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Shortly after going into production, the director suffered a massive heart attack and fell into a days-long coma.
It took an enormous amount of time to ingest that.
My films, up until this point, have been very rigidly cause-and-effect narratives.
I didnt anticipate during that two years how daunting writing a nonbiographical narrative would be.
I started to break that theme down into smaller units.
What happens when you dont move?
The 80s.But thats not a story.
Then I spent eight months trying to figure out how to script the film.
Did you feel obligated to include certain things?
But there was eight months of trying to write these ideas into a narrative.
There is an extraordinary piece of audio in the film in which Bowie calls himself a false prophet.
This is the blueprint!
in terms of understanding Bowie and what Bowie was consciously putting into the world.
And David goes, Ah, no, man.
I just mentioned a space guy in two songs.
The audience is going to project and fill in the blanks.
That was the key for me to understanding Ziggy and Bowie: projection and fill in the blanks.
Hes not really providing us with information in his music.
I throw 52 cards on the ground and its a fucking mess.
Bowie does it and youre like, Whoa!
So this can never be David Bowie on David Bowie.
It needs to be Brett Morgen on David Bowie.
That was quite liberating.
I called him and said, Im ready to show you the film.
He goes, Am I going to like it?
And I was like, Well, I dont think youre going to be selling too many T-shirts.
With this film, I dont think theres any way I could have blown up the Bowie brand.
But they were putting it at risk.
The film could have gone in any direction.
It could have been allTin Machine.
It could have been Bowie in the 80s.
It was anything I wanted it to be as long as it was my own expression.
They were risking something but at the same time empowering me to create a piece of art.
If nothing else, it was not going to be a corporate product.
You show him moving through Asian cities, hanging out with locals and riding these neon-lit escalators.
Where did that footage come from?BM:It was the tail end of hisSerious Moonlight Tour.
Theyd been on the road for eight months.
And David didnt really have anywhere to return to; I dont think he had a home.
And so he said, Lets do another run through Southeast Asia.
And Id like to make a film, sort of traveling through there.
Well use the proceeds from the concert to finance the film.
They hired a travelogue photographer to shoot it.
It was just David walking around Singapore, Bangkok, and Hong Kong.
Within the Bowie world, the inner circles, it was …
I dont want to say laughed at.
But put it this way: The film disappeared relatively fast.
It came out on VHS in 1984.
When I saw it, I thought it was the Holy Grail.
You suffered a heart attack right around the time you started working on this film.
I get so cringey with clickbait like, Director Has Heart Attack Making Film.
You have my assurances!BM:It was integral to the construction of this film.
Im not so method that I provided myself a heart attack so I could get myself into that state.
Fortunately, I was three minutes from Cedars Sinai.
I flatlined in the ER.
And then I was in a coma for a week.
When I woke up, I was not reformed.
The first words out of my mouth to my surgeon were, I need to be on set Monday.
He goes, Youre not going anywhere.
It happened because I was a workaholic my whole life.
I stress out over everything.
Very sensitive to criticism and bad lifestyle habits; it all led to a heart attack at 47.
So coming out of that, I started going through the Bowie materials.
I had never listened to interviews with him before.
The film was like a resurrection.
It was me learning how to live.
That was so specific to my condition and the pandemic.
I had written the film right before the pandemic and started editing right as we got into shutdown.
Now Im totally isolated.
Because of my heart condition and no vaccine, I cant be near another human being.
One problem: movie theaters are shut and I make film only to exist in movie theaters.
But from a narrative standpoint, it felt all very like the perfect environment to construct the experience.
Bowie is about light.
One is about someone for whom every day was a struggle.
And Bowie, I was just totally by myself.
It was finding my way through the darkness.
It was really about closing your eyes and finding your way through.
