Following a screening of “Becoming Led Zeppelin” at the BFI IMAX in London on February 5, “Becoming Led Zeppelin” director Bernard MacMahon took part in a Q&A session.

LedZepNews attended the screening and produced the below transcript of the session:

Stuart Brown: There we go we’re on. For anyone that missed me at the start, my name is Stuart Brown, I’m the Director of Programme and Distribution at the BFI. Please join me in welcoming back Bernard MacMahon.

So we’re going to chat for a little bit and then we’re going to ask you guys to put your hands up and ask a question, if you’ve got some good ones. So I’m going to kick us off. So I don’t normally do this for Q&As because it’s a bit boring, but I think with this one I’m going to ask it which is what was the first impulse, what was the thing that led you to think, I want to make a film about Led Zeppelin?

Bernard MacMahon: Well I’d made these films, ‘American Epic’, which were about the first country, blues, gospel recordings made in America in the twenties. Essentially the roots of all popular music. And Stuart, the BFI, was the first person to screen those movies. And I wanted to make one more music film that picked up from post-war and led us into the sixties.

As a child, I’d read this, 12 year old, I’d read this little book about Led Zeppelin by this guy called Howard Mylett, I think it only went up to 73 or 74. And I didn’t know their music then, but I loved the story of these four guys trying to find their way in the music business. And then meeting in this room, and then against all odds trying to succeed with the press eviscerating them. No one in their home country wanted to sign them.

And so I went to my producing partner, Alison McGourty and writer and said, I’d love to do this movie. And then we spent seven months writing it, storyboarding it, scripting it, and everyone I knew said, ‘you’re totally insane, they’ll never do this film, they’ve not agreed to do any movie.’

But I just took a chance, and we worked and tracked down, archive and prepared, and then we put a call in, miraculously they agreed to meet us, and we discovered that…

SB: All three of them?

BM: Yeah, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant happened to be huge ‘American Epic’ fans, and they had the movies on DVD, and they had the book and the nine soundtrack albums.

And John Paul Jones was the one that didn’t know it, so we called his managers and said, can we send him this film, just tell him to watch 15 minutes, and if he doesn’t like it, he’ll never hear from us again. And so we sent him ‘American Epic’, and two days later they called and sai he’d like to meet you.

And when we met him, he said he’d made a trip to the Carter family fold in Virginia, which is where the first story was from, and had met all the people in our film. And so that’s how we got in the door.

SB: That’s amazing. If you haven’t seen American Epic, you can just find it, I think it’s on Amazon or something, but it’s very much worth your time, it’s amazing.

So that was the in, and then you’ve made some really specific creative choices about which part of the story you wanted to tell. How did that work? Was that a conversation with them, or was it always, I want to start here and go to here?

BM: Well, when I read the book, which is just a very straightforward telling of the story, there’s no frills on it, the bit that most interested me when I was 12 and I read twice was the bit up to 1970, because that as a kid was the most useful bit to me. After that, it was like album, tour, album, tour.

But that bit was the unique bit where what they were as these four completely different individuals was how they got to be the biggest group in the world. And so that was useful to me as a kid reading that book.

And so I remember thinking, if the story starts from when the oldest member, Jimmy, is born, and you follow their journey through, the moment where they knock The Beatles off the number one spot and they come home being finally accepted in Britain, if that was the NASA story, that’s when you land on the moon. I thought, I want to make that movie from the space race to landing on the moon. And then someone else can do all the other moon missions.

And I think that point in stories is like, if you think about Led Zeppelin, I can’t imagine a single group on the planet that I could listen to their music that much and still love it. So however horrendous it was trying to get what you’ve seen on the screen to flow, the music was always amazing. And I’d come into the edit bay and go, ‘Jesus Christ, this sounds incredible.’

And so when you listen to it, you realise it’s four essential people that are making that music. And you take one of those guys out, you don’t have Led Zeppelin. And so I think this part of the story, you can see what each of them bring to it.

And it’s a message about working. One of the things that’s really amazing is everyone kind of goes, Jimmy Page has this vision, which he does. But what I thought was incredible about him is he was open to the idea that when this guy in Obstweedle says, I know this great drummer, he goes and sees him. You know what I mean? I sort of admired that, you know? Because you can’t get more experienced session musicians than Jimmy Page. So he probably had some great drummers in mind, but he was open to it.

