WTF with Marc Maron Podcast - Episode 1365 - Brett Morgen

Episode Date: September 12, 2022

Documentary filmmaker Brett Morgen likes to go into the deep end with his films. He never wants to repeat himself, or repeat any other docs for that matter. He wants his films to be an experiential, subjective expression, not a declaration of truth. All of this makes Brett an ideal director to tackle a subject like David Bowie, which he does in his new film Moonage Daydream. Brett and Marc discuss his work on other docs about Robert Evans, Kurt Cobain, Jane Goodall and O.J. Simpson, and Brett details the near-death experience that made him see the Bowie project differently. Sign up here for WTF+ to get the full show archives and weekly bonus material! https://plus.acast.com/s/wtf-with-marc-maron-podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Hi, it's Terry O'Reilly, host of Under the Influence. Recently, we created an episode on cannabis marketing. With cannabis legalization, it's a brand new challenging marketing category. And I want to let you know we've produced a special bonus podcast episode where I talk to an actual cannabis producer. I wanted to know how a producer becomes licensed, how a cannabis company competes with big corporations, how a cannabis company markets its products in such a highly regulated category, and what the term dignified consumption actually means. I think you'll find the answers interesting and surprising. Hear it now on Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly. This bonus do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies

what the fuck nicks what's happening i Mark Maron. This is my podcast. Welcome to it another day. I hope everybody got through the dark anniversary of our country yesterday, September 11th. Grieving people still from that. And I hope you're okay today. I hope you're okay in general, to be honest with you. We got some rain in Los Angeles, which is so fucking rare and so weird and so welcome. Like I lost my mind. I was hoping for a deluge. I was hoping for the type of rain where homes slide down mountains, where roads get washed away. I needed a biblical rain for LA. I needed the soil to be wet for weeks. But instead, it seems that the sky is not quite sure how to create rain anymore.

It's like, oh, you look at the sky here, and it's sort of like, do those clouds know what they're doing? Have they lost their ability to do what they're supposed to do? It's a very strange thing, what's happening in the atmosphere. But we did get some rain and it was amazing. And somebody reached out to me because I've been sort of rambling on apocalyptically about water. And somebody got back to me, somebody with some experience. I'll share that with you in a second. I would like to say that I will be at Largo here in L.A. tomorrow night

playing some music with the fellas and also doing some comedy, and I'll have Hannah Einbinder there doing some comedy as well, and Dan Telfer will be there, and me and the band. I'm going to do some of my simple three chord covers maybe four chords occasionally a fifth chord comes in and i also wanted to announce if you haven't noticed already that uh i i oiled my boom i oiled my boom that's not code i oiled my boom can you hear any squeaking you can't because i'm moving around i'm moving the mic around no squeaking went bought some wd-40 squirted the

proper places no squeakies yeah you're welcome those of you who are hung up on that today on the show i talked to this guy bre Morgan. Okay, so he's a documentary filmmaker. He made The Kid Stays in the Picture years ago. Kurt Cobain, Montage of Heck, he made that as well. Jane, the Jane Goodall documentary. He also made a doc called June 17th, 1994, which was part of ESPN's 30 for 30 series and he just directed a doc about David Bowie called Moon Age Daydream which I saw but this guy and I go back I couldn't quite remember the exact details after he had directed The Kid Stays in the Picture I think in the buzz aftermath of that he was signed on to do a show for comedy central and he clears up for me what it was and

what the situation was uh and i remember you know that he he had a certain swagger to him he still does but i'll be honest with you i went i've watched many of these things i think i've seen everything he's made actually and i believe that the documentary that he did for espn called june 17th 1994 is one of the great documentary films uh it was kind of a brilliant conceit uh given the assignment i will talk to him about that i'll talk to him about this david bowie movie which is a bit challenging and a bit interesting. It's a long piece of work. And it's all footage of Bowie talking.

Most of it is, I believe, his words. There's other things in it. There's a lot of montages of things he's done, bits and pieces. There's bits and pieces of things that moved him to do things. And it's interesting the choices this guy made because you know it took me a while to realize and to learn that documentary filmmaking is not journalism it's uh it's it's a it's a director's genre it's a you know you the director has a point of view and presents whatever he wants

to present out of the facts that you know he's pulling from there's a broad context and it's interesting what any director will sort of provoke in you with the way he's put together the facts uh or his interpretation of the facts and it was challenging a little bit, the Bowie movie. It was pretty spectacular. The family was on board. The estate was on board. So they got to use music. I think it's going to be some sort of big IMAX experience, which is great.

Bowie's great. But ultimately, it did make me look at Bowie in a different way, for better and for worse. it did make me look at Bowie in a different way for better and for worse. Humanizing is a, is a, you know, it's a double-edged sword. You know, when somebody is mythic or amazing or, or even charismatic, uh, once they become humanized, you have to reckon with that. You have to reckon with the realization that these people are mortal. They're just people. I mean, I do that. It happens to me all the time here. But obviously, I didn't have the opportunity to talk to David Bowie. So it's quite an undertaking. It was good talking to Brett about it. So here's what's happening here. The rain came and created this humidity.

what's happening here the rain came and created this humidity look i i hope for for happy endings but they're not real and i've been very apocalyptic about the water situation i've been apocalyptic about almost everything uh you know politics the the drug problem the water situation i think about it all the fucking time but i had to sort of try to understand what exactly I was thinking about. There's an entitlement to it where, I've lived in this house for a few years. My old house didn't have much of a lawn, but this house came with this beautiful

landscaped situation. And there's a selfishness to it, sort of like, well, I don't want to watch this die. I mean, I don't want to get depressed and watch it die. I don't want to watch this die. I mean, I don't want to get depressed and watch it die. I don't want to necessarily rip it all out, but that's probably going to be the right thing to do. But it's not, somewhere in my mind, it's like,

why is the environment fucking us like this right when things were getting okay for me and the house and this and that? Why does the world have to end at this inconvenient time for me and the house and this and that. Why does the world have to end at this inconvenient time for me when I'm just starting to feel okay about myself in my life for the first time? So this guy reaches out. Subject line, CA water situation from an expert. All right, great. Hi, Mark. Big fan.

I also happen to be a civil engineer with 20 years experience working directly for the California Department of Water Resources, Metropolitan Water District, LADWP, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. The agencies and utilities

that oversee L.A.'s water supply. This guy's on the inside. He's going to lay it out for me. I heard you discussing this topic on your latest episode, and I thought I would send this email to you while I moved to Tucson last year after 20 years in Los Angeles. We're in the same situation with water, and I continue to work on water projects all over the Southwest. All right, we're going to get some truth. Is there enough water for LA? Yes, but with serious changes needed okay southern california will have

to stop using water to irrigate landscaping wow okay kind of knew that i see no way around that very soon say goodbye to the green grass and lush landscaping of los angeles southern california will soon look like arizona and this is not this is not apocalyptic craziness he's saying because it was a desert to begin with if and when that happens in addition to a few other feasible water supply and conservation projects there would will be plenty of consumable water well beyond our lifetimes will Will you get a message from Gavin? Yes, but it will be to stop watering your lawn and plants. Not a message to only water a few days a week,

but a message that doing so will have serious consequences. I foresee in the next few years, each house business in Southern California will have a water limiter installed based on livable space square footage. You will get an adequate monthly water allowance exceeding will either result in heavy fines or shut off that will be the main dystopian change okay so then he says the main thing to worry about as always the people that don't care about

the situation and those that peddle fear instead of solutions. Now, I think that's maybe speaking to me. I'm going to take that personally. Sleep a little easier knowing there are plenty of smart people like myself, hopefully, that are working on sound science-based solutions. Scott. Okay, so here it is. Everything's going to be fine. You just got to dig up your yards, be fine you just got to uh dig up your yards dig up your current sprinkler situation and uh get rid of all of that and just sort of welcome back the desert if you've been to phoenix or tucson or utah uh that's where la is going just another desert town with the heat beaten down no more yards no more trees. I guess maybe the palm trees will be all right.

