For Brett Morgen, a dyed-in-the wool Bowie fan from his teenage Golden Years, the journey towards documenting the star’s life began back in 2007 when he was approached by a friend at Sony BMG to make a film. “But he won’t do a documentary. He doesn’t want to look back. Can you come up with a pitch for him that would sort of be a non-documentary documentary?” the Sony exec asked, Morgen recalled.
“I came up with a really insane pitch that sort of imagined he never evolved after Ziggy Stardust [one of Bowie’s many personae]. And it was modern day Berlin. And he was playing to the last four people on Earth who gave a shit about him, and a cabaret at like two in the morning on a Monday,” Morgen continued. “And then there was this second section of the film [where] David and I would go to Japan to promote a very traditional talking heads documentary about him. And we would show clips of it at the airport. And then David would go and wander around Asia, walk into Chinese opera and kabuki and see scenes from his life.”
Despite his plans receiving verbal approval from Bowie’s manager Bill Zysblat, the star couldn’t commit to the project for health reasons.
Fast forward to 2015, and Morgen had made his Curt Cobain: Montage of Heck, about the legendary (and tragic) Nirvana front man. After a screening in Austin, Texas, the Rolling Stone journalist David Fricke commented how the film was as close to the real experience of seeing Nirvana as one could get, Morgen pointed out. “And something went off,” he continued. “I realized that what I’ve always been interested in is texture and experience and trying to capture everything you can’t put in a book in a film.”
So he created the IMAX music experience as a medium for the perfect marriage of Sound and Vision, and had another meeting with the CEO of Sony BMG, who had been eyeing up the idea of profiling massive pop icons. “I mentioned what I was interested in. And he said, you know, this is 2015… this is where our industry’s going right now, the convergence of music and image. And our greatest growth is in YouTube. And he signed up for 15 films. And the idea originally was we’re gonna do one a year. And so we started talking to bands and everyone seemed very excited.”
But then, on January 10 2016, Bowie died. Morgen was as devastated as the rest of the planet and in a renewed conversation with Zysblat pitched the idea for the IMAX music experience.
“He said, ‘you know, most people don’t know this, but David saved everything,’” Morgen recalled of their conversation. “’He’s been collecting his archives for the last 30 years, but he never wanted to make a traditional documentary’… And Bill said, ‘you know, it sounds like you may have the perfect vehicle, a platform for doing something.’”
“The only thing he said to me was ‘David is not here to approve this film. So it’s not gonna be David Bowie on David Bowie, it’s Brett Morgan on David Bowie and you need to embrace that.’ And so I started the journey.”
But that journey was, at least initially, along a rocky road. Yes, he got approval from the Bowie estate, which entailed assessing and digitising 5 million assets, which completely blew the budget. And then, almost a year to the day after Bowie’s death, Morgen had a massive heart attack which put him into a coma.
“Coming out of that was like, what if I had died that night? What was the message to my children? And it was, ‘work hard and you’ll end up, you know, with a heart attack at 47.’ And at, at the same time, I’m ingesting all of Bowie into my brain. And I realized that through him, I could create a roadmap to give to my children a satisfying and fulfilling life in the 21st century. And that was to be the film that I would make.”
“I don’t know another musician that would’ve offered that up,” Morgen adds. “So David became a nurse, a muse, a companion during the pandemic.”
Morgen then explained the rationale behind his approach to the doc. This was never going to be a documentary with talking heads and a rehash of footage we have seen a thousand times before.
“With Moonage, I was definitely interested in creating a non-biographical experience,” Morgen said. “With Bowie, it was perfectly suited for that because David Bowie is all about projection. The secret to Bowie is never in his songs. He’s not singing about anything in particular. There’s consonants and vowels and sounds. And we extract our own meaning and interpretations from them. And we’re usually synchronized in them. I like to say Bowie is best experienced rather than defined…And that was really critical in terms of how to design the film, which is [apply] the sprinkles and let the audience fill in the blanks.”
He added how, “we received bodily assets from the archive, but that wasn’t enough. We needed to make sure we had every piece of media in the world. And for that, I turned to Jessica Berman Bogdan. She’s been my archivist for 25 years. We’ve made every film since The Kid Stays in the Picture (2002) together. She’s the only person who’ll work with me film in film out. And she’s amazing. And, um, leaves no stone turn. And so we were sort of have a two-tiered soul.”
And given Morgen’s reputation for perfectionism (he himself stressed how he is a “glass half empty person), when did he know that enough was enough on Moonage Daydream, interviewer Chang wanted to know.
“It’s over when it’s on HBO, like when it’s streaming…I will probably go back and continue… I’m going back to colour correct again next week,” he answered. “I called Paul [Massey, film music mixer] recently and was like, ‘hey, we’re going to fix some stuff in the 12.0 (sound level). And he’s like, ‘it’s over.’ And I’m like, ‘it’s not over until it’s in theaters.’”
Morgen also confessed that he had “mixed feelings” about presenting the film during the Cannes world premiere. “It was so personal and it was like my little thing, and I kind of wish I could have kept it that way for a little longer. Not that I left no stone unturned. Just the experience of sitting with David Bowie’s image and voice for the past five years was just the greatest experience I’ve had.”
