'Lemmy' Filmmakers Says MOTÖRHEAD Frontman Is 'The Ultimate Rock And Roll Badass'

Michael Leader of Den Of Geek! recently conducted an interview with Greg Olliver and Wes Orshoski — directors/producers of "Lemmy", the long-awaited documentary examining the life and career of MOTÖRHEAD frontman and rock icon Lemmy Kilmister. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Den Of Geek!: You've both been involved in the music scene for a long time, as directors and writers. So, how did the Lemmy project come about?

Wes Orshoski: Greg and I were working on another film, and we found ourselves in Dublin, Ireland, and we were working so well together, and we decided "Okay, let's go to this pub across the street and come up with ideas." And the first idea that popped into my head was Lemmy, because I'd just interviewed him for Billboard magazine in the U.S., and that interview was about the group HEAD CAT, his side project. And I just kept thinking about it. I kept listening to the record over and over. Buddy Holly, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash covers. Man! Lemmy's such an interesting guy, and he's a badass. He's the ultimate rock and roll badass. There's so many other sides to him. So, I said, "Greg, I know who we should do a movie on." That was the only idea we came up with and we just drank for the rest of the night.

Greg Olliver: And when you have a few drinks, you get more courage, and you think things could happen, and we were really lucky that it actually happened. We could have a hundred more ideas, and a hundred of them won't happen. So, we were really lucky that it fell together instead of apart.

Den Of Geek!: How did you go about organizing it, and getting Lemmy on board?

Greg Olliver: There was a lot of phonecalls and emails, and showing my work and our work to management, to get them to see that we were decent filmmakers. And basically we auditioned for Lemmy as human beings. So, we went and met him at the Rainbow, in Hollywood, and it was supposed to be like a business meeting. And it was like two minutes of us telling him what we wanted to do and a couple of hours of getting drunk with Lemmy at the Rainbow. And his manager was like, "He really liked you guys. That was the longest he's ever sat down at a business meeting!" And so, we're like, well, if this is business with Lemmy, then we're excited.

Wes Orshoski: This is the business we want to be in!

Den Of Geek!: So, how did it develop from there? How long were you filming him and following him around?

Greg Olliver: We didn't plan it, man. We didn't have an agenda. We just told him we wanted to make an honest portrait of him. So, we didn't know what we were going to film. We just knew we had to spend time with him. And we started thinking in our heads it might take a year, but it took three and a half years to get everything, so all three of us were happy with what we got, and we knew we were done with the film.

Wes Orshoski: It was funny, because it was just a couple of months before we finished the cut of the film for SXSW, where we world premiered it, Greg and I didn't feel we had enough. We didn't really feel like we had everything. And then we started to edit everything together, and we were like, "Fuck, man! We have a lot of stuff. Dude, we have a movie!" We just needed to get the ending.

Read the entire interview from Den Of Geek!.

A new official trailer for "Lemmy" can be viewed below.

"Lemmy" will be released in the U.K., Germany, France and Scandinavia on DVD by Entertainment One on January 24, 2011. The film premiered in the U.S. in March 2010 during the South by Southwest at the historic Paramount Theatre in Austin.

Check out reviews of the film:

* Inside Pulse Movies
* Hollywood Reporter
* Variety