How ‘Changing into Led Zeppelin’ Filmmakers Bought the Band to Inform Their Story (Unique)

The filmmakers behind a brand new Led Zeppelin documentary pulled off a powerful feat in convincing the band’s surviving members to open up for interviews.

Changing into Led Zeppelin, in theaters now, marks the primary time the band’s three surviving members Robert Plant, Jimmy Web page and John Paul Jones have participated in a documentary on their era-defining run with the late drummer John Bonham between 1968 and 1980. Because it seems, filmmakers Bernard MacMahon and Allison McGourty have been the precise documentarians to attract Plant, 76, Web page, 81 and Jones, 79, out of their shells.

“Once we began, we spent seven months researching, in search of each scrap or fragment of archival footage we might discover,” McGourty tells PEOPLE. The pair scripted their storyline for the documentary and made a storyboard to pitch to the surviving band members, however as MacMahon says, “Everybody we knew stated, ‘You are fully insane. They will by no means conform to do it.’ “

Because it turned out, when MacMahon and McGourty lastly reached out to the band, they discovered that Web page and Plant have been followers of their 2017 documentary sequence American Epic, which MacMahon described as an “uncovering of all the primary blues, nation [and] gospel data, which is principally the roots of all in style music, together with Led Zeppelin.”

“John Paul Jones did not realize it, however we have been capable of ship to his supervisor the DVD, and we simply stated, ‘Please give this to him and ask him to look at the primary 20 minutes. And if he is not , you will by no means hear from us once more,’ ” MacMahon provides. “And he known as again like two days later or one thing and stated [Jones would] like to satisfy you.’ “

MacMahon and McGourty say they first met with Web page for seven hours, throughout which he intermittently quizzed the filmmakers on their Zeppelin data. Web page, in addition to the opposite band members, introduced luggage stuffed with diaries they wrote within the Sixties, together with different archival materials for the filmmakers to look at for the ultimate film, which follows every Zeppelin member from their upbringing and early profession by means of 1970.

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“He has an incredible reminiscence — consider me, I’ve talked to all people. I’ve checked all these items,” MacMahon says of Web page, who fashioned Led Zeppelin in 1968 after his former band the Yardbirds broke up. “I might are available in with timelines of all of the dates and I do not recall him ever being improper with one thing like the place he’s, obtained the improper month or one thing like that. Robert and John Paul Jones have been the identical, actually good recollections.”

MacMahon says the surviving Zeppelin members have been surprisingly acquiescent to his and McGourty’s request that they, not the band, have last say over the content material of the film. “They opened up their tackle books and gave us the phone numbers of all of the folks they’d grown up with,” he says. “And we have been allowed to only go and meet these folks unsupervised.”

Changing into Led Zeppelin is enjoying in theaters now.