Probably more cacti. And there might be a little inconvenience in that you'll have some sort of giant gauge valve on your property that will allocate a specific amount of water to you and yours. amount of water to you and yours. And if you don't honor what it says, you will be fined or have to learn to live without water. So that's comforting. Just get

ready for the desert and get ready for your the big gauge out in the yard. Thank you, Scott. It's sobering, but I appreciate being sort of uh educated so that said um the rain came but not enough rain so look brett morgan i kind of you know i kind of you know i

went at him a little bit because I thought he could take it. And I thought we would have that kind of conversation because I kind of remember meeting him before. Moon Age Daydream, his new documentary, opens in theaters this Friday, September 16th, including in large format IMAX series, which is how I would see it if you can. And this is me talking to Brett Morgan. It's hockey season and you can get anything you need delivered with Uber Eats. Well, almost, almost anything. So, no, you can't get an ice rink on Uber Eats. But iced tea, ice cream, or just plain old ice?

Yes, we deliver those. Goaltenders, no. But chicken tenders, yes. Because those are groceries, and we deliver those, too. Along with your favorite restaurant food, alcohol, and other everyday essentials. Order Uber Eats now. For alcohol, you must be legal drinking age. Please enjoy responsibly.

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A fire, cyber attack, stolen equipment, or an unhappy customer suing you. That's why you need insurance. Don't let the, I'm too small for this mindset, hold you back from protecting yourself. Zensurance provides customized business insurance policies starting at just $19 per month. Visit Zensurance today to get a free quote. Zensurance. Mind your business. You see, I was just talking about that with my producer about these sanctioned docs that are pretty common in music and you know i've watched the zz top one i watched uh the leonard skinner one and i watched the clapton one that one you know that almost was i mean clapton's was the best out of all of the sanctioned docs because he sort of owns his own ship. But the other ones are just, it's like it's just a commercial or something

or it's a racing of time or vision. It's a marketing tool. Yeah, that's all, yeah. When Mick hired me to do Crossfire Hurricane, it was 2011, and he said he wanted to do something for the 50th anniversary, but what he didn't tell me was they were planning to tour in November of that year. And so ultimately I was making a promotional product. I just didn't know.

You know, it makes sense because they're basically marketing tools, advertisements for the product the band yeah i've been very lucky on on montage of heck and on moon age daydream the executors gave me final cut and um you know that's a huge risk because you're putting the whole brand if you think of it as a brand right um well they do certainly um uh duncan does you know i i did a movie about Bowie that he wouldn't sign off on. I had nothing to do with the movie. I just played an A&R guy. And I've talked to Duncan before, but they're very protective of that estate. with moon age it was the opposite where once I acquire the rights the executor said David's not here to approve the film right it's never gonna be David Bowie on David Bowie it needs to be Brett Morgan on David Bowie and you need to embrace that so from the very beginning it was one artist's interpretation of another and with no strings attached um and

full access to anything in the the the archive cobain's executive david burns gave me the same um permission and i remember when david when i had the first cut i called him up and i said uh i'm ready to show you the film and he said am, am I going to like it? And I was like, well, you're not going to sell any t-shirts. Yeah. You know, so it depends on what you're, you know, you're looking for. But I think in both cases, they were looking for something authentic. Right. And they rolled the dice, you know, that, that it would work out. Okay. Well, yeah. I mean, and also, I mean, they're, those two documentaries are, which you did both of are very different approaches to that type of film. You know, I mean, they're different.

I could see the seeds of what realizing the Bowie doc became in the Cobain doc. I have tried to make each film in my career like a theme park ride of the subject. Sure. So they're not really documentaries that are, Cobain probably more so than the other ones. Yeah. But they're all designed to kind of personify the subject. They're meant to be the act of experience. So Bowie is not a film about David Bowie.

It's a film that's designed to sort of be bowie it's it's it's the experience of bowie um from your point of view clearly yeah yeah what's interesting about that but wait before we get embark on the full what would have been interesting if i did from your point of view sure or i mean there is no way i mean obviously yeah your point of view but but there's no you know i had this conversation with bar with Barbara Kopel, you know, about the notion of journalism when it comes to documentary. And she was like, that doesn't exist. And that's not our responsibility. Yeah, I'm not a journalist.

Yeah. But, like, it was my misconception at the time where just because I don't know what's wrong with my old timey head that, you another there was some there was some that was the motivating force. But I know it's not true because we're raised in a generation that trusted Walter Cronkite. Right. Trusted the newspapers and documentarians were extension of that. So when we were coming growing up, documentarians were journalists. That's all that for the most part. I mean, there were exceptions, but that was generally how it was thought. And I think I've been doing this for like 25 years, and it's definitely still a part of the, I think, it's still, there's still an onus.

It's still an onus that when people are going to a non-fiction film that it's it's somehow fact based information based but even but it sure but like now you know given you know even the work of yeah I mean it's just a nature of even when I would talk to talk to my producer about studying photography that they you know in order to establish photography as an art form, they had to break it into two schools of thought, which were documentarians and artists. And,

and I guess also with, with film, I mean, you know, when you look at using reality or, or pieces of it, you deal with movies like, I would say a source for some of the stuff that you were doing is even like Koyaanisqatsi or some of those movies where you do have a montage with layers of music that you know is up to you we have bits and pieces of

found footage or footage of this or that to make a point but I think you know when you look at the Cobain doc you know that's sort of more traditional doing in that doc a fairly straight up you know talk to the friends kind of doc yeah that's true yeah but before we get into it though like i i saw doug herzog at that at the screening last night and and i asked him because like didn't we do a thing for come was it for comedy central we did a pilot um in 2003 i want to say right for comedy central called confessing it right based on eating it yes with pat and oswell um patrice o'neill i mean it's an amazing cast bob shimmel too right bob shimmel yeah um um moon unit zappa was on it. Me? You were on it?

Yeah. But all I remember is a couch. You were on a couch, yeah, on a set at Sony Studios in New York. Yeah. But the premise was tell the story and you were going to do the magic animation thing, right? Yeah, I didn't want to animate it. That's why I never got pushed forward. I thought the stories were so good that they didn't need to be animated and then they oh then they didn't want it no see

i i get there was the the comedy central wanted it to be your story is animated and we drift off in the animation but i couldn't take my eyes off the storytellers right sure i didn't and i didn't see there was any reason to do that yeah i thought it would be really kind of shitty and gimmicky so so it didn't get so that was it that was that was it so that so yeah i remember that i remember i remember the stage i remember big red couch yep and uh and i remember seeing shimmel and i remember people around there was no audience so no there wasn't on it we did one day without an audience and then we brought an audience in and i flipped the script so i had you on a white psych and then i flipped it to like um to i had another setup that looked like kind of that was designed like lenny the oh like a nightclub yeah oh okay so but that was right on the what was that that

was you coming out of the success of the kids in the picture yes yeah yeah which employed the uh the sort of like uh the the exciting zooming into still photographs and three-dimensionalizing them. Yeah, photo animation, yeah. Photo animation. That was the big thing. And basically that doc, because of the weird almost underground popularity of the audio book, which was being passed around. It was just, I remember it was on tape. And it was something that you could buy.

