It’s seven years since David Bowie left this earth, and the musical and cultural legacy left by the White Duke is still undiscovered. He was always careful about his privacy and gave a relatively limited number of interviews throughout his career. Moonage Daydream (the title comes from one of the tracks on the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars) is an invaluable document for tracing his career and life through the different stages of his artistic evolution.
Brett Morgen was trying his hand at the not-so-easy task with the approval of the singer’s heirs. He’s an Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker (in 2000 for On the Ropes, he later tackled two rock legends like the Rolling Stones and Kurt Cobain). The film, distributed by Universal Pictures, is in theatres from Sept. 23.
Brett Morgen, the material in Moonage Daydream is outstanding. How long did it take you to view the archive?
About two years. Much of the material was owned by the family, but I also worked on external archives approved by them.
The hardest thing was finding the proper storyline. Bowie had so many lives.
When I work on these projects, I watch the material chronologically to find a line of demarcation. With David it was not difficult to establish it. He constantly declared it: chaos, fragmentation, transience. In an interview I did not use, he says critics are convinced that changes characterized his career. Still, it was always about transitions, in a spiritual sense first. When he wanted to change he did it to try something new for himself. In 1974 he was the most exciting rock star in the world. He decided to throw it away and reinvent the way he made music, without certainty, except to release one of his most successful albums. Bowie is an inspiration for how to be an artist.
Is there anything else you had to leave out that would have told the audience who David Bowie was?
No, I didn’t want to educate the new generation about David Jones. Deciding what to include was crystallized, starting with the performances, only those I could personally work on both on video and audio, an excellent filter to skim the material. When I found an unedited concert, I would edit it in its entirety to figure out which part would be most beneficial for my purposes. It was exhausting, but in the end, it was like being at a crime scene after going through Luminol: the blood traces were what was needed. After two years of work, I’m confident I used the 140′ I needed.
There are particularly missed artists. David Bowie is one of them. How vital would his figure have been at a difficult time such as the current global political, social and cultural landscape?
What I’m about to say might sound horrible to Bowie lovers. Still, I think artists like Harry Styles, and Billie Eilish carry on discourses they share with a large audience. Of course, they don’t have Bowie’s degree of experimentation, but today David would be 78 years old. He wouldn’t be able to speak to young people the way his 1970s incarnation was able to. But if you asked me if I would like to hear the music that Bowie would write at 79, I would tell you that it would be shocking to continue to discover his evolution. But it is also true that the message he left us with Black Star is that each of us is Bowie because of what he shared with the world throughout his life and career.