Metal Anarchy

Wendy Dio, wife and longtime manager of Ronnie James Dio, has confirmed that filming has already started for the documentary on her late husband. The film will cover the legendary singer’s career from Elf to Heaven & Hell.

Wendy told The Metal Voice the following:

“We just started shooting. We did interviews last week — a few with me, with some technical people, with Geezer Butler [of BLACK SABBATH and HEAVEN & HELL] — and we will continue that in between the [‘Dio Returns’ hologram] tour, we’ll continue on with that. And then, hopefully, that should be out by next year — probably latter part of next year.

We started with Geezer Butler, who’s obviously Ronnie’s best friend from BLACK SABBATH. And I think we’ll probably do some of the [DIO] band while we are on tour. And other people — all the people close to Ronnie, people that played with Ronnie or were influenced by Ronnie and also his childhood years and going all the way through his time with ELF, with RAINBOW, with BLACK SABBATH. And I have so much footage — stuff that people have never seen. I’ve got some Super 8 stuff. I found a whole huge box of stuff — stuff from his childhood, stuff from the RAINBOW days, behind-the-scenes stuff. I’m getting it now transferred, so that we can actually view it.

A lot of these Super 8s were at Ronnie’s parents’ house, and when they passed away, Ronnie and I went there and took a bunch of stuff — we found a bunch of Super 8s — but we haven’t looked at them yet, so we don’t know what’s on them. Hopefully some surprises… I also found a whole bunch of tapes. Ronnie would always demo his songs in his own studio, and we had all these tapes which I had no idea what they were, but Ronnie’s engineer, Wyn Davis, who he always worked with, was over at the house and he looked at me and said, ‘Wendy, this is a goldmine.’ This is demo stuff. This is stuff that probably was never heard before, or it’s the beginnings of songs, it’s songs that haven’t been finished, or have been finished, or were cast aside. He said, ‘This is a treasure trove.’ So we will go through those and hopefully put some of those out as bonus material. We’re gonna do some re-releases that BMG is putting out of Ronnie, which starts, actually, later this year. And so hopefully we can put some bonus material on there. So a lot of exciting things going on.”

Wendy went on to say she is hoping to release the documentary in theaters, before it hits streaming services. She also added the following when asked about the possibility of a Ronnie James Dio biopic:

“No, I don’t wanna do a biopic. Nobody could play Ronnie, I don’t think. I don’t think so. I’d like to do a straightforward documentary of Ronnie’s life, with lots of footage of Ronnie. I’ve got so many interviews that Ronnie did and so much stuff that I’d really like to just keep it very, very natural.”

[via Blabbermouth]