Director Brett Morgen has worked on multiple documentaries that aim to get to the heart of the musical artist. Perhaps his most famous foray (until now) is his seminal film on Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, Montage of Heck. As brilliant and groundbreaking as that film may have been, nothing in Brett’s previous work can possibly prepare the viewer for Moonage Daydream, a kaleidoscopic, non-linear take on the genius of David Bowie. Instead of creating a birth to death travelogue of Bowie’s formation, accomplishments, and passing, Morgen has made a film that eschews all convention in an effort to get at the core of one of the most undefinable artists in the history of popular music.
In doing so, Morgen has delivered a feast for the senses that seems to circle around itself in ways that could have been confounding, but ends up being revealing, ecstatic, and finally, deeply moving.
In our conversation, Brett and I discuss his efforts to reveal a man who defied definition in producing some of the greatest music that has ever been committed to record.
Awards Daily: You’ve obviously directed documentaries around music before; Crossfire Hurricane, Montage of Heck. Those were unconventional, but this to me felt like a further step out in terms of how to tell someone’s story without doing the A-Z approach that’s common in documentaries.
Brett Morgen: In the movie David talks about hearing Fats Domino for the first time and how while he didn’t understand what he was singing, that is what actually attracted him–the mystery. I think that there’s different ways to arrive at the truth. There’s tangible ways and there’s intangible ways. David speaks a lot about the grey areas that he was trying to write about. The film was trying to access him through those means. It’s an attempt to arrive at a deeper understanding of the artist by recognizing that there are different ways to arrive there other than facts and biography. Montage of Heck is a biopic with a capital B. It is a biographical cradle to grave narrative, essentially answering the question how did Kurt end up where he did and walking us back. That was a way to arrive at an understanding of Kurt. I don’t believe that Bowie can be explained through facts or traditional forms of information. I think Bowie was Bowie, something intangible. So like my previous work which was all constructed to reflect the sensibilities of the subject, David’s film needed to be enigmatic, mysterious, sublime, and ultimately familiar and relatable.
Awards Daily: Did it at all make you nervous? You had to know you were going for something a bit unusual here and It seems like you were working at a pretty high degree of difficulty.
Brett Morgen: It was overwhelming. I didn’t know how to write something experiential. My scripts have always flowed right out of me once I finished screening because they feel very methodical. You have your through line and then you start employing the footage that works for the through line. Honestly Montage of Heck was a three day journey to get to the first wrap to the script. With Bowie, I didn’t have that foundation to rest upon. It was overwhelming because when I finished screening, which took two years, and at that point, we had spent all of our editorial budget. We hadn’t started editing the film. I didn’t know what happened at minute seventeen. I didn’t know where to start. I sort of had an idea. I sort of knew that the beginning and the end would be at the same place, but I didn’t know what was happening at minute seventeen. That was difficult. The through line was readily accessible as transience–David discussing at length from the beginning of his career to the end. How that manifests itself moment to moment took some time. The bigger challenge that I was confronted with from the beginning was the idea of expectations, genre expectations. The idea that if someone is going to see a movie on David Bowie, they’re going to expect a biographical narrative because we don’t have a subgenre outside of that. I wish we did. I wish there was a genre that was less journalistic. So that audiences understood that you can take a journalistic approach to a subject or an impressionistic approach to a subject, both trying to achieve the same goa,l just through different means. But we don’t really. There are films like Moonage, that are immersive nonfiction but that is not an accepted subgenre that the public is necessarily aware of, or at least can differentiate. That weighed heavily on me. Many of my decisions in the first twenty minutes of the film were done to assist in creating a covenant with the viewer, to establish the type of film, and how information would be presented and revealed to this movie.
Awards Daily: I had eye surgery recently and it was one of those procedures where you are in twilight while they’re doing it. They gave me Versed, which I’d never had before as a drug, and it was one of the trippiest experiences of my life. I felt like the stars and constellations were talking to me and there were all these colors and everything. I thought well I’ll never have an experience like that again…and a few weeks later I saw your movie. (Laughs).
