Venice International Film Festival has a pretty big new addition to its line-up. Today, the fest announced that director Bernard MacMahon's Becoming Led Zeppelin will get its official premiere at this year's event next month. The first authorized documentary of the band will feature in the out-of-competition section of the 78th iteration of the festival, which runs from September 1 to 11.
As previously reported, the film — which chronicles the individual journeys of each of the four band members leading up to the group's formation — went into post-production in 2019. It's said to focus on how the musicians' paths merged irrevocably in the summer of '68 and how, by 1970, they became the biggest band in the world.
Becoming Led Zeppelin features new interviews with Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, as well as rare archival interviews with the late John Bonham. Becoming Led Zeppelin marks the first occasion the band have participated in a documentary, having given MacMahon "unprecedented access."
Following the critical acclaim of his debut film American Epic (2017), MacMahon has teamed up with co-writer and producer Allison McGourty for the Zeppelin biopic.
In a statement, MacMahon said:
With Becoming Led Zeppelin, my goal was to make a documentary that looks and feels like a musical. I wanted to weave together the four diverse stories of the band members before and after they formed their group — with large sections of their story advanced using only music and imagery — and to contextualize the music with the locations where it was created and the world events that inspired it. I used only original prints and negatives, with over 70,000 frames of footage manually restored, and devised fantasia sequences, inspired by Singin' In the Rain, layering unseen performance footage with montages of posters, tickets and travel to create a visual sense of the freneticism of their early career.
A wide release date for Becoming Led Zeppelin is still yet to be announced.
Back in June, the readers of Guitar World and Total Guitar magazines decreed "Whole Lotta Love" the proprietor of the "greatest guitar riff of all time."
As previously reported, the film — which chronicles the individual journeys of each of the four band members leading up to the group's formation — went into post-production in 2019. It's said to focus on how the musicians' paths merged irrevocably in the summer of '68 and how, by 1970, they became the biggest band in the world.
Becoming Led Zeppelin features new interviews with Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, as well as rare archival interviews with the late John Bonham. Becoming Led Zeppelin marks the first occasion the band have participated in a documentary, having given MacMahon "unprecedented access."
Following the critical acclaim of his debut film American Epic (2017), MacMahon has teamed up with co-writer and producer Allison McGourty for the Zeppelin biopic.
In a statement, MacMahon said:
With Becoming Led Zeppelin, my goal was to make a documentary that looks and feels like a musical. I wanted to weave together the four diverse stories of the band members before and after they formed their group — with large sections of their story advanced using only music and imagery — and to contextualize the music with the locations where it was created and the world events that inspired it. I used only original prints and negatives, with over 70,000 frames of footage manually restored, and devised fantasia sequences, inspired by Singin' In the Rain, layering unseen performance footage with montages of posters, tickets and travel to create a visual sense of the freneticism of their early career.
A wide release date for Becoming Led Zeppelin is still yet to be announced.
Back in June, the readers of Guitar World and Total Guitar magazines decreed "Whole Lotta Love" the proprietor of the "greatest guitar riff of all time."
