Sundance Film Festival

Davis Guggenheim started the filmmaking process for It Might Get Loud with an inconspicuous tape recorder. Sitting in hotel rooms across from Jimmy Page, The Edge, and Jack White, he let conversation write the first draft of his documentary, laying down a map for the shooting that would unfold over the next 18 months.

It was a technique he learned “by accident” on An Inconvenient Truth as the best way to draw out Al Gore without the distraction of lights and cameras. For a different reason, cameras inhibit rockstars who are used to creating artifice and performance. But without an audience, all three could talk articulately and intimately about their lives, music and process. And with audio tape practically free, Guggenheim could roll indefinitely.

He then cut together a radio documentary-style outline; the conversations told the filmmakers where to go—to the house in Dublin where The Edge hid out with his songwriting demons and emerged with “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” to Headley Grange where Jimmy Page performed in a hallway where he once heard John Bottom play drums.

A couple of stories were best illustrated with animation, all together Guggenheim says the process took him away from the kind of dutiful data you get on Wikipedia and into a living dialogue between the past and the present. “Shooting is so expensive,” Guggenheim says, “that people end up writing the documentary before they make it and that’s deadly because then you’re telling a story that’s already been told.”

In addition to the individual, biographical stories, which were shot on Super 16, the film includes an extraordinary sequence in which the three guitarists meet, play, and talk shop on the big soundstage at Warner Bros. Shot with four HD cameras, and switched live, it was a very different type of storytelling in contrast to the reflective unfolding of the biographical stories and the dialog among musicians with very different relationships with their guitars.

“On Inconvenient Truth I learned there were these radically different colors of storytelling experiences—one very head, one very gut, heart. The HD stuff was one color, the personal stuff where you go back in time and are alone with how they live and create, that’s another and we yank the audience between those colors.”

See the film Sunday 3p.m. at the Screening Room at the Sundance Resort and next Saturday 6p.m. at Park City’s Temple Theatre.