Davis Guggenheim calls himself a "Behind the Music" junkie, watching every episode of the VH1 show chronicling famous rock stars' rise and fall and rise again amid triumph and self-destruction. He loves it, he says, but the Academy Award-winning director of "An Inconvenient Truth" had other ideas for his own documentary on the electric guitar.
In "It Might Get Loud," he focused on three masters of the instrument from different generations, each with a different style -- Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page, U2's the Edge and the White Stripes' Jack White -- and there would be no talk of girlfriends or rehab or black magic, none of the sordid subjects that have fueled rock documentaries for decades.
"Let's rethink the music documentary," says Guggenheim, 46, who dabbles a bit on guitar himself. "They're either about car wrecks or drug overdoses, or they're about celebrity worship, big platitudes about how they changed American culture. We wanted to go deeper."
"It Might Get Loud," which premieres Friday at the Los Angeles Film Festival (ahead of an Aug. 14 release in Los Angeles and New York), reaches into the heart of inspiration and attitude, more about mood than biography. In the opening scene, White is at his farm outside Nashville as he nails together his version of a "diddley bow" from a plank of wood, Coke bottle and single guitar string. He plugs into a vintage amplifier for a moment of wild, twangy sound, and says, "Who says you need to buy a guitar?"
In London, Page riffs alone through "Ramble On" amid stacks of guitars, amps and travel cases, demonstrating his delicate use of "light and shade, whisper to the thunder." Scenes with the Edge in Ireland are particularly eye-opening, revealing the U2 guitarist as lighthearted but also deeply philosophical about his work, as he meticulously pieces together the song "Get on Your Boots."
At his offices in Santa Monica, Guggenheim is already halfway into work on a new documentary about public education, but there are remnants of "Loud" everywhere. On one editing room wall are color-coded cards representing scenes with each of the guitarists: green for the Edge, yellow for Page and red for White.
"We don't want to take it down because it was two years of our life," Guggenheim says with a smile.
It began as the idea of producer Thomas Tull, chairman of Legendary Pictures, the force behind such massive hits as "The Dark Knight" and "300." He is a collector of guitars and amplifiers and often gets together with friends to jam out some blues.
