“With unparalleled access to the group and their personal archives, their full support and never-before-seen footage, Becoming Led Zeppelin will immerse you in the sights and sounds of their early career. For all the millions of people who will never see the band live, this is as close as you will get to being there. Before the stairway and the dragon, before the gold and the girls, there were simply four men and their love of music. Becoming Led Zeppelin reveals their individual journeys as they move through the music scene of the 1960’s, playing small clubs throughout Britain and performing on some of the biggest hits of the era, until their meeting in the summer of 1968 for a rehearsal that changes their lives forever. Their four journeys merge into one as they set out to conquer America on a rollercoaster ride that culminates in 1970 when they become the number one band in the world.” -Venice Film Festival
Director’s Statement: “With Becoming Led Zeppelin my goal was to make a new form of film, a documentary that resembles 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 with only music and imagery and to contextualise 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.” -Bernard MacMahon
