A labour of love

Filmmaker Morgen endured a pandemic and heart attack while making Bowie doc

Nearing the first anniversary of David Bowie's death, Brett Morgen was in the research stages for Moonage Daydream, his documentary about the singer, when he almost died himself.

Making the movie, which premièred at the Cannes Film Festival, was meant to be a dream for the director, who discovered Bowie's music in the early 1980s. And he'd already won plaudits for his 2015 Kurt Cobain film, Montage of Heck.

Morgen had first discussed a “hybrid non-fiction film” full of unseen footage from Bowie's personal archives, with the singer in 2007. But Morgen needed 50 days of filming, which Bowie, entering semi-retirement, opted against. After Bowie died in January 2016, Morgen contacted the estate with a new plan. The singer's family allowed him final cut and gave him an avalanche of material: around five million assets comprising audio and video clips, photographs, memos and so on. The sole condition was to respect their privacy when the film was made public.

Then, on Jan. 5, 2017, Morgen had a heart attack. “I flatlined for three minutes,” he says, “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.”

Morgen's project is both experimental and pop — just like Bowie. “The only way to do it was to really embrace a lot of Bowie's approaches to art and creativity,” he explains.

The director spent two years watching everything before working out the film's shape. “How does one write a non-linear experience? I would go to work at 8 a.m., I would come home at midnight, get on the bed and cry. I felt so unworthy, and incapable of cracking it. And the immense pressure of Bowie, with my health at the time ... it was just daunting.”

When the pandemic hit, Morgen was stuck alone in his production office. “(David) was the best pandemic companion. To sit there and hear him talk about how to channel alienation and isolation for creative purposes. There was no network; there were no executives; the estate wasn't going to look at anything. Of course it was a lot of pressure, but it was also the greatest experience of my life.”