SB: And the other thing that struck me when I was watching the film was it’s quite unusual in the genre, the music doc genre, for the subjects themselves to give themselves so generously. And you can see when you’re watching the thing that it’s quite emotional for them. They’re having a, like it’s meaningful for them. Can you talk a little bit about the relationship you had with them and how you managed to create the environment where they’d be like so kind of open to that?

BM: Right. Yeah, so when I came to meet them, the storyboard was so detailed for what the film would be. And it’s actually exactly what you see on the screen. I went back and looked at the original storyboard and it’s identical. We went through this big arc and ended up right back where it was.

But when I presented the film, I’d committed everything to memory. So there was no words on the page. So I’d memorised every day. I remember I said to Jimmy, I said, this is when you see Robert Plant. He goes, ‘what was the name of the band he was in?’

I say ‘Obstweedle’, he goes ‘very good, carry on.’

So there was this, so I had this thing and they started really contributing and suggesting ideas and saying, ‘I’ve got this and I’ve got that.’

And when they agreed to do it, they said, ‘well, how are we going to do this?’

I said, ‘it needs to be an independent film. You can’t be producing it or editing it.’ And they agreed. And so they’ve not touched a frame in the movie.

And then when they showed up to do the interviews, they all arrived with like bags of photographs I’d never seen before. So a lot of those images you see, like John Paul Jones’s parents and Jimmy’s parents, those had never been seen before.

Robert turned up with this lacquer of Band of Joy, ‘Memory Lane’ that you hear that’s never been released before.

And they were just really, the guys I met, I just thought I need to get those guys I met in those rooms on the screen for the audience so you can see what I saw.

And so to do the film, what I did was I came with oceans of weird archive that you don’t see, you only see bits of it in the movie. So I would track down photographs of the church that John Paul Jones played organ in and that was bulldozed two years after he stopped playing there.

And so I’d bring this up. He hadn’t seen this in 60 years. And so it just prompted emotion.

And then I kept going through chronologically in the story, like month by month, so that they forgot after two or three hours that they were even in Led Zeppelin.

So that when they get to the Gerrard Street, they’ve been talking for three hours. And they’re kind of like, oh, my God, it was incredible.

So it’s real. So yeah, it was just trying to think of what would prompt emotion. But they really did come with the absolute intention of going for it.

That was what was amazing about them, was that for something that’s so closed, so private, when they do once in a lifetime agree to do it, they go for it.

SB: Right, right. Yeah. Because they’re famously reticent to do that, to do stuff. And I think what you’ve done is it gives it a kind of intensity, but also a sort of certain sense of this is the definitive story. Because you’ve sort of allowed them to tell their own stories, right? It’s Led Zeppelin by Led Zeppelin in a way.

BM: Yeah, I mean, but it’s informed by an enormous amount of background research in the film. So the other thing that I’ve got to really give them a huge credit to is all of them opened their address books and gave us the phone numbers of people they’ve grown up with. And allowed Allison, my producer and co-writer, to meet everyone they’ve worked with and grew up with.

And the same with Robert in the Midlands, he knew that those people would be totally unvarnished talking about him. And so some of those people have become close friends. And then I would track down everyone living that was referenced in the film.

So I did like two hour audio interviews with Glyn Johns and making sure that what he was saying matched with what the band were telling me. And I met with Shel Talmy that hired Jimmy to do all those sessions and Tony Hatch who employed both of them.

So I wanted to make sure I understood what they were telling me. And I remember Jimmy in his interview made a reference to his mother and just one sentence about how important she was to him. It’s very brief and you’d almost miss it.

But because he’d let me meet Rod Wyatt, who taught him his first two chords on the guitar and the other friends, they talked about what a hugely important figure she was. And I went, when I got that one sentence, that’s really important.

So that was really good. There was a lot of background research.

SB: It shows. How long did you spend making the film?

BM: Five years. Oh, well, I did the interviews in 2018. We did have a pandemic, which really slowed things down. But yeah. Yeah.

