“It’s ‘A, B, C, D…’ - it’s my vocabulary to cut the film with. “Because all of that media is just letters, really,” he notes, by way of explanation. That way, he says, he can provide context for what can be a lot of random, out-of-context footage once he’s done that, he can start to establish a through line and begin writing a script that underlines any connections or recurring themes he wants to dig into. Morgen describes what he says is a tried-and-true method for diving into documentaries involving long artistic legacies: He tries to read as many books and consume every bit of media that he can on someone, all in chronological order. So how did he manage to go about doing that? Morgen takes a deep breath and looks directly into his Zoom camera. Something where a viewer could fill in the blanks.”
But I also wanted to give people who weren’t fans of Bowie a sense of who he was, and have this function as a canvas where others could see the Bowie they know in here as well. “After what I went through while I was making this,” Morgen says, “I needed to make something personal with this. (It premieres tonight at a midnight screening at the Cannes Film Festival and will hit theaters in September.)Īnd while die-hard Bowie disciples will swoon over a lot of never-before-seen footage of Bowie during the many eras of his career (notably longer snippets of his legendary 1978 Earl’s Court show) and Tony Visconti and Paul Massey’s remixes/translations of Bowie’s original stems for the soundtrack, Morgen’s aim was to make something that functioned as more than just a sonic scrapbook or a for-the-fans love letter. Yet much like Morgen’s 2016 documentary on Kurt Cobain, Montage of Heck, it pushes an exhilarating stream-of-consciousness blend of performance footage, clips of movies and music that influenced its subject and an abundance of sound + vision close to the very edge of completely falling apart. Constructed completely out of archival footage, this was never going to be a straightforward, cradle-to-grave look at Bowie’s life and times - what Morgen describes as the “Best Buy presents the greatest hits” style of rockumentaries.
Befitting for a movie about the most chameleonic musician of the late 20th century, the final result is something that kept reinventing itself as it went along, evolving and constantly chasing after new ways of telling the story of someone who refused to be pinned down.
For Morgen, the project would turn out to be a five-year odyssey that included a near-death experience, a hobo-like trip through New Mexico, and a radical rethinking of what it means to balance the professional and the personal when making a music doc. Or rather, it was one of several beginnings. That was the beginning of Moonage Daydream, Morgen’s extraordinary portrait of the late artist as cosmic philosopher, glam trickster, and sage-like cypher via a stream-of-consciousness blend of vintage performances, rare archival clips and career-spanning interviews. And it sounds like you’ve created a format that might work for us.’” The manager replied, “‘David actually loved the meeting you guys had I’m not sure if you know this, but we’ve collected and saved everything. David never wanted to make a traditional documentary , so we weren’t sure what we were going to do with all this stuff.
When Bowie died in early 2016, the filmmaker was in the process of developing a potential series of IMAX movies on musicians that he wanted to lean toward the experiential: “Something that wasn’t a biographical documentary, that wasn’t a concert film, but was more cinematic.” He rang up Bill Zysblat, Bowie’s manager who’d been at that original pitch, and explained what he was thinking of doing. Right after he laid into me, someone asked, ‘What’s your favorite Bowie album, Brett?’ I said, ‘Well, to be quite candid, I haven’t really appreciated anything he’s done since 1983.’ Then David just looked at me and went, ‘Touché.’ No one had ever said ‘Touché’ to me before! I thought that just happened in movies.”
He went from dismissive to just ripping into one of my movies. He had this idea for a collaboration with Bowie on what he called “a sort-of hybrid experimental film.” A lifelong fan, he was beyond excited when the rock star agreed to a meeting.Īnd then, Morgen recalls over a Zoom call from his home in Los Angeles, the sit-down with Bowie and his associates started getting “a little contentious. It was 2007, at which point Morgen had been a filmmaker for over a decade and had made documentaries on boxers ( On the Ropes), Black music in America (the Say It Loud series), legendary Hollywood producer Robert Evans ( The Kid Stays in the Picture) and the Chicago 10 ( Chicago 10).
When the Thin White Duke insults your work, it tends to burn deep into your memory. Brett Morgen vividly remembers the first time he met David Bowie.