First, there was a string. Then someone discovered that if you tie it between two nails and strum it, you get a little music. Then if you add more to it, you get chords.“It Might Get Loud” is the documentary about the strings, the chords, and what three generations of electric guitarists -- Jimmy Page, The Edge, and Jack White – have done with them. It opens in L.A. and NY Aug. 14, and Susan Bullngton Katz and Ken Chan of the Hollywood Lounge sat down with director Davis Guggenheim (who directed and exec produced the Oscar-winning “An Inconvenient Truth”) at a recording studio in Santa Monica to hear more about it.
Susan Bullington Katz: You’ve got a cow mooing in the beginning. Loved that opening.
Davis Guggenheim: You liked the cow?
SBK: Loved it.
DG: This is Jack White’s making the diddley-bow at the beginning. It’s funny, the big arguments I had with my editor, Greg Fenton. I never wanted that scene at the beginning of the movie. I said, “It’s wrong, it’s wrong.” And then at the end, weeks before, I was like, “You know what? You’re right.” You know, Jack White is just this brilliant guy. And he just said, “I want to make a diddley bow.”
SBK: And it was electric?
DG: He made it. I don’t think anyone’s ever done that before. The diddley bow is what… its sort of lore is that sharecroppers – poor Blacks in the South – would take a piece of barbed wire, string it between two nails on the porch, and that’s how they’d play basic slide stuff. And that’s how Bo Diddley got his name, because it’s called a diddley bow.
SBK: Wow.
DG: And Jack’s idea was to put a pickup from a guitar and play it.
SBK: He had a cord there, an electric cord. Did he plug it in?
DG: It’s a pickup. Any electric guitar has a pickup beneath the strings, and when you play a guitar, that’s what makes it electric. Otherwise it’s just acoustic.
SBK: So how did he make a pickup for his diddley bow?
DG: I guess he stripped the actual pickup from an electric guitar, nailed it to a board, took some barbed wire, strung it between two nails, used a glass bottle as a bridge, and he played – I believe he played “I Fought Piranhas” -- one of his songs – on the diddley bow.
SBK: You know, I played guitar in a folk trio in high school – acoustic – so I knew acoustic guitars when I was in high school, but I never did rock and roll. Watching this, I was like, “Why’d I ever put it down?”
DG: Right.
SBK: But I never really understood how the sound got electrified. Now you’ve just explained it to me. So what’s your own background with electric guitars?
DG: I have a musical background. I used to study singing. I wanted to be an opera singer when I was in high school. That shows what a dork I was.
SBK: What’s your favorite opera?
DG: Oh, “La Bohème.” All the Puccini stuff I love. Verdi. I don’t like Wagner very much. But always into music, but not a guitar player. My son plays guitar, so I play a little bit, just to play with him. But I’m a huge fan of Led Zeppelin and U2 and the White Stripes. Huge fan. And when you’re a filmmaker, you’re always looking for music that inspires you, puts you in a mood, helps you write a scene. Music is an integral part of everything I do. So when I got a chance to make a movie about musicians, that’s really fun.
SBK: Had you been kind of fooling around with your son’s guitar before you did this?
DG: Only in the last couple of years, interestingly enough. My son’s been taking guitar and plays. It’s an interesting story – when I first interviewed The Edge, I went into his studio, which is smaller than this – a very small little room with a folding table and bottles of water and Clif bars, and he was writing. His guitars were there, and I saw this computer, and I go, “What is that? What program do you use?” And he said, “Gare-azh-band.” And I was like, “What is that?” And he goes - he spelled it out and it turned out to be Garage Band. And that’s what he uses.
He has a little blue M box – it’s like a $100 unit with two plug-in speakers, and that’s how he writes his songs. I ‘m sure he has great microphones, but that’s how he lays down his tracks. And it made me realize… that’s part of what the movie does, it sort of strips the façade of these rock stars. You know, being a rock star is really about being alone with your guitar and writing music, the same way we all do it – write articles or make movies.