But people were passing it around like, you know, you can't get this shit. It was like two or three, maybe three or four cassettes of him talking. And it was like Satan. He was like Satan talking. It was like, I mean, it was just like listening to like,

just a devil that had the time of his life pat have you heard patton's impersonation yeah i remember him doing it back in the day he did a bit on it no he did okay uh bob but that film speaking of what we were talking about what we're speaking with earlier the first line of that film is there are three sides to every story. Yeah. Your side, my side, and the truth. Known as lying. Memories serve each differently or something. Yeah.

That was, for me, a massive political bomb onto the documentary, this idea of documentary as truth right right that was my kind of tna like there is no objectivity so the only truth can be subjective so embrace that wrap yourself around that and you're at least achieving possibly you you know, a not an objective truth, but a I think a something that's more truthful to Bob to revealing the character that's being. And that was something he said in his book. Yeah. And that was that the reason that you say, like, was that what made you say, I'm doing this guy? No, I wanted to do Bob because I wanted to make a documentary comedy. And it's really hard

when you're making a documentary unless you're doing it on a comedian to to create you know think about like in the history of documentary there's like hands on a hard body american movie yeah i mean there's a real handful of like comedies yeah i'm not even sure american movie you know set out to be that but it's really funny oh no it's great it's great but like you know ultimately it's it's rooted in a profound sadness and delusion it's most comedy usually yes yeah it's true the sadness being the point of view of the person and the delusion to think that they can make it as a comic but uh okay so i do remember you you did you did use that footage of him playing a lunatic yeah of his you know brief acting career yeah yeah to to pretty good uh uh use yeah that was uh that was

and the the photos in that were we sold that that film before we made it to Focus Features, the company that became Focus Features. So it was a documentary that was designed to go into movie theaters. And so we felt we had to do something different, not just talking head and what have you. Bob's, and also going back to the subjectivity, the idea of creating the distorted photographs were intended on one level to constantly remind the viewer that this is a subjective interpretation. This is Bob's, it's sort of a distorted truth, if you will. Well, that's sort of like that old French new wave trick of, you're watching a movie. Yeah, I mean, it was a Breck was a technique to pull you out of it and yet at the same time it serves to be seductive and sublime

so it's seducing you and draws you in yeah so right well i mean it had a profound impact but like but already so where do you come out of i mean you know what was to be the beginning of it because you know clearly with this bowie movie you know you've you've you've launched into some other thing that you know in in this in the sense that you know you you ultimately my feelings about bowie probably shifted watching it uh probably not for the better um interesting yeah and and but it seems to me though in talking about subjectivity what you you were doing with this subject was moving through ideas about time, art, death, work, love, life, and honesty. the way he did about things and also presented the way he did and evolved and changed the way he did it was it was almost a an amazing palette for you as somebody to explore these ideas uh the just i'm one of possibly the best canvas right ever yeah so like to me it's a transition into you know something that is uh i i guess it still falls within documentary but this is you know a

big movie about big ideas and it's you know specifically an art film really is that wrong well let's yeah yes and no i mean do we consider bowie's music art music or pop music and i think that what bowie did is he created art music that also has pop music like anything he created in the berlin period yeah is straight up avant-garde experimental music and his construction how he arrived there and the techniques he employed can only be considered if you will art well it's interesting because yeah right okay so you focused on that you're conscious of it so i had a conversation um early on after i got the keys to the to the archive and i flew back to new york and um i i sat down with bill zisplat who's david's um executor yeah was his manager for years and uh i said bill and bohemian rhapsody had come out, and I saw Bohemian Rhapsody 14 times the first 15 days.

The biopic? Uh-huh. Okay. I saw the sound in the movie theater. I was fascinated by the mix, and I realized, and you know, like Rocketman was coming, and I was like, look, we can approach approach this there's a way to make this film that is incredibly accessible like a jukebox musical you turn your brain off you just sing

the songs we walk the audience through the a through z of bowie's career make it very digestible and straightforward and we'll probably gross um a significant number for a non-fiction sure or we design and package it like bowie which is um which is a little more challenging a little more engagement um um but a little more experimental and bill looked at me and was like well that's your problem yeah and what i what i can't imagine that they're really concerned about making money right so what i realized in that shortly thereafter was the way to make the most pop or accessible david bowie film if we believe that david bowie's music is can be pop or accessible is to sort of mirror Bowie and and so

the Bohemian Rhapsody version for Bowie is hopefully Moon Age Daydream which is well that's interesting you know which is a Bowie film cannot be should not be um through Z Wikipedia. That doesn't get you anywhere. Or Bowie being played by anybody. Well, you had that. Yeah. Well, no, I saw that happen right in front of me. It's difficult. But, you know, oddly, you know, Johnny Flynn did not do a bad job.

No. You know, like Bowie is ridiculous. Yeah. And certainly at that point in his career, it was almost embarrassing. And like, I didn't really know that, you know, when I started doing that movie. I thought like, hey, look, nothing's going to, no shit's going to fall on me. He's the guy, right? But when I looked at what he was drawing from research-wise, it's ridiculous.

And even watching your movie, like, look, I stopped with him, but with Bowie, probably at Scary Monsters. And that came out in high school. And I might have, when I was in high school. And that might have, you know, and I might have checked back in around Let's Dance. And I did see him at Foxborough, you know, Stadium on the Let's Dance tour. But I, you know, I was so far away, it didn't have an impact. But when I was a kid, I was in it, and I had tutelage from an avant-garde musician in the town I grew up in, in terms of what Eno meant, what Hassel meant, what Fred Frith meant, what that world meant, and the residents, and this you know, in coming into what became that Berlin period and understanding some of that.

But ultimately, like, I'm still thinking, I just saw the film last night, your movie, and what it's doing in my brain around Bowie as an artist is surprising to me. People who know things like, if you know, if you have your own, you know a little bit about Bowie. A lot about Bowie. No, probably middle. Middle, okay. You bring that to the film. Sure.

And you fill in the blanks. Yeah. Ultimately, what happens in the movie for me is that, you know, this guy, and it happened a bit with the cobain one too is that you know whatever you're doing that you know you're in the way that you humanize these guys what you're up against is you know the myth versus you know this sort of weird fragile egos that they are and also the the sort of half-baked people that they are like you know with cobain it's very hard even in the shadow of the music and whatever the his wife is not to think that guy was kind of a dick who did not take responsibility for his personal issues and hurt a lot of people because of it and with

bowie you know it's hard not to watch and go like holy this guy was really a shattered kind of like nebulous person that probably couldn't function at all if he didn't have music that you know when by the time he leaves la for berlin it seems to me from all the footage and you can put it together yourself if you're a fan by watching that stuff is that he must have almost killed himself you know through exhaustion overwork drugs whatever the fuck it was by the time he gets to berlin he he had to have almost died in my mind does that does that track i think is 85 pounds when he right yeah so you know by the time he gets to berlin he's got no choice but to regroup somehow and to approach it honestly and and take that risk of sort of like, well, if I'm an artist, we're

