"It's my golf," Tull says. "It's a great source of joy for me."
He'd also noticed the popularity of video games such as Guitar Hero and Rock Band, plus the continued public fascination with rock 'n' roll and the people behind it, despite ongoing troubles in the record industry.
"It was kind of personal," says Tull. "I just wanted to do something as a fan of the guitar and music. Why is there such a love affair with this instrument? What would I want to see that tried to get at the heart of that?"
"Loud" is his first documentary. He turned to his friend Guggenheim, who had just won the Oscar for his alarming climate-change film and quickly accepted the job to bring Tull's project to life.
The director constructed "It Might Get Loud" around a series of audio interviews with the guitarists -- an approach he learned during the making of "An Inconvenient Truth" with former Vice President Al Gore.
"When the film crew was there with all the lights, Al Gore would be different. It would be more formal," Guggenheim says. "The whole idea was how do we break through this facade and how do we become more intimate and more personal? When the film crew went away, I'd drive around the farm with him in his car and I'd get the greatest stuff."
Choosing three guitarists was the initial challenge. Page was the first to sign on, and is credited as associate producer. Guggenheim says he'd assumed the enigmatic classic rocker wouldn't do it, but after the director described his approach over tea in London, Page became an enthusiastic participant, providing the grinding, bluesy instrumental that unfurls over the opening credits.
"What we were trying to accomplish was not to make a list of the three greatest or the three this or that," Tull says. "It was really about bringing different eras, styles and personalities to bear . . . Davis deserves all the credit for the way he's able to bring out really great moments and highly personal things."
The high point of the production for Guggenheim was a two-day "summit" last year with the guitarists and their instruments on a Warner Bros. soundstage. Early on, as Page picked up a black Les Paul to demonstrate "Whole Lotta Love," Guggenheim noticed on one of his monitors that a camera was drifting off and out of focus.
"I realized the operator had forgotten to shoot and he was just watching," he says with a laugh. "The music was so loud and so incredible that he forgot what he was doing. A lot of us were just blown away."
--
calendar@latimes.com