But I thought, well, you’ve got we had wonderful executive producers, which are David Kistenbroker and Cynthia Heusing, who are here, who supported this production. They’re amazing philanthropists because you did it independently.

And we had a wonderful executive producer, Duke Erikson, and other people and an archivist that worked on it.

And I just thought, you’ve got one chance to tell this story, to do it the best you can, put everything you can into it. And it’s really made like a biopic, like a theatrical film.

And we’re using all kinds of theatrical techniques like montage, we’re animating, you know, marquee signs, anything we can to bring it to life for you.

But what you are hearing is you are hearing the music in the purest form. Those are the original lacquer cuts that Bob Ludwig did of Led Zeppelin II. You know, and that’s the George Piros cut of Led Zeppelin I. And you’re hearing the original discs of Shirley Bassey, Johnny Burnette. So it’s a journey in sound. And you’re hearing that sound as it’s originally intended in 56, 65, 69. So you can hear how much Led Zeppelin changed the sound of music. So that’s the one area we did not fuck with, the music.

SB: That’s totally awesome. I do wish you hadn’t shown so many tickets that said Led Zeppelin, $3. As someone who will never see them live, that was a bit gutting.

BM: One of the funniest things about it is if you actually look at the film, the number of times it’s happening so quick that Led Zeppelin is misspelled. Almost every time there’s a bin card, the name’s misspelled, the tickets are misspelled.

SB: We’ve got time probably for just a couple of questions from the audience. Put your mitts in the air. I’ve got a bit of a thing about this. I like to choose a woman for the first question. So we just have women. Over there, on the right, if we can get a mic down to there. It’s a thing. There’s a thing about Q&As where for some reason women don’t often put their hands up first, so I always go first.

Audience member: My hand was right up first. So obviously John’s not with us. Where did that come from? That was great to hear him talking, and you can see how emotional it was for them as well, hearing his voice.

BM: There are three interviews that make up John Bonham in the film. The first one we found was an Australian one.

We had a bootleg that we tracked down with him speaking, and even though it was four generations old, I could tell it was recorded to quarter-inch by a radio DJ.

So we sent it around everywhere in Australia, and eventually they identified the DJ. We called the radio station he worked for in like 1971, and they didn’t have it.

They said they did send some of their old tapes to the University of Canberra, which is the Australian National Archive.

When I called the University of Canberra, they didn’t have the tape, but they said they had thousands of unmarked reels.

They’d done an ‘American Epic’ festival, and we’d given them loads of stuff for it. So I said, ‘would you mind looking?’

Three months later, I got a phone call, and they had found the tape and sent it to us.

It’s all ‘American Epic’ again, thanks to Stuart. Then we found two other recordings as well, shorter ones. One of those is with the audio where he’s talking about what he thinks about the band members. Just wonderful.

The most lovely thing is we premiered the film at the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, and this young guy walks up to me, kind of looks familiar, and he comes up and shakes my hand, and he’s got tears in his eyes, and he says, ‘thank you so much. That’s the first time I’ve ever heard my granddad talking to me.’ And it was Jager Bonham, his grandson.

SB: Wow, wow. That’s amazing. We’re almost at time. We’ve got time for one more. I’m going to go over here.

Audience member: Bravo.

BM: Thank you very much. I must say one thing: film is a collaborative effort, so I must thank the editor, Dan Gitlin, who did an absolutely extraordinary job. My writer and producer, Allison McGourty. Our magnificent archivist, Kate Griffiths, who’s in here. I’m just one of the ditch diggers making the movie.

SB: What’s your question?

Audience member: What did the guys all think when they saw it? Did they come back to you and tell you?

BM: Yeah, it was very moving. I remember Robert came down to watch the film with his sons and his grandchildren, and there was quite a lot of tears. I remember him turning to his grandchildren and going, ‘this is my story.’

Audience member: Awesome. Thank you.

SB: I’m going to say thank you to Sony Pictures for helping us show the film here and for bringing Bernard and Allison over. The film is out in IMAX Cinemas now, and it’s out in cinemas across the UK on Friday. Please tell your friends. If you enjoyed it, go and see it. Go on your social channels.

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