How the Director of ‘Becoming Led Zeppelin’ Made a Great Modern Rock Doc

There hasn’t been any shortage of music documentaries on big screens lately, but most are presented as special events that come in and out for one or two nights on a weekend, without settling in for a regular run. The Sony Classics release “Becoming Led Zeppelin,” though, has defied expectations of what a modern rock doc can do in cinemas, on its way to finding the favor of fans as a home video hit, too. Its success is, well, highly becoming.

Director Bernard MacMahon sat down with Variety to talk about the long process of making and then finding a buyer for the film, admitting there were plenty of companies that turned it down. The objections were plentiful, as he recalls it, when he and producer Allison McGourty were touring executive suites. But maybe most curious of all, to those who didn’t get the film, is that it doesn’t follow a traditional “VH1 Behind the Music” rise, fall and embattled rebirth narrative. “Becoming Led Zeppelin” is a rise-and-rise story, climaxing with the recording of “Led Zeppelin II.” If someone wanted to make a movie about how things got bigger and more out of control later on, they were welcome to it, but MacMahon knew how Zeppelin changed the music world at their outset was more than enough to fill two gratifying hours. And sending music lovers out of the world’s theaters happy and humming (to the extent that anyone can hum “Bron-Yr-Aur”) is a byproduct of the decision to focus on a celebratory but still revelatory origin story.

The signs were good in February when the doc grossed $2.6 million in its first weekend, playing a limited run on Imax screens — the best number ever for an Imax music film — before crossing over to regular cinemas. By the first week of April, the film had grossed $10 million domestically and more than $12 million worldwide, rare territory for a documentary. Now, fans everywhere are re-streaming the home release and trying to tweak their speakers to make it sound as good as it did in state-of-the-art theaters… though MacMahon stresses that he only wanted to make the film sound as good as the original pressing of “Led Zeppelin II” did roaring out of mere stereo speakers.

Where did the idea to do a movie focused on the rise of Led Zeppelin come from?

Way back, my mom was an antique dealer, and when I had just turned 12, one of her boxes had this paperback book in it called “Led Zeppelin” (“The Led Zeppelin Biography,” by Ritchie Yorke, published in 1976). It was quite beat-up then, but it was published in in the mid-‘70s, covering the early part of their career — the first (long-form) thing that had been written about them. I didn’t have any idea who they were, but I found the story completely fascinating and inspiring.

When children have something they want to do, there can be something that inspires that that might be useful; it could be paintings, could be anything. And what the story was about to me was these kids that had this passion for music and somehow they managed to protect that light against all the odds, while constantly fueling it. And I just was very inspired by the fact that they didn’t appear to waste a minute, whether it was Jimmy Page or John Paul Jones as teenagers getting into the session world, working like demons, checking out what the recording engineers are doing, trying to figure out how this thing worked. All of them were constantly doing that, pushing themselves out there. Then when they finally all meet in the rehearsal room, they recognize, with all the stuff they’ve already done, that this this is a special thing. And it felt to me that the story was like one of those Jason and the Argonauts or Odyssey or Arthur stories, where you suddenly call all the skills of these strangers together. With all of your knowledge and focus, you’ve got to be open to collaboration, to working with other people.

So I found the story super inspiring, even though I hadn’t heard the music. When my mum saw me reading it a second time, she pointed out that there was this guy that used to buy antiques from us; he would always be trying to buy my mother’s fireplace, and he’d be asking me how I was doing at school and stuff like that. We didn’t know who he was until my dad saw him sort of ditching into the silver Rolls Royce he parked around the corner … it was Peter Grant (Zeppelin’s manager), coming into our house. So I had this connection with the story. I think a few weeks after reading it a couple of times, I went and started to explore the music. And I was listening to it knowing what had gone into the music. A year or so on, I remember thinking that the perception of this band is not the perception that I have. I was hearing that the drummer was into these African American soul and jazz rhythms, as was the bass player, and it was this very interesting fusion of people. And I thought, this is, in some ways, a misunderstood group.
With this film coming out, I discovered that that little book I read went out of print very shortly after it came out, and it’s been completely forgotten. And all the things that have been written about them were all written quite some time after the demise of the group, written looking back, where this was from a perspective near the beginning, looking forward. And in cinema, for the most part, those are the exciting stories — the things that are looking forward.