Brett Morgen: It’s interesting you say that. David was doing a promotional tour for RCA in ‘73. He gave this speech where he talks about the moment right before you’re asleep, you’re between a conscious state and a sleep state. That’s the area that he liked to write about. The film was very much presented like that, sort of like a stream of consciousness. So your analogy of being in that sort of state of mind is apropos. It was part of the design of the film to create a canvas that felt spontaneous and unrehearsed, or in the worst possible critique—unfocused. I think luck is when opportunity meets preparation. The fact that I know how to edit even though I’m not a trained editor played heavily into the design of the film. In crafting a film about Bowie, employing the techniques and methodology that Bowie employed, one of the oblique strategies that I embraced was this idea that there are no mistakes, just happy accidents.
This is not just a catchphrase, this was something that was put into practice daily. Because I’m not a trained editor, I’m very unorganized. I work on an eleven inch laptop with probably sixty tracks which means every time I make an edit, I have to scroll down through all the tracks to lock all the tracks. Inevitably I’m not going to lock everything and there’s going to be a mistake and suddenly some shot that I forgot on my video tracks appears. In the old version of myself, I would immediately cover it up and fix it. In this orientation, I had to dance for joy that I was able to create a mistake, or an accident. It made working with other editors nearly impossible because what would seem random to them would make perfect sense to me, and what would make sense to them would come off as random to me. It’s like there was no right or wrong, it just was by feeling you would know that this worked–these images coming together.
Awards Daily: One of the things that really came out was your intentional choice of talking about his standing in our culture by using images of other people: Chaplin, Basquiat, and James Baldwin were the three that caught my mind. Chaplin was clear to me as a choice. Bowie used to be a mime, which silent films have a certain miming aspect. Basquiat—heck he played Andy Warhol in the movie about Basquiat. But Baldwin was kind of fascinating and it made me think of the time that he challenged MTV about not showing black artists on their network. Am I too far afield or what was your intention?
Brett Morgen: You’re right where you need to be. I never thought that when I saw Baldwin in there, but that’s what the film is designed to do. It’s supposed to reflect your life and your journey. Again, all art on one level invites us to project, just by the nature of it. But not all art is created with that intent. Bowie created art with the intent to invite the spectator to participate. When he started employing the cut up process and you have lyrics that are only employed because of consonants or vowels, it’s up to you to conjure up any meaning. You can hear a song like Sweet Thing / Candidate and think it implies A, B, and C. You are correct. I am also correct in thinking that it implies D, E, and F. The images that are presented of artists and of their art were editorialized. They were presented on an even basis as art and artists who influenced and inspired David throughout his life and career.
So the connection between James Baldwin and Basquiat is not that David and Basquiat were both outsiders, which they were, it’s that Basquiat influenced David. That’s why Basquiat is in the film. James Baldwin influenced David. how you want to engage with that is up to you. I don’t even tell you that David knew James Baldwin. Most films are not inviting the audience to participate. They in fact do the opposite. There was an article I read in high school on film and it was called The Fascism of Steven Spielberg. It was all about how if you stop to think when you’re watching E.T. and recognize that you’re looking at a mechanical piece of rubber, you cannot cry or be emotional. The movie works because it’s not inviting you to participate and explore the machinations of the process. Bowie was participatory the way Bertolt Brecht is participatory. So this film, as well, was designed to invite you to project so that you can arrive at the conclusion you just had.
Awards Daily: This may seem overly obvious, but there’s that sense of Bowie that he was never sitting still. He was always changing. I can imagine that informed your intentions with the film too of never sitting in one spot for very long.
Brett Morgen: I think that maybe has more to do with because it’s not an overt narrative as we’re used to. It needed to sort of feel like one long dissolve, that ideas were bleeding into the next. In part because if I stop the action, you go where am I? What’s happening? Part of the hypnotic nature of the film is that it’s a river that’s constantly moving. Oftentimes in circuitous routes and directions and sometimes it goes backwards on itself and forwards but nonetheless it’s constantly flowing.
