As the chairman and CEO of Legendary Pictures, Thomas Tull has overseen such big-budget blockbusters as Superman Returns and The Dark Knight. But the movie closest to his heart right now cost a fraction of those summer spectacles’ budgets.

It Might Get Loud, out this month from Sony Pictures Classics, represents Tull's first foray into documentary filmmaking and he admits that moving from the realm of fiction to non-fiction required a bit of an adjustment. "There's no script and you don't get to sit back and watch dailies," Tull says, on the phone from Los Angeles. "It's a very different process from a scripted movie, because it felt so loose—we had to feel our way through it."

The veteran producer has no one but himself to blame for leaving the reel world for the real world. After all, It Might Get Loud, which chronicles the lives and careers of three of rock music's biggest icons—Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page, U2's The Edge and The White Stripes' Jack White—is based on Tull's own lifelong fascination with their instrument of choice, the electric guitar.

"I've played the electric guitar since I was 14," he says. "To me, it has always been emblematic of rock. I know why I love it so much, but I've never seen a film that has gotten to the essence of the instrument." Eager to be the person that made the definitive movie about the electric guitar, Tull picked up the phone and called his friend Davis Guggenheim, who had just won an Oscar for directing the critical and commercial hit An Inconvenient Truth, one of the highest-grossing documentaries of all time. "I told him, 'I want to do this, but I have no idea how. What do you think?'"

He didn't have to wait long for an answer. "I really wanted the make the film personal," Guggenheim says, picking up the narrative of the movie's origins. "I've always felt that the problem with most music documentaries is that they try to do too much. I wanted to avoid a situation where I'd be spending only three minutes on, say, Jimi Hendrix, because that's just not enough time. I had just come off making An Inconvenient Truth and part of the objective with that film was finding a way to go deeper exploring someone who is a public figure. So my instinct was to take that same approach to this film—find out what makes our subjects tick through intensive interviews and conversations and film the movie around that."

Once Guggenheim settled on the kind of documentary he wanted to make, he and Tull began putting together a wish list of musicians they hoped would participate in the film. From the very beginning, Jimmy Page was their dream get. "Originally we felt like 'We'll never get Jimmy, let's move on,'" remembers Guggenheim. "But a month later, we decided that we should at least give it a try. I wrote this long letter to his managers and flew to New York City to meet with them. They wound up saying, 'Why don't you meet with him?' So I flew to London and sat down with Jimmy. Once we got him, we knew we had a movie."

With Page on board, the next step was finding two other guitar heroes who could hold their own opposite Led Zeppelin's lead shredder. That search led Guggenheim to David Howell Evans a.k.a. The Edge and John Anthony Gillis a.k.a. Jack White. In addition to being respected musicians in their own right, both men also complement Page in that they embody a specific generation of rock ’n’ roll. Just as Led Zeppelin defines the ’70s, U2 is the poster band for the ’80s and The White Stripes were one of the few late-’90s indie rock groups to cross over into the mainstream in a big way.

"Each guy has his own era and style," Tull explains. "You get to a place where you have three separate voices and journeys about this instrument. I always look at it like a guitar is a piece of wood with a neck and some strings on it. If you just stare at it, it doesn't tell you a lot. But when someone picks it up, their voice comes through it. That's what we wanted to get at and part of Davis' ability is getting people to open up. These guys really put themselves out there."



Because of Guggenheim's methodical, in-depth approach, It Might Get Loud took a year-and-a-half to make. During that time, the director visited each of his subjects individually, first for audio-only interviews that stretched on for days, followed by extensive shoots that go beyond the usual talking-head mise-en-scène glimpsed in so many documentaries. For example, Guggenheim films The Edge returning to the high school where he first met his bandmates and takes his camera inside Page's study and captures him playing some of his favorite vinyl records. He also hangs out on White's farm, where the reclusive musician builds a guitar from scratch, writes and records an original song and talks to a young kid playing his nine-year-old self (a conceit that White dreamed up).

"I hope people feel like 'I've never seen that before!'" Guggenheim says. "I hope they say, 'Wow, I get to be alone with The Edge in his studio while he's writing a song' or 'Wow, I get to be alone with Jack while he's listening to his favorite track.' And there are so many good scenes we cut out of the movie! Jimmy playing more Zeppelin songs, Jack playing solos, a few more stories. The DVD will have at least 10 to 15 deleted scenes."

Those intimate moments are sure to thrill rock fans, but the stuff that will really have them stomping their feet is the extended sequence that Guggenheim calls "the ultimate jam session." Halfway through the film's lengthy production, the director assembled his three stars on the biggest soundstage at Warner Bros. Studios and spent two days filming them chatting, laughing and, of course, playing their guitars. It was the first and only time during the shoot that they would meet each other face-to-face and Guggenheim pointedly stayed on the sidelines as much as possible. "My feeling was that anything I could ask them to do would pale compared to what they'd want to do," he says. "I didn't say very much. I just put three chairs facing each other with their guitars behind them, the amps behind the guitars and the cameras way, way back so it was basically just the three of them. They did ask me at one point, 'What do you want us to play?' And I said, 'I'm not going to tell you.'"

As it turned out, the three didn't need to take any requests. Once the conversation started flowing, so did the music. As the "jam session" unfolds, viewers are treated to such memorable sights as Page strumming the opening chords to "Whole Lotta Love" while The Edge and White look on like fanboys at a comic-book convention. The two-day summit—and the film—ends with all three performing an impromptu acoustic cover of The Band's classic track "The Weight." "We had heard electric guitar for two straight days and I thought it would be great if the movie ended on something acoustic," explains Guggenheim. "They picked that song. It's a good example of the entire process—I gave them a vague idea and they picked something they all shined to."

Because It Might Get Loud profiles only three of the numerous musicians who have put their own unique stamp on the electric guitar, both Tull and Guggenheim feel that there's room to turn the film into an ongoing franchise. "Davis and I have already had some conversations about it because it was so much fun to do this one and you start thinking about all kinds of eclectic combinations," Tull reveals.

At this point, though, Guggenheim has no plans to start production on It Might Get Louder. He's already deep into researching his next documentary, a film about the state of America's public school system. "We're filming in San Antonio, Washington, D.C., New York, Los Angeles—it's a pretty comprehensive and shocking look at the country's public schools. It's going to take me two years to finish. There may be a feature in the next couple years for me as well, but I'm in no hurry. I love making documentaries—each one is so different and there's no formula to them, so there's a lot of room to put your own stamp on it. The great thing about It Might Get Loud is that I've never seen anything like it. Three different guys from three different generations come together and have a great jam session. When will that ever happen again? It's completely unique."