So when we finished our “American Epic” films [an acclaimed three-part documentary about recording techniques for rural artists in the early 20th century], I spoke to my producer, Allison, who came to really kind of drive it. I said, “I think this is the next story I’d like to do.” So it really came from the heart. It was something I genuinely had this affection for, and it’d been meaningful for me as a kid. These guys had never done a (documentary) film. And apart from a quote here or there that Jimmy might do when some albums are being reissued, they never talk about this. And so I thought, this is a story that’s never been done.

What were the first steps you took after that point of conception?

We spent maybe seven, eight months absolutely working, researching the story, writing a script of the story, and trying to find things that hadn’t been seen before. Then we reached out to the group. After all that work, a couple of people said, “You are insane. They’ve never agreed to a film, they never will, and you just wasted your time.” We just ignored that and said, “We’ll just do it.” When you have something you think has got value or a higher purpose… The amazing thing about it was, I never actually thought about the success of the film. It’s come as this amazing surprise, because I never thought about commerciality or money at all. I just loved the story and thought: Can it inspire people, if we can get that on the screen? So it was only when the film came out and, oh my God, we became Imax’s biggest music film of all time that I was like, What?

When we brought the film to the band, we met with Jimmy Page first. So I’m arriving at this hotel with this enormous storyboard and we sit down, and… there is a quote about how fortune favors the prepared. And as Jimmy came in, it transpired that he was a big fan of “American Epic” — he had the book and he had the soundtrack album. I think it was seven hours of presenting to him, walking through this storyboard — with trick questions he would throw out. He’d be like, “What was the name of Robert’s first band?” And I’d answer and he’d be like, “Very good. Carry on.”

I said how we wanted to shoot the film, and what was amazing is, this group that says no to everything and is known for being super private, when we actually came into that world and were really prepared and able to explain what we wanted to do, they were like, “OK, go ahead and make it.” They gave us complete artistic freedom to make the film — no control at all.

These days, literally almost every other documentary about a music act has that artist as executive producer. So them not exerting control is kind of unheard of, in contemporary times.

Yeah. Sometimes, someone will say, “Oh, you’re not covering all the groupies” and stuff like that. But we talked about one of the reasons for doing this period in the film is that it’s when they’re climbing Everest in a storm. Whatever the goal is, you’ve got that journey that is unique in human beings, whichever group or individual is making that journey in the moment. If you do land on the moon or you do get the gold record, unfortunately thereafter the story becomes very similar to that of a number of other people. But always the exciting part, or the part that’s helpful, is: This is how you do it. Or at least that’s the film I wanted to make. And I’d never seen a film that showed you how you do it.

And it’s so funny because the film was literally pretty much frame-by-frame written before I met them. When I was going through that huge storyboard with them, all they did was say, “Oh, I’ve got a picture of that…” And it’s true that if you were making that film with other people, they would be controlling that film in its narrative completely. But they all opened up their address books or gave us telephone numbers of people they’d grown up with, knowing that those people would introduce us to everyone else, and they gave those people the blessing to talk to us.

And so you did end up talking with these scores of people who knew them. But you didn’t include any conversations in the film other than what you filmed with the three surviving band members. If you just did all those other interviews for research, weren’t you ever tempted to break with the format and put anyone else on-screen as a talking head?

Absolutely zero temptation. Not one thing came up that made me think, “Oh, I wish we could put him in it,” and I’ll tell you why. For one, these guys had never talked before, and I could tell when I sat down with them, they were talking really openly. When I presented the (plan for the) film to them, they were seeing all the stuff we’d unearthed in pictures and clips they hadn’t seen before, and they were coming out with all this stuff because they felt comfortable talking to us. And I tho0ught, if I can get that on the screen, this is something special. … If I thought there was someone who was absolutely needed to give a perspective on what I was hearing and seeing, then I would’ve considered it. But what the 175 background interviews did was, firstly, reinforced to me that (the band members) were reliable witnesses, certainly of that period of their lives from their childhood forward.