going to have to figure this out because whatever that clown show I've been doing for however many records is not who I am and I can't continue it because it almost killed me. So then he aligns himself and collaborates and really gets his hand on the pulse of stuff. I think he's a very good intuitive cipher of stuff. But it seemed to me that seeing him talking in those pieces of footage about berlin was about as as honest as as i i ever imagined him capable of being my take on bowie from the interviews which is how I was able to access him, was for the most part that he was incredibly present and not shilling, sometimes deflecting,

not wanting to get personal. But no matter what, in any manifestation, he was present because he liked to be jarring too. This was my single greatest takeaway of David was that he viewed each moment as an opportunity for an exchange for growth. Yeah. And where really was illuminated was in the 80s when he started, you know, there was a shift between his interviews with rock journalists in the 70s who were pretty knowledgeable and knew his reference points. And then he gets into the mid to late 80s,

and suddenly he's being interviewed by Entertainment Tonight. And I would see the pre-roll before the cameras are rolling, and David is engaging with them. And he never condescended. He never looked down. He would talk to them about books he just read and trying to share stuff and it was like i was kind of in awe i was like why is he even talking to this person they haven't done their work i don't and um and that's where i just kind of honed in that it was like every moment

he made every moment mattered and it was most illuminated by seeing him with these really dodgy reporters and seeing how um he was there but he would when you're the when he was touring berlin i the character people like to refer to characters with david in the movie i don't talk about characters other than ziggy um someone asked me the other day what my favorite character was and i said well I don't know if this is an official character, but I like the professor. The professor was the character, if you will,

when he was promoting heroes in the mid 70s, who was a great intellect, who loved talking about chaos and fragmentation and Nietzsche and right and everyone you know and Einstein and Freud breaking down the the the fabrics of our and like he got off and this is why he's trying to sell heroes right and he said something there probably more poignantly than he did later at other points in his life but he talks about being a sort of cultural anthropologist

and putting a timestamp on the moment. He's not a futurist. Right. And what I started to recognize was that Bowie, and again, I think people tend to think he's a futurist. Like there's this interview where he's talking about the internet that gets put on social media every three weeks.

Right. He wasn't a uh futurist he was like a great artist more sensitive to what was happening now the rest of us just took a little longer to process it i understand what you're saying and i guess going back to what i'm saying is that like it seemed to me the reason i that resonated with me not not in terms of character was that it felt to me that it was the first time he was fully taking responsibility for his uh you know for his drive as an artist and and being collaborative in a way that was a lot more conscious and i also think he knew he was down for the count i think he knew that whatever he had done was done and like either he was gonna you know live the rest of his life playing those fucking 15 songs you know that were hits or he was going to take

a chance there was a vulnerability there of a guy who had like emerged from uh an experimental life and was going to take more responsibility over over what he saw his expression can i offer another path forward for that sure because you you suggested he would just play those same songs uh-huh or whatever I would say that what most artists do is continue to write new songs in the flavor and spirit of the ones that sold because they're trying to hold on desperately turning on to that success enough formula right and what Bowie did and what i think is so revolutionary about the berlin thing is he blew the whole system up yeah and he said i'm gonna i i'm not even gonna write songs anymore

yeah and i don't have a parallel for that it's it's it's it's it would be like james i don't know maybe christopher nolan a filmmaker who works with a huge ensemble, saying, I'm going to go make this other film with a camcorder by myself. It was so stripped down. And one of the things that's so remarkable about it is when we think about pop artists and we think about entertainers, we think about actors, we think about... And we think about entertainers. We think about actors. We think about there are so few when you have that success who are willing to risk it and put it all on the line and blow it up. And Bowie wasn't a joke. And he could have very easily written eight more albums and they would have sold great. And Lowe sold great, but he did it on his terms. And, and, and then, you know, talking about let's stands to me, one of the revelations when I was going through all this stuff is, so I were, I think the same age, but it was close to 57, 58. You're a little younger. I just helped you out. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm literally, I'm 53. Right. So, so scary monsters was my introduction. Right. I was seventh grade iners was my introduction. Right. I was seventh grade and punk-ish enough to think that Let's Dance, you know, was a bit of a sellout. And by the time

you got to the one after that, it was like this. I don't even know what this is. Yeah. When I was listening to interviews for the film, there was this great interview

with Lisa Robinson, great music journalist. And, and David, it was this great interview with Lisa Robinson, great music journalist. And David, it was pre Let's Dance. It's in the film and Bowie talks about how he's tired of people perceiving him as icy and that he wants to be part of the mainstream and that he wants to produce warmer accents and he wants to be more excited.

And so imagine this, Mark, 15 years into his career where most artists are retiring or playing the heritage circuit. He actually says, as a social experiment, now I'd like to try pop stardom. It's like a movement, like a Picasso movement. He's like, I've tried this, I've tried this, I've tried this, let's try this. Let's be a superstar. And then becomes the biggest superstar

in the world and then it becomes sort of a Greek tragedy in the sense that he just, he stayed too long. You know, he enjoyed the trappings of success.

Yeah, because that's where the turn, like it's sort of interesting. When he's saying like, I just love to be an entertainer. That was death. Yeah. That was the death knell like, it's sort of interesting. When he's saying, like, I just love to be an entertainer. That was death. That was the death knell. And it's funny.

My distributor was trying to put a piece on TikTok, you know, like a quick little soundbite. So they pulled that thing where it talks about planning for a feature. And I was like, yo, that is not supposed to be an inspirational right idea that was the moment bowie was dead yeah um and in fact in the film i superimpose as he's saying that a shot of him um looking at his self dead on the ground um i think the thing with, though, is he had to sort of get bankrupt, if you will. I don't think he would have arrived at that station if he had skipped out of Let's Dance quicker. If he'd done three years there and said, okay, moving on to the next art thing. I think that he wasn't gaining satisfaction through his work and he had right right and it was from that point

that he was like there's there's something that i'm missing i think i so i just i'm not an apologist but i will say this so when when when i met david in 2007 yeah um we i i met with him to talk about a hybrid non-fiction film not this something something different yeah and uh we met his office on 57th street we sit down a small little space there's four of us in the room yeah and you know how these things usually go you you go in for a pitch and it's a lot of you know people kissing ass or whatever and um and i sit down and david immediately launches into a a pretty harsh critique of my most recent film which was it was a movie called chicago 10 the animated movie yeah and I can't say he was entirely wrong in retrospect. But did you say, hey, we take chances. By the way, this is what was freaking me out. Because he starts, when I say he's ripping me, it felt very much like an assault.

And he wasn't caustic in it. He was saying it in a very polite way. I didn't care for that at all. And and he said, have you seen the the Weather Underground by any chance? And I said, the PBS documentary, the talking head one. And he goes, yes, I much prefer that one. And I was like, wow, that's really interesting because that's very kind of traditional and I would have thought you would have appreciated

some of what I was doing. And then his assistant who was in the room said, what's your favorite Bowie album? And I, coming off of a 10 minute sort of, I looked at David and said, well, to be totally honest, David, I can't say I've cared for anything you've done since Let's Dance. And David locked in on me and goes, touche.

Nobody has ever said, I mean, do you ever hear someone say touche in conversation? It's like you see it in movies. Well, I mean, one of the things that you really capture pretty thoroughly in this documentary is that he was a kind of a dork. capture pretty thoroughly in this documentary is that he was a kind of a dork and you know that there there is this sub this underneath thing underneath whatever the hell he's doing is this ridiculous mime and this ridiculous you know sort of posturing dance it's like well it's i don't know if it's a dork what it what i dig about it is he's not the greatest dancer he's not the greatest singer he's not the greatest actor he's certainly not the greatest mime there you go but he's not the greatest dancer. He's not the greatest singer. He's not the greatest actor. He's certainly not the greatest mime. There you go.

