A version of this story about “Moonage Daydream” first appeared in the Guild & Critics/Documentary Awards Editing from TheWrap Awards Magazine.
Brett Morgen’s previous documentaries have covered such notable figures as Kurt Cobain (“Montage of Heck”), Robert Evans (“The Kid Stays in the Picture”), Jane Goodall (“Jane”) and the Rolling Stones (“Crossfire Hurricane “). . He tackles another titanic figure in “Moonage Daydream” for whom he spent years venturing through the late David Bowie’s exhaustive archives.
Rather than follow a standard biographical path, the film is structured as an aggressive and immersive IMAX-scale fantasy. She’ll probably learn something about Bowie, but mostly she’ll experience him.
This is a documentary about David Bowie, but it’s not really a documentary about David Bowie. It’s an immersion into the world of David Bowie, I guess.
Yes. To say “a documentary about David Bowie” would be to create a series of false expectations for the viewer. This was very consciously and deliberately done as an experiment in form to see if we could create something more than the standard musical biopic. I wanted to explore if there was a way to make a non-biographical experience that would ultimately lead us to a truth.
And to do that, you used an incredible variety of images.
Most people don’t know this, but David saved everything. And for the last 25 years of his life, he’s been coming into the office weekly, working with a filing clerk. But he had said: “I don’t want to participate in a traditional documentary.” So I came in (after Bowie’s death) and said, “Listen, I’m just interested in your file and I’m not really interested in the biography. I’m not interested in facts, I’m not interested in dates.” And what I didn’t realize then, because I hadn’t begun my deep dive into Bowie, is how appropriate that was for a movie about David Bowie, an artist who defies fact, defies definition, and is wonderfully mysterious.
What I love about Bowie is that the more I listen to David Bowie, the more I know about myself. I don’t get close to David Jones (Bowie’s real name). My films are not on the subject. They are bringing the subject to life through form and content that cannot be obtained in a book. Bowie is mysterious. He’s mercurial, he’s sublime, it’s hard to pin down.
He’s not the only singular artist you’ve made a film about.
I’ve had access to some of the most amazing minds in my life: Jane Goodall and the Rolling Stones, Kurt Cobain, Robert Evans, and Abbie Hoffman. And I love you all. They are all unique. But what makes David unique is that, for most of us, it’s part of human nature to hold on to our success. We all want comfort and security, and very few entertainment stars are willing to risk their fame to scratch a creative itch. And he did it over and over again.
(laughs) There’s a funny question that I hope you won’t ask me. I’ve been doing a lot of interviews, and my trigger now is when someone says, “Why Bowie?” I want to go out. How really? Is that a trick question? How is that even a question?
There is a moment in the film where Bowie talks about his attraction to fragments and chaos. I feel like I’m giving you a shot for the movie.
Yes. The most challenging part editorially was trying to create a sense of spontaneity in something I spent seven years massaging. And to do that and build the movie, I needed to dig deeper. I needed to go into the desert on my own and come back with whatever I brought. I used as many techniques as I could and methodologies that I had learned during my seven years of studying David Bowie. That means everything from oblique strategies (creative tools developed by Brian Eno and used in Eno’s work with Bowie) to some deeper kind of philosophical approaches to art. Like, no accidents, no bugs, just happy accidents that got me through the edit. I was constantly coming across something that was an accident and going, “Hey, that looks good.”
There’s a timeline in the movie, but sometimes you’re open to breaking that timeline. At first there are snippets of “Space Oddity” and “Life on Mars,” but then suddenly we’re on “Hallo Spaceboy,” which was over 20 years later.
It’s not a time-based chronology, it’s a hero’s journey-based chronology. So there are no timestamps on the film, no album titles, it’s an inner journey. It’s funny, this movie. You can let it wash over you, or you can sit back and say, “Where’s Iggy Pop? Where is Lou Reed? The few people who approach it that way, I always think, “If they knew that, why would they want me to take over precious IMAX real estate to have a talking head, ‘And then he worked with Iggy Pop… ‘?” I don’t understand maybe its Bowie needs to be explained, but me Bowie doesn’t need to be explained.
Read more from the Guild & Critics Awards/Documentaries issue here.