And, you know, nobody’s getting any younger, and I’ve got these guys that are still sharp, have got good memories. You know, it’s so much easier to make a film with other people talking or narrators because you can prop up all these tricky bits of narrative. But here they’re on the spot and they have to tell their story in real time, and they don’t have an opportunity to go back and reconsider the past, you know? So the key is whether it takes five or six or even seven hours, you’ve gotta go through it in one hit. If you do this, the audience has this opportunity to really understand who these people are, because I found them reliable and super candid as weaknesses of what happened.

For me, the dream is, you (in the audience) get to spend two hours with these people. Those the guys I’ve met, with the right balance of energy, wistfulness, pathos, emotion… That’s the balance I encountered. So I’m trying to put that on the screen. The received wisdom had been that they will never talk. So if you get the chance to do it, you should be having this pure distillation of what they’re about in their own words. Because what it’s many years from now — I hope — that they pass on, there’ll only be talking heads to talk about that.

What are some of the best reactions you’ve gotten to the film?

Taj Mahal said, “This film rearranged my molecules.” And I think it was Bob Weir who said something like, “Oh, they’re like the John Coltrane trio with a singer.” So these guys were completely getting what this thing was.

You first showed the film, or a rough cut, at the Venice Film Festival in 2021. But in an interview Robert Plant did when he was touring with Alison Krauss last summer, he was asked about it and said he’d only seen bits and pieces, so he was apparently in no hurry to see that rough cut. Do you know if he’s seen it by now?

He came to a theater in Waterloo with his family and grandchildren and watched it as a punter. He might have come in disguise. I heard they watched it as a family. And I don’t know how much I would say specifically, but what I heard was that he thought it was absolutely wonderful and very, very moving. And I heard that Jimmy really loved it.

The film was about 15 minutes longer when you showed it in Venice, right?

When we started editing this film, the pandemic had kicked in, and so we were not able to screen the film in its rough-cut state anywhere and weren’t allowed to assemble people in a theater. So Venice was an opportunity for us to sit in a large theater and watch the film and figure out what we needed to cut. I like sitting in audiences, particularly audiences where there’s a large number of people that are either neutral or very unfamiliar with the subject. And to have that stress of being in that room, because it gives me a very acute eye of what’s on the string. There’s a strange energy moment where people are like, “Oh, what is this?” I love fans of things, but we do not get that with a group of people that love the thing.

And so we put it on in Venice and they were cool. We announced it after the festival tickets had all sold because I didn’t want the hardcore Zeppelin fans — not because they’re not terrific, but it wouldn’t have helped me. Venice was very much a work in progress. Unbeknownst to us, there was a press screening of the film in some theater where the PA wasn’t working and it was like, what the hell? So I think we had three or four people that reviewed that cut, and of course, we hadn’t sold the film or anything yet.

You don’t have any of that normal politics where you have this subject coming in saying, “He’s got more lines than me!” We had zero of that. And so you’ve got this thing whereyou’re going, “This is entirely down to us if this film works or not.” You can’t blame anyone else when you’ve got total freedom to do what you want. So in my world, that put a huge amount of pressure to make it the best it could be.

Was there a key for you to making the film succeed in cinematic terms?

This film is employing all these old Hollywood musical techniques as you watch it. I’m big into the history of film, going back to the teens and the silent era, and I think I’m always returning back to when the medium I’m working in was being codified, when it was being shaped, because that’s the moment when the new ideas happen.

I learned from the classic musicals of MGM and “Oklahoma!” and all these things. It’s like, let the music always carry the story forward. So you think, well, how would you do that, if the Led Zeppelin songs in album one and two were not written for a musical? But the songs do drive the narrative if you actually watch the film a couple of times. You’ll start to spot how, when they’re playing in Europe and these kids are putting their fingers in their ears and no one gets what they’re doing, they’re singing “Communication Breakdown.” When they’re flying out to New York to try and get their record deal, they’re singing “Your Time is Gonna Come.” When they’re traveling across America, and recording the second album, for a significant portion of that you are hearing “Ramble On.” And when Rolling Stone and some of the media have completely lambasted them, and they decide to kind of double down in the face of that, they’re playing “Dazed and Confused.” So the songs are used the way that they do in the ‘40s with musicals like “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” where it was compiled with different Irving Berlin songs from different musicals and they just used the lyrics to create a new narrative. That’s part of the fabric in Old Hollywood musical style fabric in this film.

Do you have a sense now of why it’s so popular with audiences, beyond what you anticipated?