But he's putting himself out there and he's putting himself out there. You know, when the stones started... This is the price David pays for taking a shot at you in 2007. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let me finish that story, Mark. I'm kidding.

So that, you know, he said, I said, well, it's quite, I don't really appreciate anything he's done since Let's Dance. I hadn't heard anything he had done since Let's Dance. I was just being a bit of a dick. And David passes in 2016. I receive the assignment to work on this film. An assignment? Whatever you want to call it. I did. I hired myself to on this film. An assignment? Whatever you want to call it.

I did. I hired myself to make the film. Yeah. The time had come. So I start going through the catalog. I fucking love post-95 Bowie. I know you were... No, no, no.

The Tin Machine, I played the shit out of the Tin Machine. Like Heathens to me is like speaks so much to where I am right now in my life really

yeah I gotta give it a go you gotta give it a go listen to Heathens the Rays look the Day After and Dark Star

I got into I like Dark Star I like the musicians that he pulled together there he it was an inconsistent record for a death note, but it was okay.

I think what happened after Amon is, after the 80s, all of us who were fans pre-Let's Dance, I think a lot of people stopped paying attention. Yeah. He was at a much better place than he'd ever been. Emotionally. Emotionally with Amon. Well, that's the other thing I was going to tell you

is that you dug into that Terry stuff and I think it was important. And I think his struggle for, you know, against and with mental illness was a real thing. And I think that, you know, because of, you know, the nature of who he was and what he came from, both, you know, mentally and emotionally,

that he was really incapable of letting anybody in in a genuine way so by the time Iman comes you realize like well that you know he's finally you know figured out that you know life is beautiful yeah and in that and I get that you know and then I appreciate it and it was touching and I and it did you know in a less cynical way kind of saved the character of bowie for me in the film you know in a genuine way because i believed it yeah and and you know you you made that i could feel that i like that footage too of him with the 12 string guitar like clearly the grown-up kind of you know elder uh you know bowie you know you know playing the hits in a way that he could uh you know uh find palatable.

Yeah. What was that from? That was from his 50th birthday party at Madison Square Garden. That was something. Yeah, it was. It was really, well, you know what's interesting is I'm sure you noticed that the, this was one of my sort of, again, I had never prior to giving myself the job, I had never read a book on David per se.

to giving myself the job i had never read a book on david per se yeah and um david talks in the film about how alienation and isolation are a stock and trade but he never feels alienated yeah isolated and um uh during the 70s during the what i call the transit period post-Berlin pre-let's dance. I thought that, you know, because we introduced the biographical components with his family, that you recognize that he's sort of what you alluded to, that he's damaged and that he's running away from something. And I never thought of it like that. And he didn't present it that way himself. Yeah.

You know, he presented it as I'm on the move to gain experience. Right. Right. Like, it was never. Sure. We all rationalize ourselves. Right, right. And so I did find that kind of illuminating a bit in that because he was so insightful about his goals and objectives.

And I thought that was one area that he wasn't able to necessarily overtly connect to or maybe not want to discuss. Sure. Well, I think there is that element of him that is like kind of British. You know, that there is a lack of communication about emotions in all the games he's sort of playing like because you know he couldn't even admit that really that you know there's that one bit of uh of uh interview where you know he kind of mischaracterizes love and then kind of corrects himself later right no he says he says he can't love. No, it's a contradiction, I suppose. No, he says he loves love, but he cannot invite it into his life because he's too selfish.

Yeah, it takes up too much time. That's pretty honest. It's about the most honest thing I've ever heard. I mean, I wish there were more. There would be less divorces in this town. I guess, but that's also given whether or not you can express or feel love properly. You know, like what is the definition of that? You know, he clearly has some sort of,

like his, the way he holds his ground on stage is very interesting and it's unlike anybody else. That there's an intensity and almost a looking far and away kind of thing. That is in and of itself kind of distant you know he he's not needy up there no no i mean especially if you saw the 95 uh nine inch nails tour we had a piece of that right was it was that i had a little bit of Hello Space Boy, but that tour was where he went on stage and he only did three hit songs and he did them in versions that you can't even tell what they are for the most part. And was pretty much-

Was that Reeves on guitar? Yeah, Reeves on guitar. And by the end of those shows, there were half empty arenas because people were there to see Nine Inch Nails. Who went on before him? Yeah. Oh, wow. empty arenas because people are there to see nine inch nails who went on before him yeah and uh and um and he wasn't changing it up like he could have changed the set list yeah halfway into that tour but like fuck you yeah it's kind of fucking awesome yeah well let's go back now because like i think we've we've kind of like explored that you you know, in terms of like, you know, I like the way that they like the one thing that keep coming up that I kept trying to wrap my brain around because of the nature of how he died and knowing he was going. And you want to kind of put a bunch of, you know, magical thinking onto that.

And you want to, you know, bring Crowley back into it and symbols and everything else. There was some sort of through line about, about life. I don't know. There was a way he was looking at death or moving towards it. That that's seemed to make it part of a continuum.

Not so much on a spiritual level, but, but maybe that that that i find provocative and i'm not putting my finger on it right now do you know what i'm talking about yeah i mean the theme is transience through the whole thing it is transience and and at the end his last um the last thing he says is something along the lines of um does it matter? Like, why, if we're going to fry out, why should we even invest in this thing? And he says, you do it just to do it. You know, just to carry on.

But, I mean, given that this movie is all about, you're moving towards his death, and that becomes sort of this nebulous event that you know is going to happen and the theme of transience and everything. I mean, did this, what did you learn from, why were, it's all about death. So in January 5th, 2017, I was directing a pilot for Marvel.

And I left the studio at ABC and went to go moderate a screening at the Silent Film Theater. Of what? Of the movie Tower, an animated documentary. And I had a massive heart attack in your car no in the movie theater oh my god and uh fortunately we were three minutes from cedars um i flatlined in the er and was then put in a coma for a week uh it was my son's birthday. Yeah. And my daughter's born on David's birthday. So I was in a coma on her birthday year to the day David died. And I didn't, I was 47 and I didn't have a heart attack by accident. I had a heart attack because my life was totally out of control. Every,

I had a heart attack because my life was totally out of control. I smoked. I ate like shit. I didn't exercise. I was workaholic, worked seven days a week. Totally stressed out. No balance in my life. And when I started to recover,

I began the research into Bowie. And so, and when you have an incident like this, right? I had three young, three preteen kids. And you ask yourself, so if I die, what's the message? What did I, what was the purpose of my life? And I was i was like oh my kids used to give me these father's day cards they would say dad thanks for showing me the great work ethic yeah like no irony yeah and i was like what's the message of my life that you work hard and you die at 47 right yeah and it was from that vantage point that i started um ingesting Bowie.

And I started the Bowie research. So the idea of it being the film that it is, at that point, I'm just setting out to make this kind of entertaining sort of David Bowie immersive experience. Yes. But you needed answers. But you needed answers. But suddenly I realized through Bowie wasn't gaining knowledge for Nirvana. There was something that he was trying to drive towards. It was just improving the day-to-day. Right.

