Becoming Led Zeppelin, the first-ever band-authorized documentary about the legendary rock group, premiered at the Venice Film Festival Saturday. Soon after, the first official clip from the upcoming film was uploaded online.
The minute-long teaser features pristine archival footage of the group performing “Good Times Bad Times” alongside black-and-white stock footage of a zeppelin hovering in the sky.
Jimmy Page was on hand for the documentary’s premiere, with the guitarist also discussing the film, the Associated Press reports. Page said the band had received many offers for an authorized documentary, but “they were pretty miserable. Miserable and also to the point where they would want to be concentrating on anything but the music.”
However, Page said of Becoming Led Zeppelin, “This one, it’s everything about the music, and what made the music tick. It’s not just a sample of it with a talking head. This is something in a totally different genre.”
Producers Bernard MacMahon and Allison McGourty also talked about the lengths they went to obtain the rare footage seen in the film, including a year spent tracking down the original audio from an interview that John Bonham did with an Australian journalist.
In addition to the footage, much of it never-before-seen, the documentary also features new interviews with the band’s surviving members, Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones.
“When we first met we were probably a little nervous of each other. But the conduit was the storyboard,” Page said. “And I thought they’ve really got it, they really understand what it was about.”