Awards Daily: One thing that caught up to me as I was watching it was the huge fanaticism attached to his early years in the work. He was like Prince in the way that he was both a cult artist and a famous artist at the same time. Which is a kind of unique thing. That fanaticism that followed him through Ziggy and beyond, that was all pre-internet. Things couldn’t just explode into Twitter and all of a sudden everybody knew about them. There was something about finding him and I felt that in the movie. When I’m watching it, I feel like you’re asking me to find Bowie as I’m watching it. I’m discovering him. Even if I know a ton about him already, what you’re getting at is an essence as opposed to, as you were saying, a biography. A sense of him.
Brett Morgen: The film is constructed so that if you know everything about Bowie that one can learn, then you’re filling in the blanks. Hopefully it’s never boring, because it’s not about that. It’s not about information. So the information that you bring to the table just fills in the existing narrative. If you know very little about Bowie, I think you leave the film with a deeper understanding of who he is. If you didn’t really get him, I think the film does help. I think that there’s a level, and again this is true of all art but particularly true of this, that because it’s not about a person named David Jones it’s about an idea of Bowie. If you know nothing about Bowie, you’ll leave the film hopefully having learned something about yourself or something practical and useful that you can employ in your own life. The questions that Bowie is asking in this film are not questions that one generally is confronted with in a music documentary. It’s not whether we should do four bars or two, it’s how do I make the most of each day. Whether you’re a day laborer or in the creative field, that is applicable to our existence.
Awards Daily: I would think that because Bowie was such a visual artist on top of being a musical artist that it gave you a lot to play with. I imagine that on one hand that was great, on the other hand how do you pick? I can imagine picking what to put in being potentially really challenging. It seems like you could make six versions of this movie and not use any footage again.
Brett Morgen: I didn’t see it that way. There weren’t many times where I had multiple options for a moment. In fact it felt like that almost never happened. Maybe for songs I could use this song or that song from a particular performance. There was an enormous amount of material to go through but there was not a lot of observational footage shot of David–very little. So yeah there’s a lot of performance moments to pick from but outside of that it was somewhat slim pickings to me. I could construct my own images more than half the time. There’s David in the 1970’s. He’s in the Pennebaker film and he appears in a BBC documentary Cracked Actor. That’s all of the known images of David up through 1978. And some music videos and some film roles. When it came down to him saying I’m moving to Los Angeles, there was no footage. There was no footage other than this film Cracked Actor and I was drawing a twenty five minute sequence. There wasn’t, no. It was the opposite. It was wow we don’t have any footage of David sort of being depraved in L.A. so how are we going to get there? Because it’s in the script, I need this sequence to help me get from here to there. That’s where not only was there not a lot of footage, there was no footage. Through sound design and montage, we had to create an experience of David in L.A.
Awards Daily: Bowie was known throughout his career as being someone who changed characters and put on personas. One thing I think is particularly lovely about your film, and this is something I’ve often thought of myself, is that towards the end of his life, the most fascinating Bowie character was just Bowie himself.
Brett Morgen: That’s true. He became David Jones the older he got. If the film went forward, it would just be repeating the final stanza which is that throughout the film we watched David throw himself into the fire to create his art. Until he finally worked through some issues and found a way where he could create art without putting himself in harm’s way, in fact from the safety of a home. That’s why the film ends where it ends. It’s not to suggest that the last twenty years of his work were insignificant. They were wildly significant. The way he constructed them was completely different and very much of the same orientation.
Awards Daily: Even though your film is constructed in this unusual way it’s almost like it accumulates as you’re going along. You’re catching all this amazing artistry and beauty and then you realize oh yeah he’s also a guy who fell in love and did the things that all of us would want to do at some point in our lives.
Brett Morgen: When you break it all down, it’s sort of like The Wizard of Oz. The thing he’s searching for is right in front of him the whole time. It’s home. It’s really about a guy trying to find home.
