Brett Morgen on “Moonage Daydream”

Editor's Notebook

Aug 9

Brett Morgen is the director and editor of Moonage Daydream, a kaleidoscopic immersion into the music and persona of David Bowie made for IMAX theaters and now streaming on Max. The film is nominated for five Emmy Awards including the categories of directing and editing. Rolling Stone’s reviewer wrote, “It’s a groundbreaking approach to the music doc. There’s no narrator, no talking heads. It’s just a montage of Bowie footage, interviews, and various versions of his music, remixed by Morgen into a constantly shifting rush of sound and vision.”

Morgen has a distinguished career as a director for over 25 years. His films include The Kid Stays in the Picture (directed with Nanette Burstein) about the maverick Hollywood producer Robert Evans; Crossfire Hurricane about the early years of the Rolling Stones; and Cobain: Montage of Heck on the life of Nirvana’s singer. Morgen has seldom had an editing credit on his films, but this time he had no choice, as he explains in this interview with Pure Nonfiction host Thom Powers.

Powers: Am I right that you became the editor of this film out of necessity?

Morgen: Yeah. As a producer, I had done a deal with BMG in 2015 for a series of 15 films, IMAX music experiences. At the time, they were intended to be 40 minutes in length and the budgets were locked, but we didn't know the subject.

When we settled on Bowie, I went with his archivist to their facility in New Jersey. It was the most expansive archive I've encountered, probably five times the scale of the Rolling Stones archive. That took two years to import and then to digitize. We ran through our entire budget - except for a sound mix and color correct - before we began editing, just trying to digitize the footage. So I had no money to work with an editor. I was planning to co-edit, as I did with Montage of Heck. But when you're a co-editor, there's a big difference in terms of time commitment. Now as the sole editor, if I wasn't working on the film, the film wasn't moving. Given how complicated the film was, it added a tremendous amount of anxiety and stress.

Powers: How did you begin to process that wealth of content?

Morgen: My process has stayed the same since The Kid Stays in the Picture. The first thing I do is book research. I read everything I can on the subject. That provides a context for when I'm going through the footage. When I'm watching footage, my notes are really about how I'm experiencing what I'm seeing. You only have that first chance to see something fresh. Now, with Moonage, knowing that we were finishing in IMAX, I was pulled towards footage that was originally shot in 35 millimeter. At the same time, some of the materials were VHS dubs of dubs. I felt the need to screen everything, even if I knew I couldn't use it in the finished film. It was all background on David.

Powers: In this process, who did you have to answer to? As the director of a biography, sometimes you're reporting to a producer or the estate or someone that you want to please, either contractually or just spiritually.

Morgen: Well, the good part of my deal with BMG was that I had the final cut and I didn't have to present anything to anyone. The other fortuitous thing was that there was no delivery date. Once I came in as an editor, we were three or four years into the project. At that point, there was so much invested I was going to just see it finished, however long that took.

There was no one to report to. We were in a pandemic. We couldn't post things online because of the agreements we had with the Bowie estate related to the sensitivity of the materials. There was no one to screen for. I don't say this in some sort of heroic way because it was really kind of awful to not have anyone to talk out an idea before you execute it. With editors, you share an idea or realize we're gonna hit a cul-de-sac. In editing this film, I had to get there on my own.

The most absurd part of the whole edit was when I had done the scene right before [Bowie’s wife] Iman gets introduced. I needed a line to connect the two scenes. I spent 26 days coming to work every day, trying to figure it out. The answer ended up being a Bowie line, “Then I met Iman.” I felt so small in that moment. I remember thinking, if [editor] Joe Beshenkovsky had been here, this would have taken 2 hours.

Powers: There's a lot of bold choices in the film. And given that you didn't have to answer to someone, how did you gain the faith that you could just go for it?

Morgen: Well, I think there's a couple of things that contributed to that. One, I spent a year on the script before I went to the edit. So I had the song playlist worked out. I had the scenes which dictated the scene structure. I didn't know shot to shot what would happen, but I had armed myself with a set of rules and materials that I would use to tell this story.

There were two big decisions from pretty early on that really impacted the day to day. I decided that I would use images of the art, films and artists that David was inspired by as part of the vocabulary of the film. And I would never put a chyron on explaining what it was from. It was meant to be part of the melting pot of the film. That was partially inspired by the way that David presented culture. He was a culture vulture. For a lot of us, he was an introduction to Bertolt Brecht and various other artists that he was interested in. He was the conduit.

I also knew - and this is going to sound crazy given that there were millions of assets - that there was also a shortage of documentary footage of David off the stage. He only participated in two [observational documentary] projects: Cracked Actor and Ricochet. Besides that, he rarely let himself be filmed. I knew that despite all of this material, I was still challenged.

The second thing that really had a massive impact was this idea that the whole film was essentially “Bowie” in quotations. It wasn't David Jones [Bowie’s birth name]. The biography was about Bowie, that kind of aura, if you will. And by that token, everything was performative, everything was performed, which doesn't make it disingenuous or not honest - by Brechtian standards. Once I accepted that, I was able to look at all of his film roles as not David performing, but as a document of a moment in time.

Powers: There's footage of him traveling in Asia that comes up a few times. Can you talk about those pieces that you use more than once in the film?

