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Credit: Sony Pictures
The long-awaited movie Becoming Led Zeppelin is finally opening for business, and director Bernard MacMahon has revealed what it took to get Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones to take part in the film.
Speaking with The Guardian, McMahon reveals that all three surviving band members needed convincing to support the project, with Jimmy Page the first to agree after a seven-hour meeting in a London hotel in 2017.
“I wondered if he had brought sandwiches,” says MacMahon, revealing that Page had arrived for the meeting carrying shopping bags filled with his old diaries.
After agreeing to the project, Page called MacMahon and invited him to visit his former home in Pangbourne, a boathouse on the River Thames purchased for £6000 in 1967 and an early rehearsal space for Led Zeppelin.
Later, Page revealed that the invitation to Pangbourne had been a test, telling McMahon, “If you had said no to Pangbourne we wouldn’t have done the film.”
MacMahon would go on to talk to John Paul Jones, who came on board after watching MacMahon’s 2015 documentary American Epic – about the US music business in the 1920s and 30s – and a four-hour discussion. Finally, MacMahon spoke with Robert Plant, who agreed to be filmed after three separate meetings.
Becoming Led Zeppelin will show on UK IMAX screens today (February 5) and tomorrow before a non-IMAX release this weekend. The film will open in the United States and Canada this Friday, a week after a premiere in New York attended by Paul Stanley, Dirty Honey, Jessie Hughes, Scott Ian, and members of Stone Temple Pilots, Black Crowes, and Garbage.
“Led Zeppelin for me was a religious experience,” said Stanley. “The first time I saw them was 1969 and it was an epiphany for me because I saw how great something can be.”