Awards Daily: There’s that whole line of his about getting out into the water until your feet aren’t quite touching and that’s where you belong. I’ve seen that interview and I’ve always thought that’s basically the entirety of his ethos in a nutshell, which is to always be stretching yourself and if you’re too comfortable, you’re not really progressing. And I think that’s what your film conveys.
Brett Morgen: I share that same ethos in my work. Stefan Nadelman did the visual effects for the film. We’d been working together for fifteen years. We did Montage of Heck together. After we did Montage of Heck, some of the techniques that we’d pioneered or championed were incorporated into other works, often by Stefan. I’d done The Kid Stays in the Picture, and we’d created that specific look for that film and that was also wildly appropriated. I’m obviously…what’s that Who song? Every word inside my head someone else has said. I poach and steal wherever I can, but when it came down to working on Bowie, I told Stefan “Leave your toolkit at home.” This is the film that’s going to require all of us to step outside of our comfort zone. It was true of him, it was true of me, it was very true of the entire sound department.
I think it was particularly true for Paul (Massey), mixing the film. What I was asking him to do was way outside of his comfort zone. Paul is a ten-time Oscar nominee, and winner for Bohemian Rhapsody–the greatest master of his field. When we set the mixing tape, Paul would point out that all orientation when you’re mixing is in the front of the room, what happens in the surrounds is generally complementary support of the action onscreen. I kept trying to argue that there is no front of the room with this film, that there is no screen direction, that the experience of watching the film is as much what the film is about as the content. That experience was immersing the viewer in David’s art, wrapping it around their heads, bringing it off the screen and into the room. That was a fourteen month tug of war. I think Paul is as proud of the work he’s done as anything he’s ever done, and maybe a little more so because we all found ourselves in quicksand and in a situation that seemed out of our control. That’s where we knew we were able to do our best work.
Awards Daily: I found myself getting very emotional toward the end of the film. I’m even getting a little emotional thinking about it now. You know how sometimes a line that almost seems like a throwaway, something that you could easily forget, is the thing that sticks with you most? The line that got me that just hit me right in the chest was him saying “I’d love to do it again.”
Brett Morgen: I was about to finish your sentence for you, it does the same to me. At the time he delivered, if he’d said it at the beginning of the film, it wouldn’t do it. We just watched him live this incredible life. This isn’t someone who didn’t appreciate life until they got to the end. This is someone who had an appreciation for the brevity of life from the very beginning. One of the only really false things that I think David said in the film is at some point he says “The moment you realize you’ve lived more days than you have in front of you is the moment you can really begin to appreciate life.” I don’t think that was true of him. I think he had that appreciation when he was a teenager and, as he said, set about to have the most exciting adventurous life that one could have. And he did it. So the emotion we have when he says that is yes to a job well done. I get hit every time I hear him say that. I get real emotional. It’s lovely to know that he enjoyed it as much as we enjoyed having him.
Awards Daily: I can only imagine the greatest compliment anybody could ever give to their own life is just what he said, wanting to do it over again. That would mean that all the mistakes and everything, it all adds up to something greater. I think that’s the thing I always felt with Bowie. However slippery his lyrics might have been, however many changes he made in personas and characterizations and all that, the search was always the thing. He was not a destination guy.
Brett Morgen: It was not about the destination. It was always about the search. When I was at Cannes, I remember I did an interview. This was seven years working on the film. I was talking to someone and I said “You know, if I could, I would do it all over again.” Not because I think there’s a better film to access. But because the experience working on it was so rewarding I didn’t want it to end. I’ve never worked on a project that gave back as much as this did. It’s been incredibly rewarding. If no one showed up to see the film, I would have had the same feeling. The fact that the film has been so well received across the globe, just has made it that much more satisfactory and vindicating this idea of believing in oneself. If it works for you as an artist, you hope you trust that it will work for someone else, that it will somehow connect.
Moonage Daydream will be returning to theaters in early December, Filmgoers can look for screenings near them on the film’s web site.
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