Morgen: Bowie talks a lot about happy accidents. And one of the things I had to learn late in my career was to be intuitive and just let things happen. I knew from conception, the film was not going to be linear and it was important to disrupt that time flow. So in the first 10 minutes I started cutting to stuff from Ricochet from 1983 while he's singing Ziggy [in the 1970s].

Powers: Can you explain what Ricochet is?

Morgen: Ricochet was a 1983 travelog that David commissioned following him around Bangkok, Hong Kong and Singapore. He completed the Serious Moonlight tour and he had nowhere to go. He didn't want to finish. He was having such a good time. They were supposed to finish in Auckland and he said to his manager, “Listen, why don't we go to Southeast Asia? We'll use the proceeds from those shows to pay for this [documentary].” It’s such a disregarded piece of Bowie media that it's been out of circulation.

Powers: Was it on television?

Morgen: It was back when they did direct to VHS. I think it was like 50 minutes long. I came across Ricochet at a point when I knew that Moonage Daydream was very much about a wanderer, a seeker. I came across only a small piece on YouTube. And I called the estate and I was like, “this is the Holy Grail.” And David's executor was like, “What are you talking about?” I think he was deeply concerned. And I was like, “No, you don't understand. This is the only footage in existence that captures this thing that I'm trying to present.”

The film was originally shot in 16 mm and they only had a three quarter inch video tape that was horrendous. Our archive researcher Jessica Berman-Bogdan ended up finding the 16 millimeter A and B negative, mislabeled in a vault in London. So it had been lost since ‘83, ‘84. That was an incredible discovery.

Powers: Jessica Berman-Bogdan has been doing this for many decades. Can we take a minute to sing her praises?

Morgen: Jessica is the only person who's worked on every film I've done since The Kid Stays in the Picture. And god bless her. If you've worked with me, you know that's a challenge. We have a shorthand at this point. She’s sure to find me every piece of media in existence on the subject at all costs - beg, borrow, or steal, no matter how hard it is to find. She shares the excitement and she's relentless. She has incredible integrity and is so well loved within the community.

Powers: You described that you were guided by the specific idea of David Bowie as a searcher. How did that inform the selections and exclusions you made from such an extensive archive?

Morgen: Most of those decisions were made while I was working on the script. And the background of the script was the playlist. The songs were selected because they all relate back, in one way or another, to themes of impermanence, transience, chaos and fragmentation. Or they were constructed using those techniques. It was helpful in editing that I could throw things in without feeling they had to be permanent. I could experiment and get used to what worked.

You were asking earlier about why there are repeated shots. Part of that was theoretical, philosophical, this idea that time – and David’s journey – is not linear. He would come back to ideas and themes repeatedly. It was almost like he was having a dialog across time. So the idea of using elements repeatedly or out of order spoke to that.

The image of Bowie on an escalator - which I used during the Ziggy section and then years later - that was a situation where I was auditioning the material in different parts of the film. “I like it here and there. I don't have to make a decision now.” As I started to get towards the end of the production, my wife [and executive producer Debra Eisenstadt] kept saying she was really annoyed by the repetition. It drove her crazy. She’d say, “When are you going to get rid of that escalator shot?” But I was emboldened by this idea that art is imperfect. On all of my prior productions, I was attempting to be a virtuoso. Everything had to be in its exact alignment. With this one, again, it was part of that embracing the Bowie-ness and this idea that it's okay.

The best example was the biographical information. I had this 44 page editorial manifesto that I wrote during the writing process for myself. And the first line was no facts, no dates, no timestamps, no biographical information. I knew that if I mentioned one thing, it would open the door to everything. So, if you say Brian Eno, now the question is, well, why didn't you mention Tony Visconti? Why didn't you mention Lou Reed? But the idea is if you don't mention anyone, the covenant is set with the audience.

Then I began editing a section where David goes into his family back story. I felt if David's spending so much time talking about alienation and isolation, I want to give the audience some context to where that might have been born. But I realized that I was breaking my own covenant. I had awful internal struggles with myself because there was no one else to talk to. But this feels right to me in the moment.

Then, of course, the first review of the film is by David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter. And it was my worst nightmare because it was a review of the film I didn't make. He’s asking, “Why aren't there talking head interviews?” I remember reading it and thinking I opened the door for all sorts of misinterpretation of intent by diluting the covenant. But, at the end of the day, the film ended up really resonating and I feel like it was a great lesson.

Powers: I want to ask you about montages. There are many quick cut sequences where you're mashing up lots of different source materials - old horror films, TV commercials, random bits of pop culture. The average audience member will register some and others will go by in a blur. What is your philosophy around those montages that not every audience member can possibly take in?

Morgen: They're not supposed to. In fact, when we were at the color correct, a shot would come up on the grading and I’d say, “What's that?” And the technician would say, “I don't know.” It would be one or two frames left over from some weird thing. And I'd leave it because it was serving a purpose. It belonged there for a reason. Again, nobody, including myself, is supposed to identify the reference points across the board. It's not designed that way.

The quick rapid shots are about a mood, a vibe, a feeling. I'm trying to communicate color or motion or something intangible that is only arrived at through the summation of three shots or the connection between two shots and a sound on top of it. So there is no right or wrong. It's really about feeling. In that sense, it's abstract art. I let the brush guide me and stepped back, reflected on it. And I felt it was right.

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