VIDEO EXCLUSIVE: ‘Moonage Daydream’ Director Brett Morgen On Cultural Significance Of David Bowie

Moonage Daydream is less a biographical film and more a door to understanding the iconic David Bowie‘s philosophy on life.

Director Brett Morgen recently sat down with uInterview founder Erik Meers to discuss the cultural significance of David Bowie.

“David Bowie came into my life when I was entering puberty. Well, I don’t know what came first – puberty or Bowie, but they both had a profound impact on transforming everything I knew about the world,” Morgen revealed. “For a lot of people, he’s served the role as a right of passage. He enters our lives at the point our consciousness starts opening up and we start curating around art. In fact, David was the first record I purchased that wasn’t my parents’. He had such a critical role in helping me understand that my differences were my strengths. There weren’t a lot of people in 1981 that were sending those signals out to me. He made me, and he made all of us, feel like we weren’t alone. If that was all he contributed to my life, that would’ve been enough.”

“But then at the age of 47, he reentered my life,” Morgen continued. “At that time, I was a workaholic. I never really grew up, I was kind of a man child. Suddenly, I met not the Bowie of my youth, but a Bowie who provided me with a roadmap of how I could lead a more balanced and fulfilled life. I watched every frame in the existence of David Bowie. If he’s otherworldly, I can tell you that looking at every frame, I never saw an unblemished moment in front of a camera. He was so intelligent and so present and even when he was speaking to a daft reporter and I’m sort of cringing, ‘This person hasn’t done the work. They don’t know who he really is.’ He would view each moment as an opportunity for change. He understood from the beginning the brevity of our time on Earth and he wanted to have the most adventurous life possible. Really what it is, is a curiosity.”

The director also shared the access that makes the film stand out from other works of Bowie.

“This was an incredible experience,” Morgen shared. “In 2016, the David Bowie estate granted me permission and final cut, miraculously, to access everything in their archives. We took that archive and went out on the road for the following five years and grabbed all other known media. For the past five or six years, I’ve immersed myself on a daily basis in the world of David Bowie.”

Moonage Daydream comes out in theaters on September 22.