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Award-winning journalist traces the U.S. economic collapse to policies enacted after 9/11. (1:03)
 

Full interview. (12:23)
 

Tavis: Davis Guggenheim is an Oscar-winning filmmaker who directed Al Gore's acclaimed documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. His latest project celebrates the role of the electric guitar in music and focuses on three guitar greats, Jimmy Page, the Edge, and Jack White. The film opened earlier today in New York and Los Angeles with more cities to follow in September. Here now some scenes from It Might Get Loud.

[Clip]

Tavis: These guys are all pretty good. Why these three, Davis?

Davis Guggenheim: Well, we didn't want to pick the best three or the only three. We wanted to pick three guitarists from three different generations. Jack White from Detroit in the 80s, Jimmy Page from London in the 50s and the Edge from Dublin. Like what would these different guitarists who wanted to say something very different, what did they do with this piece of wood and how did they express themselves?

Tavis: What's the similarity, though? I want to flip what you just said and ask what the similarity is you've discovered from the three -

Guggenheim: - I knew you would do this to me on your show because your show is just - I watch your show all the time and it's so special. With all the noise out there in the world on TV, I watch your show and it's like, oh, here's a conversation.

Tavis: I appreciate that.

Guggenheim: At the end of the movie, they come together and they play one song. They play a Led Zeppelin song and they play slide steel and they're so different. Like U2 came out as a rejection of Led Zeppelin. You know, they hated those big indulgent white boy blues bands and Jack White hated the way U2 made their songs.

Tavis: (Laughter).

Guggenheim: But when they came together and they started playing, you realized that music is universal and that each of them could express themselves equally and differently through this music and that's the sort of the climax of the movie. It's really beautiful.

Tavis: To your point now, Davis, how do three guys who have a certain level - my word, not yours - a certain level of disdain for the others' style and, if not disdain, certainly wanted to juxtapose their own style against the other guy, how do the three of them act when they get together?

Guggenheim: (Laughter) Well, you know, it's true. If you're gonna be a rock star, you want to smash the generation before you. You want to destroy it and you want to come out with your own voice and reject the other guys. So I was worried.

One of the premises of this film that's never been done before, we brought three guys together. We actually mapped out a map at the Warner Bros. lot just a mile away from here so they would never meet. We didn't know what was gonna happen when the Edge arrived and when Jimmy arrived and when Jack arrived. These are rock stars with sort of entourages and equipment and techies and we didn't know.

When they came together, I realized as musicians they do that every day on sound stages and they have sort of an openness about them. They know how to improv. They know how to sort of hear somebody else's stuff and, as musicians, they could do anything.

So after a while when their differences were put aside, they had this sort of communal language that you and I don't have. You know when you meet a guy like Prince, like he is at a level and understands something that we as mortals don't -

Tavis: - just don't get (laughter).

Guggenheim: Don't get. Yeah, that's right.

Tavis: That's true. What did you learn that the electric guitar meant for them? Why did these guys choose this as their primary instrument?

Guggenheim: Well, one of the things about it is you realize that it could have been anything. What's similar about them is they're all isolated. You know, Jack grew up in Mexicantown which is a part of Detroit in the 80s where no one played instrument. It was all hip-hop. He said playing an instrument was the most embarrassing thing you could ever do.

Jimmy Page grew up where there was no guitar at all. There was no electric guitar and the same with Edge in Dublin. They were so isolated that they all had to find their voice. They all had to say I want to speak my mind.

You know, people in my world, there's guitar teachers, you can go to Guitar Center and buy a $10,000 guitar. It doesn't make you a good guitar player.

Tavis: Or Guitar Hero and not do anything right (laughter).

Guggenheim: That's right. You push the yellow button, you know (laughter).

Tavis: Exactly. But they all wanted to communicate what through this instrument?

Guggenheim: Well, that's what I was trying to say. It's no one is speaking for me, you know. I think you see that time and time through musicians all the way. There's a thread, you know, going all the way back to the blues, the blues players in the south and it's no one is speaking for me. I'm gonna use this instrument to speak for me, even though the rest of the world doesn't hear that.

You see Jack White making a diddley bow on this farm in Tennessee, which is how Bo Diddley got his name. He's banging a nail on a 2x4 stringing some barbed wire and electrifying it and playing this instrument. It doesn't matter if you got a $5,000 guitar, but he can speak. They want to say something that words don't say.

You know, the lead singer Bono gets to sing and Robert Plank gets to sing, but these guys, when you're at a rock concert, you hear that guitar and the words don't matter. They're saying something that words really don't help with.

Tavis: When you talk about the electric guitar, there's such a long history of this instrument and it comes from blues and that's the point you made earlier. There's nothing wrong with this. I'm just curious. Why focus on the electric guitar in its being employed in the rock genre?

Guggenheim: It's a good question. I mean, it's a wonderful thing about the process we did because I could start the movie tomorrow and make it about three jazz guitarists or three novelists. We just found three guys that played the music that we loved.

So Thomas Tull - he produced the movies 300, Batman and now The Hangover. He called me up and he said, "You don't know this, but in a month you're gonna win an Academy Award." I'm like, "No, no, no." He goes, "No, you're gonna win an Academy Award and I want to produce your next movie and I want it to be about the electric guitar."