I just met with Warren Ellis from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and he’d seen it twice already, and I just run into everyday people who are watching this a number of times. And I think it’s partly the sound of the film they’re responding to. It’s got this really open sound. It’s even better if it’s got the best speakers. But even though it was made for these huge screens, it actually should be hugely effective (at home). The 5.1 mix is like the base mix, and then you just adjust it for Imax, you know. But the real base mix for these things is stereo. These recordings are mono and stereo in many ways. So it should be pretty powerful even there.

In another interview you said you really did not want the movie to have compressed sound. “Brickwalling” is kind of the bugaboo of audiophiles who hate everything just being turned up and pushed together, who miss having dynamics in the sound.

Modern films now are heavily compressed, which means for me that they can be very tiring on the ear. In terms of sound almost all the things that are normally done in film, we are not doing them in this movie. If you look at the wave forms of this, it’s really dramatic peaks and troughs. We obviously had access, potentially, to the master tapes of the studio recordings and the digital remasterings that have come out over the years. But I chose, looking at all these options, to go with the original discs.

Because when you make a record, certainly in the ‘60s, a quarter inch master would be made … it would then go to someone like a Robert Ludwig who would cut that production master onto the vinyl that you hear… And in the case of Robert Ludwig on the second Led Zeppelin album, he did radical things to the sound to make that music pop even more; he did things that are so extraordinary, you can’t get back and recreate what he did, because he’s doing it in real time. He is doing this stuff as this needle is cutting it onto a lacquer. And so that Robert Ludwig cut of that record, that’s what ignited the excitement in America. Once those masters’ plates have worn out, someone else comes in and recuts the record. In this case, Robert Ludwig had cut that record so loud, and the loudness affects how dramatically the grooves are cut… The problem was that if you had very cheap record players, that needle moving like crazy could sometimes jump out of the groove. So the record was recut at considerably less volume and with less energy. So those first 250,000 copies, pristine copies of those are recognized as being the pinnacle of how “Zeppelin II” sounds. That’s the ultimate. There’s a reason that people who knew what that thing was and how to identify that particular plastic would pay three and a half, even $4,000 if you would find a pristine copy of it.

We are literally doing zero to that record apart from handing it onto the speaker system. You are hearing it in the purest form, which also means no compression other than any compression that might have been applied for artistic reasons or whatever during the recording itself. So it’s the sound equivalent of me cutting a pineapple off a tree in a waku and literally slicing it in half and putting it on your plate. That’s what you are hearing. Sonically we are not tampering with the sound in any way. There might have been a couple instances where it was a live recording and there was clearly something lacking in the amount of bottom end they had. But essentially the policy was, if you think this group is worth sitting in a room for two hours listening to, bloody play their music and don’t mess with it, you know? Don’t fuck with the music. The best thing I can do as a filmmaker is give you these guys as directly and as openly as I can.

Of course, the other reason why I did it that way is that when you hear the music that preceded Led Zeppelin, whether it’s Lonnie Donegan or Little Richard or Shirley Bassey, those things that they played on, those are the original discs too. And so you are hearing the exact sound of ‘63, ‘64, ‘65, ‘68. So when you’re in that theater, and they come on and they play that song in Denmark, everyone in the theater hears that huge sonic shift that’s inherent in that recording. We’re not goosing that. We’ve obviously got the purest version of that, but when they appear, you hear the difference between them and the Johnny Burnett Trio. When you get “Zeppelin 1,” Zeppelin are one of the architects of genuine live stereo recording in the studio, where the drum kit is spread across the whole left and right, panned across the whole stereo system. You hear that shift sonically, and then when you get to “Zeppelin II,” Jimmy, with the help of Eddie Kramer, is really pushing the boundaries of what you can do with stereo, with essentially a live group with some guitar and other overdubs… So amongst all the other journeys — the personal, the emotional — the other journey is you’re on a sound journey in your house, on your headphones or your speaker system…

People can feel when you’ve done that. They don’t have to be technically minded at all. I’ve talked to women, especially, who may not have been that into the band, and their take on everything they’ve seen is as sophisticated as mine is… I’ve had some people going, “We thought it was just gonna be this completely overwhelming, distorted onslaught from this heavy rock band, and it’s not that at all.” You’re inside the music, you know? And you want to welcome people in. The whole thing about this film is sharing stuff.

