by James Mottram

Five years in the making, and the first film to plunder Bowie’s personal archives, this cut-up collage of performances, interviews and behind-the-scenes moments is, in the director’s own words, a “Bowie experience”.

Morgen, who has made films about The Rolling Stones (Crossfire Hurricane) and Kurt Cobain (Cobain: Montage of Heck) sat down with FilmInk at the Cannes Film Festival to unpack this remarkable work.

You just premiered the film in Cannes. How did it feel?

“Everyone’s been asking me if this was planned… but as they played the music, I started making a slow walk up the carpet. I don’t have anyone on my team, I’m by myself and suddenly, it kicked into ‘Let’s Dance’. And I lost my mind and danced for about four minutes on the red carpet. With the paparazzi [looking]. An exuberant display of just sheer joy of having made it there, after five years. Everyone in the [screening] room was watching it. So, when I walked in, I was greeted with a four-minute standing ovation for my dancing before the fucking film started! It was totally out of this world. Surreal.”

When did you first discover Bowie yourself?

“I don’t remember the moment. It was around the time I was going through puberty. I don’t know which came first – puberty or Bowie. He came to me at that age. And like most people who come to Bowie at that age, he had a profound impact on the way I looked at myself and the way I looked at the world.”

How did it feel being the first filmmaker to access Bowie’s personal archives?

“There’s definitely an aspect of liberation. I felt that with Kurt [Cobain], I felt that with the Stones. I screened every frame of Cocksucker Blues, all 27 hours, on a flatbed in London. Nobody’s ever seen this footage and I get to fucking put this into [my film!] It’s very exciting. I would say that with David, every second was illuminating. Those first two years, I never fast-forwarded anything. I watched every line cut, even if they were on VHS, from every show that they had in the vault, even knowing that I couldn’t use it for an IMAX film. I didn’t want to miss anything.”

Did you want the shape-shifting structure of the film to represent David and his many personalities?

“I try to fashion all of my films to sort of personify the subjects. And that applies to whether we use dissolves or straight cuts. [Morgen’s Robert Evans documentary] The Kid Stays in the Picture did not have a straight cut until the last reel of the film. Montage of Heck doesn’t have a dissolve. These are all weapons, tools in the toolkit, to communicate. Bowie, I infused it with a kind of chaotic visual style juxtaposing A plus B equals C. You know what I mean? It was like pure Eisenstein-ian montage. Which felt appropriate for David. It was almost like a cut-up approach to film. The film is not supposed to be about David. The film is supposed to be about Bowie.”

Do you think audiences will be surprised by your approach?

“I assume that by the time the film hits general release, people would have heard that it’s not a biography, that it’s something different. Genre plays a very important role in how we experience art. If you go to a comedy thinking you’re going to see a horror film, you’re going to have a weird experience. And if you go to a horror film, and it’s a comedy, you’re not going to know how to read it. So, genre is very critical for managing expectations. And the expectation, of course, in music documentary is that it’s biographical. This was my biggest concern from day one: how do I create this covenant with the audience? They can enter this space without someone standing up before the movie and saying, ‘It’s supposed to be this.’ And so, the first five minutes of the film were all about setting the palette and establishing the covenant with the viewer. The Nietzsche card that opens the film was very much by design – to tell you right from the beginning, this is not going to be that type of music documentary.”

You don’t really address Bowie’s fragile Station to Station period. Was there a reason for that?

“That’s so interesting. I saw someone say that in a review. This is how I deal with it. Okay, there’s no footage of David snorting coke or anything like that. When he goes to L.A., he says, ‘I want to go someplace where I detest it, because I hated it.’ I then do this montage, in which David is rambling on. And I layered over the intro to ‘Diamond Dogs’. I put together a kind of abstract montage of sounds. And a couple of shots of David. They were all meant to evoke a state of mind for being in L.A. and the tawdriness… there’s shots from Kenneth Anger films in there. That haunted me when I was 11 years old – Scorpio Rising, nine frames of that are thrown in there. It’s all this seedy underbelly that you can’t see, it’s just alluded to.”

Do you feel Nicolas Roeg’s feature The Man Who Fell To Earth got closest to Bowie?

“I think Cracked Actor is probably closer to him. For a performance. Ricochet he’s great in. I think of his movies as documentaries. The whole movie is about Bowie in quotations, it’s all performance. Everything is performance, everything in this film is performed. It’s not a biography. It’s about an artist. And I didn’t make a distinction between whether he was in Cracked Actor or Man Who Fell to Earth. To me, Man Who Fell to Earth felt like a documentary of David Bowie in 1975.”

Certainly, he’s an artist who never stood still. Was that something you responded to?

“I have a short attention span too. The film is about change, it’s about transience, it’s about fluidity, it’s about movement. It’s about the unexpected. It’s about not understanding, it’s about the mystery, and letting it wash over you. It doesn’t have to make sense.”

Do you see any artist today that comes close to what he’s done?

“I mean, I’m sure there are. People do different things. I can’t think of a comparable artist who is as intellectually engaged and as adventurous creatively. Someone said to me Madonna – is she the female David Bowie? Her stock-in-trade has been sort of the same from the beginning. If she did a blues album, and then followed that up with a fucking country and western album, I would think that was awesome. I think why David is so admirable… he cared what people think. But he was doing it for himself, he wasn’t gonna go into the studio to satisfy anyone other than himself. And it wasn’t to create hits. It was to spend that day working and collaborating.”

What Bowie material did you leave out?

“That’s easy for me. ’95 and beyond. I came to his later work through this project… I started really getting into ‘Outside’ and really getting into ‘Heathen’. And partially because I was so receptive and open to experiencing his work when I later came to it, I wanted to turn the audience on to that – that was one of my missions. I don’t want to lean too heavily in the ’70s. The problem is, from a storytelling standpoint, once David meets [his wife] Iman he plateaus. And there used to be an extra thirty minutes, but it felt like I was just showing how comfortable he had become. Once he meets Iman and launches into ‘Hallo Spaceboy’, I felt there was nothing left to say. Like he’s back. He found his form.”

Did you find it painful to cut the thirty minutes?

“Not at all! I have a rule of filmmaking, which is you have to kill your children. As a sign, as a declaration, I will cut out my favourite scene in the film. Just to kind of prove that it’s the sum of the parts.”

I thought you might include his appearance in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige

“I love The Prestige – the greatest introduction ever where he walks through the lightning.”

What does Bowie mean to music now?

“I’m probably the last person… I’m not a music authority of any sort. I can’t speak to that. I think Bowie’s the greatest artist whose walked the Earth while I’ve been alive. And I take all things into consideration – the full 360 of it. I don’t know anyone else who knew culture – and will continue to move culture as they’re no longer with us – the way Bowie does. Bowie is the soundtrack for today.”

Moonage Daydream is in cinemas from September 15, 2022

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