Brett Morgen remembers the day he met David Bowie. The documentarian shared with Bowie and his associates the idea for a collaboration on a “hybrid experimental film,” when the artist began insulting his films. “I felt like he was being evaluated,” Morgen recalls. Then someone asked him what his favorite Bowie album was, “I told them I hadn’t appreciated anything he had done since 1983, and David said ‘Touché’.”
After Bowie’s death in 2016, his financial adviser, Bill Zysblat, remembered Morgen’s proposal and made him an offer. “We’ve saved everything,” recalls Morgen, “David never wanted to do a traditional documentary, so we didn’t know what to do with all of this. But maybe you do.”
That was the start of Moonage Daydream, the late artist’s interior monologue-style portrayal as a cosmic philosopher and glam prankster, combining old performances, previously unreleased clips and career-spanning interviews. That was probably one of several beginnings. For the director, the project became a five-year odyssey that includes a near-death experience, a train ride to New Mexico, and a radical rethinking of what it means to balance professional and personal.
“I wanted to give people a sense of who Bowie was,” says Morgen before taking a deep breath, adding that, in the process, “I lost my mind too.” With full access to Bowie’s archive, the director consumed every media file he found; that’s how he did it too Crossfire Hurricane (2012), his perspective on the Rolling Stones, and Montage of Hell (2015), about Kurt Cobain. Soon, everything related to Bowie overwhelmed him. His inner fan was in heaven, but he couldn’t find the common thread. And then, on January 5, 2017, Morgen suffered a terrible heart attack, was immobile for three minutes, and then fell into a coma for five days.
When the director woke up, everything had changed. “My life was completely out of balance,” he says. “I was lost and needed to relearn how to live and breathe.” As she returned to Bowie’s interviews, television appearances and concerts, Morgen began to return to what she considered a guide to living a more present life, how not to let time pass. What happens next is the “losing my mind” part: “I woke up one day and took a flight from Los Angeles to Albuquerque. Then I took a taxi to the train station and decided that I was going to travel until I cracked the code.”
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The director laughs and tells me, “I know it sounds silly, but it’s Bowie basics. Get out of your environment, get out of your comfort zone, challenge yourself. I just needed to get out of there.” It was during those days of train travel that he finally found the central thread of his Bowie film: transience. “You can filter each of his albums through that lens, and a lot of his artistic decisions,” says Morgen. “Usually people talk about the transience about him in terms of fashion and music genres, but it’s in everything: chaos, spirituality, gender fluidity, his approach to songwriting. From there, the script wrote itself.”
For Morgen, the estate supports his approach to the film as “experimental,” as if you were seeing and hearing Bowie for the first time. He also told me that he showed the film to “friends and colleagues” Bowie fans in November 2021, and the response was very positive. We’ll never know if the artist would have liked what Morgen did with the film or not, but according to the director, if Bowie was still around, he would tell him that working on this project made him appreciate everything he did after 1983.
For some fans, the lack of biographical structure can be frustrating, but Morgen’s film presents his best view of Bowie at a time when his words and work literally saved his life. “When you finish with Wikipedia, you get to the personal,” says the director. “I feel like Bowie taught me that. Maybe there are some things that his heirs don’t like to have in there, but when they gave me the final version, they didn’t ask me to change anything. From the beginning they told me: ‘This is not David’s film. This is David Bowie by Brett Morgen. Make it yours.’”