You’ve said Sony Classics was the only company that was interested in picking up the film. You must feel vindicated by the performance the film has had in theaters. Why do you think people didn’t necessarily see the value of it across the board when you were trying to sell it?

It’s kind of understandable to me is that if you are doing something that’s different, as Jimmy said, you are gonna have a lot of people that don’t get it, and what that tells me is that you’ve either got something that’s a terrible mistake or you’ve got something that may have some real potential legs to it. You’ve got to have a bit of a gut of iron to deal with these people going, “I don’t get it. It’s never gonna work.” And you’ve got to have conviction like Zeppelin did, because nobody in Britain wanted to sign them. No one wanted to book them, so “let’s go to America.” But if you can have the confidence in what you would like to see,  — but also what the 13-year-old me would like to see, and what the 13-year-old Alison will like — there may be actually thousands and thousands of people out there that feel the same way you do.

In this case, some of these executives just could not get the idea around how anyone would want to watch a music film in which they were singing whole songs. And they were like, “Where are the talking heads? Where’s the historians? Where’s the music writers?”  And the main thing about particularly rock music films is they’re always focusing completely not on how the music’s made. You’re dealing with a subject where people might have, in this case, been listening to this music for 55 years, and these (subjects) can actually tell you what it is and how they did it and emotionally how they got to that place and what they’re trying to do.

The normal thing in music documentaries is whizzing through that to get to where they’re telling you about all the problems they had a few years down the line when the thing became a business, and they’re on their fifth album and it’s just this industrial process. OK, that’s kind of mildly interesting, but it’s like, if you are a kid, that doesn’t help you with anything. Focusing on the Eagles’ issues with bad blood between the members and lots of drugs in 1977 — what does that really tell you, as a kid? I don’t think that helps to understand life and the human condition or how you might do something.

And so I think anything that’s changing the paradigm of how you present something — and I think this film is not done in a style that I’ve seen before, in a historical archive music film — if you’re doing it right, it’s breaking some ground in that regard. … I look back now and I go, yeah, if there’d been everyone getting it, what you would’ve had is something that I don’t think that would’ve ignited the level of interest in the public that it has, because they’d go, “Oh yeah, that ticks all the boxes of what we’re used to.” You see tht with Zeppelin, from the audiences watching at the beginning, before they find their audience. There’s a bunch of people that are like, “What the hell is this?”

And they really didn’t have a lot of their peers liking their music, even. They weren’t championed by any of the big groups at the time, because they were breaking the mold. One of the things that’s interesting about Zeppelin is that after they’ve climbed this musical mountain that the film depicts, which concludes in 1970, they sort of — symbolically, I suppose — knocked the Beatles off the No. 1 spot. Zeppelin is the only of the big groups that emerge in the late ‘60s and ‘70s that literally has no Beatles in it whatsoever. And that is unique from every other group, because they were so pervasive. But in the DNA of Led Zeppelin, there is no Beatles whatsoever. And that’s interesting. After eight years of the Beatles being the biggest group in the world, or that long in Britain, certainly, and a bit less in America, at that point, without knowing it, the audience wanted something completely different. That’s not a pejorative thing against the Beatles, but it’s one of the reasons why I think the media had a difficult time with them early on, because it was sonically coming completely from somewhere else.

Beyond all that alchemy, you were really attracted to the idea of portraying hard work and drive, not something so mystic or serendipitous.

The last thing I would say about this is that most films deal with compartmentalizing things that do really well as, “Oh, it’s genius.” And I look at genius like a pejorative term. Because it’s essentially saying your forehead was touched by some spiritual force, and while other people work, you were given this thing. Actually, what this film is about is you’re not given this thing; you have to work really hard at it, and nothing is handed to you on a plate, and you’ve gotta get out there and meet people and interact and do all these things. I think that that the difference of this film and other films that I’ve seen is that you start from this point where these kids are no different from you. You see Jimmy on that little TV show where his mum managed to get him up, and he just barely played two chords when it comes to solo. He just jiggles around a bit and whistles; he can’t play a lead line yet. At that point you see a kid that is literally just at the most simple level of competency, doing his thing, and John is tapping this one little snare and cymbal with his brother strumming away on the guitars. Those guys are like you, but the difference is that they keep at it.