David Bowie documentary director Brett Morgen: ‘I nearly died making this film’

Moonage Daydream – made with hours of unseen footage – is every Bowie fan's dream. But for the man who put it together, it’s a lifesaver

Nearing the first anniversary of David Bowie’s death, Brett Morgen was in the research stages for Moonage Daydream, his labour-of-love documentary about the singer, when he almost died himself. Making the film, which has its world premiere on May 23 at Cannes, was meant to be a dream come true for the director, who discovered his music in the early 1980s. “I don’t know what came first, puberty or Bowie,” he admits.

In late 2016, he was granted the full blessing of the Bowie estate to fashion precisely the film he wanted, meaning final cut with no interference from anybody, and was presented with something like five million assets (audio and video clips, photos, memos, etc) from Bowie’s personal archives.

Then, on January 5, 2017, Morgen was blindsided by a massive heart attack. “I flatlined for three minutes,” he explains, “and was in a coma for a week. I was 47, which is relatively young, with three children, but my life was out of control. There was no balance. I was completely work-obsessed. Coming out of that experience, into David’s work, sort of taught me how to live. I can’t separate making the film from what’s there in it now – it’s my resurrection.”

Ten years earlier, Morgen had met Bowie at his office in New York, and discussed the possibility of what he calls a “hybrid non-fiction film”, to release some of this avalanche of footage for the first time into the wild. Bowie didn’t want any kind of trad documentary at that time, but was looking for a creative way of exploring the archives. Morgen’s pitch would have entailed 50 days of extra shooting, though, which Bowie, who was entering semi-retirement, opted against.

After Bowie died, Morgen contacted the estate once more, dealing mainly with his business manager and executor Bill Zysblat. His new idea for what he calls “a visceral, sublime experience”, tailored to a state-of-the-art, 360º audio environment and IMAX, seemed to align with Zysblat’s intentions, and also won the approval of Bowie’s family. The sole condition for this carte blanche, never before given to anyone, was to respect their privacy when the film was made public.

Bowie is best experienced – not explained: a still from Moonage Daydream

Morgen has deep-delved before into such subjects as the infamous Hollywood producer Robert Evans (for The Kid Stays in the Picture) and the life of Kurt Cobain, for 2015’s Montage of Heck. He was determined from the start that he wasn’t going to dabble in biography for this one, or resort to a single talking head. “It was never going to have interviews. This is a movie about ‘Bowie’ in quotations, definitely not a biography of David Jones. Bowie is best experienced – not explained.”

Instead, he has made a film about what Bowie means to us all. “I had a 48-page manifesto that I wrote before I started editing, which were all of the rules to construct this film. And one of them was no facts, no dates, no biography. The idea of no biography is that it allows you to project your own story onto the screen. There’s a great interview Mick Rock did with David, three months before Ziggy Stardust came out. David’s like, ‘Oh man, it’s a gas – I just say ‘spaceman’, ‘ray gun’, and they fill in the blanks!’ That’s the beauty of Bowie.”

Finding this film’s through-line meant zeroing in on particular ideas Bowie had about the cultural anxiety of transitioning from the 20th century into the 21st. “David states it – he says, ‘My through-line is chaos!’ The chaos he created through cut-up lyrics was an incredible commentary. He was creating the soundtrack for the world we’re living in today. And understanding that. So, gender fluidity. It’s part of that. And spirituality is part of that. And the cut-up process is part of that. And not changing, à la the 1980s, is part of that. So it’s all related back to that through-line.”

David Bowie during his 1974 Diamond Dogs tourCredit: Getty

All the songs Morgen chose to include, out of the 400+ Bowie recorded, had to feed into that concept in some way, though he’s well aware that Bowie’s rabid fanbase will be itching to know what unseen footage has made it in. “My tales from the crypt! I watched every frame of every show. I wanted to liberate some items. But only if it made sense – I was never going to make a detour just to get something in.

“I will say this – and this will be of some significance for Bowie fans. I made a decision, partly because of IMAX and the need for high-end visuals, that I could not use performances unless I had the camera outs [ie, the complete footage from all cameras]. That’s why Starman is not in the film, because I would be taking a clip from a TV show.” It’s also why there’s nothing, say, from Bowie’s 2000 Glastonbury set. “Because Glastonbury won’t license the original footage! I’m a filmmaker – I have to make it my own.”

There are whole shows Morgen has had the great privilege of sitting through, alone, at his editing suite, including the legendary Diamond Dogs tour from 1974, and its follow-up, the so-called Soul Tour, when Bowie threw away his set-list and went back on the road. “I had no idea there was any footage in existence. And all of a sudden I’m watching this, and thinking, ‘How long is this going to go on?!’”

The quality hasn’t always met the threshold for these performances to make the cut, though sections have. (Devotees will probably want to keep their eyes peeled when Rock ‘n’ Roll with Me comes on.) How to salvage anything from the naff staging of the 1983 Serious Moonlight tour? “The secret was getting rid of the background dancers.”

Brett Morgan introducing Moonage Daydream in Las Vegas, April 2022Credit: AP

Because of the inventive remastering of all the audio material by Tony Visconti and Oscar-winning sound mixer Paul Massey, there will be further revelations – like Bowie “crying and hysterical”, on his isolated vocal track to the epic 1969 dirge Cygnet Committee, recorded when he was just 22.

Morgen was invited to Sundance to premiere his film, but decided to hang on and roll the dice for Cannes instead. Fittingly for the maker of a film called Moonage Daydream, he tells me repeatedly he’s freaking out. “When I got off the plane today in Nice, I realised, I have a shot in the f______ film of him getting off the plane at that airport. And I have so much footage of him when he came to Cannes in 1983 with Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence. I’m, like, in the movie now.”

Far from putting Bowie to rest, Morgen thinks we’re only just entering the true era of his greatest stardom. He has never been more streamed on Spotify. “There’s a famous Bowie line where he says, ‘We were creating the 21st century in 1971.’ And the world makes so much more sense, through Bowie’s lens, when you look at it today.”

Moonage Daydream is screening as part of the Cannes Film Festival, and will be released in UK cinemas in September