And that, to me, is a really wonderful sort of lesson that we don't really, going back to other music docs, you don't go to a music doc for religion or for um to improve your own no i i yeah no that's true but i'll yeah you go sadly i think most people go for nostalgia they go to have a a a uh a illustrated wikipedia of a sure yeah which is, which is fine, which is not a bad thing. But like ultimately, if it's good,

even if it's more kind of sorted and hacky, you know, you do see something you didn't see before. While I was working on Bowie, which was like a seven year odyssey, I saw the Bee Gees film, the HBO Bee Gees doc, and i teared up yeah and i was like wow this is really good not good in like art film good but it's really entertaining and it's really

easy and i was like kind of why am i making it so difficult for myself what the bg's film is the bohemian rhapsody when i sat down with the estate and said we can do one of two ways i can't but the reason that you have you do it the way you do it is because you have a formidable creative ego and the only way that it's called and the only way that you know you can you really weigh these guys is to you know move through it you know with your own tone and creating a you know you're not you whatever you're serving the bowie thing is that you have feelings about bowie and and they mesh with your feelings and some of them are good or some of them are bad but if you honestly honor your own voice in this in your own point of view in this you are as you are equal to bowie in the presentation

of bowie well in in this instance on the film there yes where it's a collaboration but you're making choices about how to depict this guy's life absolutely no no No, no. It's a collaboration. I don't know why this is going to sound controversial, but all nonfiction is autobiographical. I mean, this sounds, it's so trite. It's going to be controversial to nine people. Yeah. There's not going to be a lot of clickbait on that one. Headline. Yeah.

But I will say as someone who creates biographies yeah the moment i was able to kind of recognize and acknowledge that was a moment where i was able to get a lot more out of the work um personally and be more direct about what i'm exploring that must have started like i mean because the oj, you know, is a big piece of work. Yeah. That's an important hour. Yeah. Or whatever, in terms of, you know, what you were able to do.

But also, like, look, maybe it's just what I'm seeing, is that when you look at the other 30 docs, or however many were done during that series about sports, you know, yours is clearly the, you know, fuck all you guys. We're going to reel this. We're bringing it all in. I can do what all you guys did in just like 15 minutes of mine. And I'm going to layer it all the way up to the fucking end of culture.

But it's just a question of if you've seen it before, why in the world are you doing it? So in the 30 for 30, the failure of 30 for 30 is that it was, I thought you were going to have 30 totally different films, that each film would look nothing like the rest. I'll tell you what happened i'll respectfully to espn they got my show they said it's called june 17 1994 yeah and what did i what did i receive the same thing i received on the kids stays in the picture the same thing i receive

on every film i got a note from this from the network saying you need to go put talking head interviews in yeah and i was like well i'm not going to do that. You guys can take the film back. But if I put talking head interviews in, it's cookie cutter. Yeah. And the art is that it's not that. Right. It allows the audience to kind of

bring their own interpretation. Fortunately, they backed off and let me do the film. But what I realized then is that when you're getting network notes, it homogenizes everything. They're giving the same notes. I've been in Netflix documentaries. I think they're so unbelievably entertaining.

And this will probably make sure I never work at Netflix again. It's okay. Yeah, it's okay. There's a few other places. But I was on a uh of doing a talk about the construction of moon age yeah um in somewhere and this woman who i later found out was a top exec at netflix was in the audience yeah and she said you know it sounds

like you don't like to collaborate and you know film is a collaborative medium and i said well i didn't really have the opportunity to collaborate i didn't have the budget and i had to make this film by myself collaborating with the entire history of motion pictures and television that's because of the way you do it well i think what i took from it was that there is this knowing that it was coming from a network executive who will never grant final cut to a filmmaker. Yeah. You're not collaborating with the people that know nothing and are operating out of fear in terms of making notes on your little art project. Yeah. So that it looks like everything else on their network.

I mean, like. But this is exactly why these artists become hacks. It's like they... The delivery system is hackneyed. You know, like we were talking about before, maybe it's a stretch that, you know, the other trajectory of an artist like Bowie

could have been to make more records that sounded like his hit records, is that, like, once they... Anybody thinks they get a system that makes some bread, you know, they're going to lock everybody into it. That's where my deep, you know, going back to the Berlin where I just don't know what the, I don't have a parallel.

I mean, I don't, can you think, maybe we could probably do with actors, you know, an actor who. Yeah, I guess who take chances. But the chance of an actor just sort of like well you might not get cast as this again you ready for me to blow you away yeah here's here's the actor who i think his most emulated bowie yeah nick cage for sure um nick would do three romantic comedies in a row and you go oh he's a romantic comedy guy and then do the most depraved yeah non-box office like his film where you go no one's going to see this and you are kind of totally your character is so depraved and vulgar and you're

coming off of these frank capper romances what are you doing and then going and then going i'm going to flip the script again and those were to me very conscious deliberate decisions to both keep it interesting did you see the new one? The unbearable? I did, yeah. It's great. Yeah, yeah. The self-awareness. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I loved Pig, but you're right. Oh, Pig's Pig is incredible, yeah. Fucking masterpiece. But let me just go back to kind of build this up. And also, I don't know if we really characterized Moon Age Daydream in terms of how visually spectacular it is. But you're drawing from not just footage of Bowie and the music, but these are quick cuts to all kinds of silent films, documentary pieces. It's really kind of an old school kind of punk rock film in some parts where you've got, you're just, you know, you've got this incredible catalog of things that, you know, just go bang and, you know, you don't, you're not asking why

as a viewer, but you're sort of like, okay, you know, this is all part of it. You know what I mean? So you're kind of bringing that all in. I can't even imagine, you know, what, you know, got, you know, if we were still doing things on film, you would have been just in a room with thousands of strips of film hanging. Like, I don't even know what your desktop looked like in terms of what you were pulling from you know the interesting thing about that is when bowie was like a cultural passport you know i i was introduced to burroughs when i was a teenager through bowie yeah and i was introduced to german expressionism you would and and it would be or he would make a reference to uh some artists or something like one word and that would trigger something so that so i wanted to incorporate some of that sort of right vocabulary into the film where you don't have

to know the reference if you get it you get it you know and if you don't you don't and it's but it's not gratuitous that's interesting so it's rooted in decisions that you made every image that is not david's in the film was something that he was inspired or influenced by throughout his life and that he referenced at some point oh there you go yeah uh but let's go back in terms of like you know what drives you we talked about the kid stays in the picture. And I think that like, you know, that line resonating with you about subjective. But, and then the Cobain doc, what was the Colonel?

Like, and I know there's other ones. And I really, look, I don't know if you listened to me talk to Jane Goodall, but we talked about it. I did, yeah, yeah, that was great. Yeah, where she's sort of like well he manipulated them uh i very much so uh but june 17th to me you know as a doc that you know was fully subjective and you had control over and was all you know based in and it all only used you know, based in, and it only used, you know, existing footage of the day and some stuff,

you know, from OJ's past. But, you know, what you did by that, by mashing those things together, just what was happening on that day in sports, in the world, and then, you know, all in the shadow of that Bronco, ultimately, you know, was really kind of a, a, a, an interesting document that, that represents the end of, of media culture as we know it. Yeah. I mean, it didn't set out that way.