We both talked about our favorite guitarists and it started with Jimmy Page and Edge and Jack White, but it never was meant to be exclusive. You know, I went to see Prince here at The Roosevelt. I was like, God, if he would be in this movie, you know, I would beg and bow. He played that night and, with his left hand, he was picking stuff that I'd never seen before.

So the movie isn't supposed to be exclusive. It's sort of all-encompassing and really not even about the guitar. If you watch the movie, it's about what does it mean to write a song and, even broader, what does it mean to want to speak and find an artistic path to be able to express yourself?

Tavis: The thing about Prince, as you and I were discussing before we came on the air, is that he plays so many things well. He's an embarrassment to everybody else (laughter). He plays every instrument, you know, lead vocals, background vocals, engineering. I mean, it's not just - I mean, a documentary on him would have to go beyond the guitar.

Guggenheim: As a songwriter, as a guitarist, as a producer, as a singer. I mean, he wins all those categories.

Tavis: When you and your partner got together to talk about the film and you talked about your favorite guitarists, what is it for you as a filmmaker about the electric guitar that made you say, "You know what? I really do like this instrument and I can do this piece. I'd be interested in this."?

Guggenheim: Well, I'm just a fan, Tavis. I love music, I'm sure, like you. Because I'm a filmmaker, I feel like I live a creative life, but I'm sort of a subcategory. But when I meet guys like Jimmy Page or Prince or the Edge, I feel like they're not mortal. They're given this special gift.

So as an artist who's trying to be on a path, I'm very inspired by how they do that. So when I saw these rock documentaries, they usually end with a drug overdose or a car crash or they're about an ex-girlfriend breaking up the band. I was like, "Let's not make that movie. Let's make a movie about what it means to be a songwriter."

So the movie shows how - do you ever wonder how Prince in his dormitory wrote - I always think about him in that dormitory writing that first album. Like how did he do that? Like who taught him how to play those instruments? How did Jimmy Page - and there's a clip I think you're gonna show.

He wanted the guitar to sound dirty like the blues he heard on the Chess catalog, so he had a friend at the British Navy - it was called the Admiralty - who worked on radars. He said, "Make me a box that'll make that sound" and that became the fuzz box. So it wasn't about the guitar and it wasn't about the fuzz box. It was about a guy trying to express himself.

So for me as a person trying to express myself, I was like I'm learning something there. I'm growing; I'm expanding in my life because I'm next to these three guys.

Tavis: You used two words in the last minute and a half that I want to juxtapose. You used the word "gift" and you used the word "learning." What's your sense with regard to these three guys they come in on this line? That is to say, are these guys gifted? They came into the world with the capacity to do this? Or they learned how to do this along the way?

Guggenheim: You think because they're rock stars or even like when you meet Barack Obama who was on your show, somehow they're sprinkled with some magic dust, you know. In some respects, they've got skills, like I've got three kids. Some kids can write better than others, some kids can draw. They can naturally draw and they're spatially better.

They have that for sure, but more than that, it's almost a cliché. They have this passion and they have sort of a relentless desire to connect that passion with needing to say something. Like you get kids on YouTube that are doing Jimmy Page's solos better than him, but they didn't have his need or his passion, you know.

You see that with a guy like Barack Obama. He has that need to express himself. He has that need to connect to people, you know, and the same with Prince. That's what I get drawn to. These are fascinating people.

Tavis: I'm glad you said that because I want to close our conversation with this because I know you have an answer for me and I want to hear it. I can feel from you that you get turned on by being exposed to this kind of expertise, this kind of passion. I feel the same way.

We mentioned Prince in this conversation. I went to Montreal this summer to watch him close the Montreal Jazz Festival. I spent time this summer with Bob Dylan and John Mellencamp and Willie Nelson. The whole thing for me doing this over the last few weeks on my vacation was I like being connected to greatness. I like to engage in dialog with these guys to figure out what their process is.

What do you take from watching these guys with their passion around this particular instrument? What did you take away as a filmmaker for your own process and growth and development?

Guggenheim: So we're in the Edge's studio in Dublin and he's writing a song. He's got a little clue. It's not even a song. He's got a clue for the next song which now is a year later. It's in their new CD. He is on that thing and he's playing it tirelessly over and over again.

It's three o'clock in the morning and I'm wrapping out my camera equipment. I'm wrapping out the lights and we're gone and it's in a dark room and I say, "Goodnight, Edge." He looks up and says, "Goodnight," and he's working. I love that.

You know, it's like you. It's like you want your show to be better. You want your show to go deeper. You know, you got the same thing. I get a thrill out of that and I'm challenged. I want to be better. I want to do what they do because it'll make my work better.

Tavis: Well, harder to get better than an Academy Award, which you already have for An Inconvenient Truth (laughter), but anyway, maybe there's another one and another one and another one, to say nothing of your dad's work in front of yours. Anyway, Davis Guggenheim is his name, Academy Award-winner for An Inconvenient Truth. The new project, It Might Get Loud. Love that title, by the way.

Guggenheim: Thank you.

Tavis: Nice to see you.

Guggenheim: Nice to have me.