Interview

Photo courtesy of Sony Classics

Oscar-winning filmmaker Davis Guggenheim returns to form this summer with his first full-length documentary since 2006's An Inconvenient Truth. This time around, the director (whose previous documentaries have focused on topics such as global warming, Barack Obama, and child prostitution) has turned his lens to a slightly less political subject: The electric guitar. It Might Get Loud, which opened at select theaters across the countries this month, interweaves the individual histories of guitar legends Jimmy Page, The Edge, and Jack White, with a hall-of-fame worthy rock'n'roll summit in which the three hang out on a sound stage, talking, singing, and–what else?–jamming on the guitar. We spoke with the Guggenheim about working with some of rock music's greatest guitar legends.

LM: You grew up in a very film-oriented family. Had you always planned on being a documentary filmmaker?

DG: My father made documentaries in Washington D.C.  He taught me everything I know. But after I graduated college I knew I had to leave D.C. and move out to Hollywood and make it on my own.  You don't inherit a documentary film business.

LM: I grew up in the Washington, D.C. area as well, and I remember being really surprised when I went away to college in the Midwest and discovered that people didn't tend to care about politics in the obsessive, hyper-informed way that I was used to. Did you find that was the case when you moved to LA?

DG: Yeah, LA seemed to me to be a town that was swept up by business, a factory town.  But the factories happened to make things that I was really interested in.  There are good factories and bad factories, but the kind of discussions you hear in Washington would not happen here in LA.  If you talk about the civil rights movement, someone would say "Yeah!  Like in Mississippi Burning!"  If you started a conversation about something real, the conversation would turn to a movie about that. It would immediately go back to the movie business, and then maybe an actor, and then a deal, and then the person's next project.  That can be really fun and intoxicating for a while, but it's really empty.

LM: Do you think that drove you towards political documentaries?

DG: Maybe over time.  I moved to LA to definitely not do documentaries–to get out of my father's shadow.  For years I was pursuing everything but documentaries.  But I clearly craved to work on things that felt to me more substantial and real.  I directed a lot of television, which is really fun.  But I guess I was craving something more.

LM: Once you finally did decide to venture into the documentary realm, you became quite successful working with politicians like Barack Obama and Al Gore. You won an Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth.  So then, what made you decide to focus on the electric guitar?

DG:  Thomas Toll is a friend of mine. He called me up and said, "Next month you're going to win an Academy Award." And I said, "No, I don't think so." He said, "You are, and I want to produce your next movie.  And I want it be about the electric guitar."  It was perfect.  First of all, I'm a huge music fan. I had tried to sell this other movie about creativity, about different artists and how they work.  This was a perfect way of doing that, with these guitarists that I love.  But for me, even thought the subject matter is very different, it was a natural extension of the way I'm starting to make documentaries, which is a very, very personal, almost introspective storytelling style that I started to get excited by when I was doing An Inconvenient Truth.  So for me it was a natural jump.

LM: How did you arrive at your three subjects: Jack White, The Edge, and Jimmy Page?

DG: The thing that I didn't want to do was make a film about fifty people.  If you made a movie about fifty people you'd spend two minutes on Jimi Hendrix.  The idea was, you pick three.  Not the best three, not the only three, but you tell three people's stories.  Then you'd sort of get underneath it.  Weirdly–or luckily–we got all three that we wanted.

LM: Was that difficult to make happen?

DG: I think the reason they decided to do this, and why they hadn't done it before, was the process.  The movie wasn't going to have any sit down interviews or rock critics or ex-girlfriends or lead singers.  It was going to be very, very personal and it was going to be about the guitar and writing music.  I started with Jimmy: I flew to London and we just talked for two days in a hotel room.  Those interviews are the basis for the movie.  I did the same thing with The Edge and the same thing with Jack.

LM: Were you at all worried that once you got the subjects to agree to participate, they wouldn't open up? Jimmy Page, at least, is notoriously private.

DG: He was the hardest. We were told by many people we shouldn't even ask him.  It was a long seduction process. And then, it's one thing to get someone to do a movie. It's another thing to get him to open up. To me, the success of the documentaries that I want to make, are really getting inside someone's head.

LM: Had you met any of these guys before?

DG: No, I hadn't. There's all this sort of dark lore about Jimmy.  Part of it is fueled by the fact that he doesn't do many interviews.  But then you meet him and it's the exact opposite.  He's very enthusiastic and very sparkly.

LM: That was one element of the film that really surprised me, actually.   He was not at all what I expected.

DG: That's the great thing about making movies.  I think a lot of documentaries fail because essentially they become films that follow the things you read on Wikipedia.  Just the list of things the rest of the world knows about them, because there is not the luxury or interest to explore.  A documentary should explore things and not know where it's going.  If the movie has these great unexpected moments, it's because we didn't know where we were going.  And I was following Jimmy's whims.

LM: How was it to have those three legends in one room, playing the guitar together.

DG: We called that part of the film "the Summit," where the three of them arrived in Los Angeles and spent two days on a soundstage.  It was kind of like the rehearsal hall of the gods.  We set out three chairs with guitars and amps behind.  The idea was not to tell them what to do.  Not to give them questions or tell them what to play.  What they would come up with, we figured, would be very interesting.

LM: Were they all excited to participate in that meeting, or was there any hesitation?

DG: Everyone loved the idea. Then, as we got closer they kept calling me and saying, "What do you want me to do? What do you want us to play?"  And I said, "I'm not going to do that." I started to think, "maybe this is a terrible idea." For the first two hours they were together, it was all small talk.  Like "How many children do you have?  What strings do you use?"  And no one had said they would play. But then, out of nowhere, Jimmy steps up and grabs his Les Paul and plays "A Whole Lotta Love."  From then on everything changed; it was like a throwdown.

LM:  It was interesting watching them play together too, because U2 and Led Zeppelin obviously have totally different sensibilities.  You sort of wonder what the other is thinking about what they're all doing.

DG:  Yeah, it's funny.  The Edge teaches them how to play "I Will Follow" and Jimmy is playing the notes, and they do it for a while.  At the end Jimmy is like "Are you sure about that C?"

LM:  What was your biggest challenge in making this film?

DG: The biggest challenge was getting these guys to trust me enough to open up.  I think rock stars depend on mystique and a distance. Their instincts are to not share this stuff.  If the movie succeeds, it'll be because they opened up.

LM:  Tell me a little bit about your upcoming project.

DG:  I'm doing a film on the public school system in America.  I'm shooting it in ten different cities and following different families. "What is it about this thing that we can't seem to fix?" I think it's the hardest thing I've ever done.  Global warming feels easy in comparison.  Right now-I mean the solutions to global warming are so much harder.

LM:  But at least you just have the tangibility of something like "a hole in the ozone layer."

DG: Well truthfully, with An Inconvenient Truth Al had cracked it.  The reason why that movie is so effective is that he spent thirty years trying to figure out how to tell that.  I wish I had him, helping me figure this out.