Yeah. It just set it out to make a Bruckheimer documentary. Yeah. Like I was like, Oh, we can do the car chase. Sure. Like,

great. Yeah. But you, but you made a choice that we're only going to use footage of the day. Yes. But we made the choice to only use footage of the day and made a choice to make a film that would invite the audience

to be able to reflect on their own experiences, bring whatever. My films, there's no forced narration, and I'm trying to invite the audience to participate. Yeah, but I think by bringing all those things together, by bringing Arnold Palmer things together you know by bringing you know sort of you know arnold palmer's you know last world open that was a world open and then you know the rangers winning the only time or the second time in history and then the the nba playoffs like all this was happening simultaneously and then you know like this on

this horrendous stories unfolding you know with oj and then by the end of the day no one gives a shit about any of that other stuff yeah and and the world changes forever uh and and just all that stuff with you know uh people off mic you know costas and you know it was it was it was back in a time where some of these broadcasters had some humility around things and were were sort of embarrassed in moments where they didn't know how to report something or whether they should, but they were being pushed to follow the blood. And now it's all like that. But also this sort of strange,

these victories in sports and you're just even dealing with Rangers fans. It's just like, and I like that about the Bowie movie too, just this sort of disturbing lingering uh lingering on on teenage fans who were just so it was only disturbing in in the vulnerability of it and how much they put in him but it's like anybody else but it shifts when you get to the 80s and suddenly they become these like they you know as david said at one point in the 80s he looked out and was like are they here to

see me or phil collins well yeah Collins well yeah that's his own fucking fault because like there would be no reason at that time where he wouldn't have been on stage with Phil Collins that's a good way

to look at it you know like you can't pull that shit anymore dude you are Phil Collins you're so true but like I do like the even all the stuff around the oj thing but i just thought that that was you know how they're all sort of different because like i've seen you know

you know i don't watch a shit ton of docs but i watch adam curtis i watch his stuff because i think that you know there is something that you guys are taking chances in in different ways but you're you're out there in you know in the chaos you know you're out there on the edge of things yeah making decisions that are are your own and provocative in a way that hasn't been seen in the medium before i i think again i'll meet someone yeah filmmaker and when i did um montage effect i met this director who said oh you must have seen my film who was that i don't want to say i don't want to say and i said why why would i have seen your your film yeah and they said well uh it's considered one of the great rock docs of all time yeah of course and i was like well that's weird why would if i see something

yeah this may sound really punkish. If I've seen someone do something, then I can't do it. Sure. So I'd rather not see it. So I, because to me, the enjoy and excitement is trying to be a pioneer and find a different way. And, you know, when I walked into, when we were cutting Montage of Heck, I walked into the edit room, and my editor was, not my editor.

I always think when someone says, I always think of when Mick Jagger got punched by Charlie Watts for calling him my drummer. And I walked in, he had his hands over his, he had a book in front of him, and he had his hands over on his head. And I said, what's wrong, man? And he said, oh man, I'm reading about this chapter

where Kurt, you know, heard Nirvana on the radio for the first time. I'm just so bummed we don't have the footage. And I was like, why? And he was like, well, because it was like the first time. I was like, but we're not making that film. Like, that's the most cliched scene in rock and roll history. Like, if we had that footage, I wouldn't even use it.

It's like, what's that have to do with the story we're telling? And then I said, you know, Kevin, that which we, when we don't have, when we have footage for something, that which we when we don't have when we have footage for something it's almost like depressing because we just there's no artistry to it it's like this is what happened yeah what's really exciting is when you don't have the footage and you have to like figure out how to create that moment or that that experience and that to me is where it gets. Yeah. That's where it's, it's exciting.

So I think that David's where David became the, for me, the perfect subject was I have been trying to go into the deep end with all my films. Yeah. This one more so than anyone I've done, which really pushed me into, into an area that um where i'm

not comfortable which is non it's not it's not a rigorous narrative right right yeah because you do a lot of time travel but but also you know you can sort of justify that it's like you know it's a cut-up trip man you know well it's a film that in again from where we started is is intending to reconstruct the bow experience which is you know the enigma the mystery the intimate the sublime and create an experience that presents that um right you know and the film is cut up and they're influenced there there are references flying left and right, and it's all performance. It doesn't strip away the persona of David Jones or Dave Bones, but that's why we love Bowie. That's right.

But the thing that's beautiful about it, because he mentions chaos all the time. Yeah. That there's this idea that it's there and that to to deny it is crazy. And also he mentions this idea about, you know, all these different things that are happening in every moment around you. You're just choosing, you know, whatever your little reality is at that moment. But there's all this other stuff coming up. But but ultimately, you know what the bed or the sort of through line, whatever intellectual through lines or spiritual through lines there are is that you have the music and that you know you will you know you run you know almost loops at times so there's never a quiet moment there's always some piece of bowie music

kind of moving through all of this so no matter what the fuck happens or what the time frame is the continuity is the magic which is the music. It's a jukebox musical with a rich subtext. Well, no, but like, no, but like, but music is fucking magic. And there's very few artists, and I was talking about this

with my producer, that like, as I get older, you know, I will, you know, there are bands that I will go back to. The Stones are one of them. And, you know, that Beatles doc. And I'm not even that old,

but I couldn't not watch that Beatles doc. And it didn't like, you know, that Beatles doc. And I'm not even that old, but I could not watch that Beatles doc. And it didn't like, you know, make it. Of course, it made me cry and freak out. I'm like, you know, oh, my God, this is crazy. They're just a dumb band. You can't explain the magic. Who the fuck can explain that? But that is what that is.

What makes these guys, you know, bigger than life that makes them, you know, forever is, you know, I don't feel this way about Bob Seger. Do you know bigger than life that makes them you know forever is you know i don't feel this way about bob seeger do you know you know but if you're gonna like take a bunch of bowie songs you know you got pretty you know guaranteed magic well that was so the bowie film started off as a series of 15 films that was a project I created called the IMAX Music Experience. And the idea was that there would be the 15 biggest heritage and contemporary artists of all time, and I would create

a space in an IMAX theater for just that. So you can just go listen, see, experience, and not learn. Well, this is going to be an IMAXing, right? Yeah, it's an it's a imax uh exclusive for the first week yeah that's great but uh but oh but getting back to like you know other people's work i mean i only bring up adam curtis because you know i watch his stuff i haven't

seen a lot of it but there you know that hyper normalization and uh uh and the century of self and stuff is that you know he's barking up a different tree, but the risk he's taking by, you know, mashing together stuff to have the audience, you know, you go on these journeys of thought that are much more disturbing. I mean,

it's not, it's not a celebration of life. You know, you don't, you don't leave an Adam Curtis film with anything other than like, Oh, we're so fucked. It's fucking overdue.

But, but, but, you know, there so fucked. It's fucking over, dude. But, you know, there is, you know, I just bring him up as another documentary artist, you know, who's doing, you know,

exciting stuff. But you've never watched an Adam Curtis movie. No, I have, and I think he's brilliant. He's far more intelligent than I am. You're doing different things.

We're doing different things. I think I work more emotional. Yeah, yeah. I'm working on it more emotional. I think I'm working on a more emotional. I'm glad you've got it figured out for yourself how you're different.

That must have been a tough day for you. That day must have started with fuck. God damn it. Oh, you're funny. Fuck. Fuck.

God damn it. Oh, you're funny. Fuck. Yeah, man. But look, you've done great work. But I do want to come back to, in terms of people watching the other stuff too, that to go find that, the OJ one,

June 17, 1994, because you can, it's just right there on Hulu. And the Kurt Cobain one's on HBO Max, and it's easy to watch. But, like, you know, you can definitely, like, I can see you striving in that Kurt Cobain one with some of that, the extra, the stuff outside of the narrative, you know, the visual stuff. And it has to do with music, right?