SBK: I loved it when Jimmy Page talks about the sustainer…were you the person there asking him questions?
DG: Yeah, yeah.
SBK; When he actually says, “Now, look – this is what it sounds like ordinarily, but when you do this, look how different it is. And when you do this, and then you add a pedal and then you add vibrato,” and he shows the recipe for it all. What was your first response to it?
DG: Well, I think the bigger question is… I’ve seen a lot of documentaries about music and rock stars, and they usually have some exciting footage in it, but the storytelling is usually about a car accident or a drug overdose, or the girlfriends the star had, and they don’t really tell you much about the music, the artistry. And I wanted to make a movie that really went deep, because when I see these movies, I want to know more. I want to understand how they do it, the same way you want to know how another great artist does what they do. So I was hoping the movie would do that and not just be sort of like a movie with clichés about rock gods.
So getting them to explain what they do and getting them to open up was a real challenge, because I think rock stars really depend on that mystique. You know, they build themselves in a certain way so the audience sort of sees them from afar. But all three really went for it. All three knew we were trying to talk about their artistic journey and their contribution.
SBK: Do you stay in touch with these guys?
DG: Yeah. We’ve been promoting the movie and going to screenings together. It’s very nice and very friendly. They’re in different parts of the world. Edge is in Spain right now, Jimmy’s in London, Jack is on tour. But I’ll see Jack a couple weeks in New York, and I just saw them – I saw Jack at the Roxy. He has a new band called the Dead Weather. So I went with Jimmy Page and sat in the back and watched Jack White’s new band. That was pretty cool.
SBK: I would imagine!
DG: Yeah. Jack’s new band is unbelievable. The music is just totally in your face and very strong, very musical, very out there.
SBK: You do really get into the personalities of these guys and their creative process in differing amounts. It’s pretty cool.
DG: Thank you.
SBK: Do you guys email back and forth?
DG: Each one has a different way of communicating, yeah. We’re in conversations, yeah.
SBK: Do you text?
DG: Do I text? None of them text.
SBK: There’s a part in the movie where Jack asks somebody if they can put a harmonica mic on his guitar… and then The Edge does the same kind of thing. He asks, “Can you do this? Can you do that?” They’re asking their tech people with them, “Can we do this?” And The Edge says, “Suddenly, everything changed”…
DG: What I found when I talked with them was that each guitarist had a breakthrough. With each of them it was different, but like all of us artists, you’re working on something, and you’re working on something, and you’re not making any progress. And then something changes.
Everyone calls it something different – some say it’s a light switch that goes on, sometimes it’s a mistake that turns to be an act of brilliance. And I never planned it that way, but as I told their stories, I realized that each one of them had that moment. With Edge, he talks about how, when they’re recording his first album, the producer said, “Let’s use a different guitar,” and Edge was like, “I don’t have another guitar.”
And because he didn’t have all these resources, he found this little echo box that he rented for a day, and he found ways of using that piece of equipment to make that one guitar do different things. That became a creative explosion for him, because now he has hundreds of boxes, and every song has a hundred different tunings and goes through electronic machines, and that’s how he creates now. His signature is making these sound landscapes. Jimmy calls him a sonic architect.
SBK: And with Jimmy Page, who came along right about the time electric guitars did?
DG: The interesting thing for Jimmy – the revelation for me – was that it’s hard to imagine him as a session player. You know, we see him as this rock star who goes onstage and will play anything, and every night it’s different – if there’s a 45 minute version of “Stairway to Heaven,” or…but the fascinating thing is that he came out of a world that was 180 degrees opposite. A session player, particularly in the ‘60s, would go into a studio and they’d say, “We need a guitar piece for this or that amount of bars, and it needs to be this and not that,” or it’s written for him, and you’re just a technician. But because he was that technician for so long, he learned everything and could do anything.
So when the time came, when he went into the Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin, he was unleashed. And I would never call Jimmy a technician, but being someone who could do so many things technically meant that he could improvise anything.
