New Delhi: Led Zeppelin have never allowed their original recording of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ to be used for a movie. Until now. Greta Gerwig got the band to agree to let her use the song in the trailer for her upcoming film, Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew.
At a Q&A with Stephen Colbert in New York on Tuesday, Gerwig spoke about how she got Robert Plant and Jimmy Page to agree.
“They had not let it be used in anything,” she said. “I was so moved that they allowed me to use the song.”
Gerwig showed the film to the musicians and talked to them about the story. It helped that both were already fans of CS Lewis, who wrote The Chronicles of Narnia.
“They did it because they saw the heart of the story in the film and they, too, love C.S. Lewis, and they have a reverence for his work,” she said. “The whole thing was very fortuitous. I’m so happy that it got to be this song.”
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Song of creation
Gerwig had a particular reason for wanting ‘Stairway to Heaven’.
“It’s an epic song. It’s an amazing song,” she said. “It’s a narrative. It’s about a spiritual journey. It’s about the true path of enlightenment and spirituality, and then this path of false idols and the wrong roads you can go down. And I was like, ‘This is exactly the story of this movie.’”
The film is based on Lewis’s 1955 novel The Magician’s Nephew, which tells the story of how Narnia came into existence. Two children, Digory and Polly, travel between different worlds and witness the creation of Narnia.
Gerwig said she was particularly interested in telling a story about creation. Big budget films often involve a lot of destruction, she pointed out. But she wanted to explore “the challenge and the gift of being able to build something up and build a new world out of song, out of people’s art”.
Getting ‘Stairway to Heaven’ into a film has been difficult for other directors. Cameron Crowe had planned a scene around the song for his 2000 film Almost Famous. He had to leave it out after Led Zeppelin refused permission.
Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew releases in theatres in the US on 12 February 2027, and will come to Netflix on 2 April.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)