Moonage Daydream by Brett Morgen | Life According to Bowie

It’s a Cirque du Soleil show that kind of inspired the latest David Bowie movie. “I shouldn’t tell you that because you’re from Montreal, but I’m not intrinsically the Cirque du Soleil type…”, confided to me last week Brett Morgen, director of Moonage Daydreaman impressionist film about the life and work of David Bowie.

Marc Cassivi
The Press

Yet it was when Morgen saw Love of Cirque du Soleil, a Beatles show directed by Dominic Champagne in Las Vegas, that the idea of Moonage Daydream was born. “I went back to see the show the next day, he says, because it was like hearing the Beatles for the first time. »

In 2007, the American documentary filmmaker contacted David Bowie to offer him to play himself in a hybrid musical film, inspired by his universe. It didn’t work out – Bowie’s health was failing and the planned shoot demanding – but Morgen felt he had established a privileged contact with the artist and his team.

When Bowie died in January 2016, the filmmaker proposed to his estate to carry out an “immersive musical experience” project around his work. Bowie’s manager, now his executor, found that Morgen, whom he had met a decade earlier and who had just realized Montage of Hecka documentary on the life and death of Kurt Cobain, was the perfect man to carry out this ambitious project.

In 2017, Bowie’s estate gave him access to thousands of hours of unpublished and personal archives of this artist among the most influential of the past 50 years. Morgen worked for four years on this film – which is more of a sensory experience than a biographical documentary – including two years combing through the archives, then 18 months on the animation sequences and sound alone.

” After having done Montage of HeckI had no interest in making another biographical musical documentary,” explains Brett Morgen, whom I met on the sidelines of the Toronto International Film Festival, where Moonage Daydream was presented after its world premiere in Cannes.

He says he wanted to recreate an “immersive and hermetic experience”, like those he had known and loved in his Californian youth during his many visits to Disneyland. Bowie as a theme park? “David has become the perfect canvas for that. You can’t really understand Bowie with facts. You can’t do it knowing that he worked with Lou Reed or Tony Visconti. The beauty of Bowie is that he is an enigma, a mystery. I wanted to insist on this. »

The philosopher Bowie

As much Montage of Heckalso made of unpublished archives, could be summed up in the expression “Cobain by Cobain”, as much Moonage Daydream, it’s “Bowie by Bowie”. We hear his voice from beginning to end, off screen or on screen. There are no other speakers. Que Bowie, his drawings, his sculptures, his notebooks, footage of his interviews, his music videos, his films and 48 of his remastered songs, in studio and live versions.

“That was the starting point,” says Brett Morgen. The reason I wanted to make this movie is because I wanted to hear my favorite music on the best stereo in the world, mixed by the best sound engineers. »

I submit to him that his film could have been called Life According to Bowiemultidisciplinary artist of genius who said “hate to waste a day”.

Brett Morgen knows something about it. As he began working on the film, he suffered a stroke and was put in a coma for a week. He almost, literally, lost his skin there.

“I love David Bowie, man ! It came into my life when I was 12 and it blew the foundation of my belief system. And that was already enough to influence me more than any other artist. Then at 47, I took on this project, and reconnecting with Bowie allowed me to understand how I should live my life. My own religion – I’m Jewish – never meant much to me. »

Brett Morgen was not a fan of David Bowie before making this film. Like many, he was seduced by the early Bowie, Ziggy Stardust, the Thin White Duke, the Berlin period, then lost interest in it after let’s dancein 1983. Bowie admits it himself in the film: he lost track of his artistic ambitions in the 1980s.

“He got lost at sea,” recalls Morgen. But going mainstream was no accident. I think this will be enlightening for many Bowie fans: in an interview with [la journaliste] Lisa Robinson, five months before the release of let’s dance, he talks about his drive for commercial success as a social experiment. He wants to make it his playground.”

“Ahead of all of us”

When Bowie experienced this famous commercial success, he took a liking to it and got into the game of fame, he himself suggests in Moonage Daydreamwhich is also one of the highlights of the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spider from Mars.

“Like Midas in the Greek tragedy, he liked having the money, the notoriety and the absence of pressure to have to be creative at all costs, believes Brett Morgen. And he got lazy. He got lost. From 1984 to 1987, rather than satisfying his own artistic desires, he gave people what they wanted. He felt he had lost his soul, but maybe he needed that to get to the next stage of his life with [sa femme] Imam. »

I don’t know if Bowie was a philosopher, but the prolific and brilliant artist that he was, he always seemed ahead of his time. He was above all, believes Brett Morgen, particularly in tune with his time. “He was ahead of all of us! He heard, smelled, saw things happening that we couldn’t grasp. He was like a cultural anthropologist. He managed to capture the spirit of every moment. That’s why he liked to live in the moment,” he says.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone more comfortable, so comfortable in their own skin, age so elegantly and gracefully. ” Neither do I.

Moonage Daydream will be presented in theaters on Friday.