A lot of these guys came up and they knew how to do one thing, and asked to improvise, they could only improvise that one thing. But Jimmy was doing everything – he was doing music jingles, he was doing rock, he was doing Spanish, he was doing orchestral…
SBK: I think he even said “Goldfinger,” right?
DG: Yeah, he did the music for “Goldfinger.” So it’s very inspiring for me to see the artistic paths, because I think when you think of a rock star, you think they’re born into greatness and someone sprinkled them with magic creative dust. And they aren’t, you know. These are guys who bang their head against the wall like we do, but kept banging and had these breakthroughs and are human.
SBK: You worked on this for about a year, right?
DG: I’m the worst at timelines, but it’s been about two years from conception, getting the money, getting the guys – but I think fulltime, about a year, yeah.
SBK: Did you do any of the editing yourself?
DG: We have a wonderful editor named Greg Fenton, who’s a big, big part of this movie. Very much my creative partner. And the way the music is cut, the way the stories are intercut, if they work, it’s in large part due to him.
SBK: Just so people will know… there is tons of music in this.
DG: Ninety music cues. A third of them are Led Zepplin, a third of them are U2, a third White Stripes. You could close your eyes and go to the movie, and I think you’d enjoy yourself.
SBK: Yeah. It’s very full. So I was just wondering about the technical part of it… did Greg edit it on Final Cut Pro?
DG: Avid. But I have Final Cut Pro on my computer. I go back and forth.
SBK: Do you have your own Facebook page?
DG: No. I use the computer a lot, but I don’t have my own Facebook page. I try to run away from people. I try not to give people a way to find me. Sorry – you can cut that out if you like! In many ways I’m a troglodyte. If I’m successful, it’s because I make one movie at a time, and I have sort of an extreme focus, and I shut the world out.
SBK: That’s very interesting. As I understand it, you worked with Steven Soderbergh on “sex, lies, and videotape.”
DG: I was an assistant on that movie. That was the first movie I ever worked on, yeah.
SBK: What’d you do?
DG: I was an assistant to the producer. My first job was driving Steven around ‘cause he’d moved to L.A. and he didn’t have a car.
SBK: He’s a smart guy.
DG: Yeah, he’s amazing. He’s my age. He’s one of these people who started brilliant. The rest of us are mortals and it takes us 20 years to become mediocre, where he was born great.
SBK: One of the things I know about “An Inconvenient Truth” is that word of mouth on the internet really went a long way toward building a viewership for that.
DG: It’s true.
SBK: So what do you think about the interplay between film and internet fans?
DG: It’s fantastic. The buzz alone on “It Might Get Loud” has been great. You should talk to my producer Lesley [Chilcott] who’s totally in it. I know there’s all these rumors and buzz about Jimmy Page and Jack White and The Edge. Our trailer has been featured on many websites and already a million people have seen the trailer for our little documentary, and we need that. Hollywood is overwhelmed by these big tentpole movies that have $100 million – no kidding - $100 million to buy posters and billboards and saturate the world with those movies, and a little documentary like ours depends on fans talking to each other and saying “This is when the movie opens and you have to go see this and look at this clip.” So I would say that kind of discussion and openness and excitement through the web is more essential than anything else to getting our film seen.
It’s a strange time in making movies. There couldn’t be a more exciting time for technology, but movies, small movies, are getting killed, because not just documentaries, but independents… it’s just hard to find space in the world for people to know about your film. But you know that if they see the film, they’re going to love it.
I’ve shown “It Might Get Loud” in Berlin, in Sundance, in Toronto, in Los Angeles to sold-out crowds. And when you fill the theatre, people love it. Each time there’s a standing ovation.
SBK: I bet.
DG: Still there’s a disconnect, because you know the audience will love the movie, but how do you get the audience to the theatre? So we depend on the internet interest. We depend on the Facebooks and all the different journalists on the web.
Check your local theatre listings for the NY and L.A. showtimes. The movie rolls out to other markets after that. Check the "It Might Get Loud" Facebook page for details.