Well, here's what Montage was for me. It was about our generation. the stuff outside of the narrative, you know, the visual stuff. And it has to do with music, right? Well, here's what Montage was for me. It was about our generation. It was about the latchkey kid generation. It was very specific to, and hopefully, this is my entry point, and then hopefully it transcends beyond this. Kids whose parents were married between 61 and 70 it's a very macro moment yeah it's it were the the parents who got married because they wanted to

fuck my parents your my parents yeah they they wanted to have sex so you had to get married when you're 18 and then the 60s happened and suddenly they're seeing everyone else having fun and fighting right and then they're like well i want to do fucking. Right, right. And then they're like, well, I want to do this too. It's like when Kurt's mom said, is this it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is this all there is? There's got to be something more for me.

I'm like, lady, you got a fucking kid. Yeah. Like the time to have arrived there has passed. Yeah. Like when you have a kid, you kind of have to move beyond that. But that's not on her. It was generational.

It was generational. Sure. It was generational. But so that was my entry point. And Kurt's issues on her. It was generational. It was generational. Sure. It was generational. But so that was my entry point. And Kurt's issues with shame were, I had a really serious speech impediment. I couldn't speak until I was five and I was in therapy until I was 16.

And my childhood, really until I was probably in my teens, were kids coming up to me on the school ground going, are you retarded? I mean, that was to my face. And standing, like looking for an answer. No, I'm not retarded. I'm a monger. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it was like, it was.

Hard to stay strong. Yeah. Well, you do what you need to do. But there is some sense to it. You but there is uh some sensitive you know i have some sure those well we all do and i think you know well yeah i mean right and and you know i like i remembered seeing it the first time but i didn't remember the whole movie until i watched it again but i do remember the animated story of him you know needing to get his first sexual experience out of the way

and returning to the house of the mentally ill person. Now, do you remember, did you see it recently? I just watched it, most of it. I'm almost done. We watched most of it. What do you? Did you think that that was a short fictional story, a piece of art that Kirk created,

or did you feel that he was telling that as a like to an interviewer like it was a true story oh I felt like um I didn't sense that there was an interviewer at the end of it but I sensed he was you know telling a story about himself yeah because there are details of it that are not fictional that can't be really manufactured what was interesting that story became really controversial uh-huh and um it was it was there was a but buzz osborne on the melvin yeah melvin's came out and blasted the film because of it and said oh that story's bullshit if it had happened i would have known and i was like i remember being really confused because i was like, I thought it was really obvious that that was a short fictional story that he wrote and then recorded because of his cadence. He's not talking to someone.

He's using voices. He's reading a story. Right. And it's a piece of short fiction. So it's based on things. I have an idea of what it was based on. It's no different than a Cobain song. It's, you know.

So you're saying it's not a real story. Oh, I animated it in part to make it very clear that it's not factual. In fact, there is a little, I mean, it's very subtle, but there's a part at the end of that story where Kurt said, I lay down on the railroad tracks, put two bricks on me and waited for the train to come. As he's saying that, you don't see that. You see Kurt sitting up on the thing watching the train go by

very deliberately to distance his narration. Why do you think it's a fictional story? I think like any, I don't think of it any different than Cobain's music. I think that it has truths.

That's why it's fantastic. It's filled with truths. Are they historical truths? Did these things really happen? Did he sleep with that, as he calls a retarded girl, is that a metaphor for something else, right? Like, it's not, I believe it's, you know, and that story, what was really interesting

was he wrote it in his journal and then he recorded it. Yeah. And it was recorded on a tape he did with a lot of other poems and short stories. Okay. That one had a lot of what appeared to be biographical components. Yeah. But there was some stuff mixed in there as well that weren't necessarily directly biographical um so at the beginning of montage of heck i said this film is going to be told

using kurt's art you know yeah both his music short stories blah blah so to me it was not intended to be like anything factual it's it's better than factual it's gives you like a direct shot into his brain one way or the other it's art okay you know and that that the story of montage was we're going to tell a biography and through a third person autobiography and allow the artist's art to tell the story where i got trapped in that is I needed context and I didn't have the perspective through Kurt's own art, so I needed to do interviews to help contextualize Kurt's space within the film.

Huh. Well, yeah, okay. I get it. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I wonder though, I mean, what would it look like if you didn't do the interviews? Oh, it would have been a montage of heck. Now, how do you get to, like, you know,

where do you fit this sweet kind of like sad Jane Goodall talk into? How did that become part of your oeuvre? Did you just say sad Jane Goodall? Oh, no, sad in the sense that like, you know, having talked to her, you know, having seen that, the sort of youth

and the sort of earnestness and the excitement and then to talk to her in relation to about what's happening now, it's devastating. Yeah, it's devastating,

yeah. Nacho saw Montage of Heck and someone there like called me up and said- Who saw it? Who's that? I'm sorry, National Geographic. Oh, Nacho. Okay, got it.

This is the true story of that film. So, supposedly, the Murdochs, when they still own National Geographic, wanted to do a rebranding. At that point, at 2014, it had become a pretty dodgy reality, unscripted series. They kind of lost their identity a bit. Nat Geo did. Yeah. So there was this sort of directive

to go back and sort of rebrand, you know, as this sort of adventurer, explorer's place. Jane's their, you know, their iconic story. I think I might have asked them since them but i get a call from my agent said national geographic wants to talk to you about jane goodall yeah i said what i i i i don't know anything about science uh haven't i seen that film a million times um i i have no interest i mean like the first I was like, this is fucking weird. Why would they call the guy who did Montage of Heck?

Yeah. So I do a call with them. All it takes is one person, you know, that liked the movie. This is true. I did a very quick call. Yeah. And my agent calls me back and says, they want to do another call. And I said, I don't want to do another call unless they agreed to final cut.

I don't want to waste anyone's time. Yeah. the call i said i don't want to do another call unless they agreed to final cut uh-huh i don't want to waste anyone's time yeah and they agreed to final cut which i thought was totally insane if they're going to brand their whole if they want to use this to brand the network and they're going to give me final cut i just did montage of heck like i said we weren't selling any t-shirts you know what i mean um but anyway they did and, what I was interested in, in Jane was, um, and again, I, all these things become very self-reflective. I had spent most of my life trying to figure out how to create a balance between work and being, between my, my passion for work and my family.

Yeah. That's what Jane was about. How do you, how do you, how do you find that balance in life and um you know particularly especially because she had you know several families yeah they're her family and then the monkeys yeah yeah true yeah and well also as a woman in that time where it was expected that she would be the one to stay home with the kid and hugo would be the one to go out those adventures kid. And Hugo would be the one to go out with those adventures. We did a, I remember I was at a screening at the Arclight for that film. And the moderator made a comment about how much he hated Jane when she dropped off her son to go to school in England. And all these women in the audience were going, and he didn't get it.

And he was like, what? What? She's fucking, that was fucked up. She dropped her kid off. He was six. And I had to look at him. I was like, dude, you're not saying that about the dad. Yeah.

Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, yeah. We all got to learn. There's a learning curve on this. The respecting and empathizing for women learning curve. It's a steep one for dudes. But Jane was also like, that was an opportunity to do real life. I mean, like that footage was so.

Yeah, it's all there. Oh, my God. It was so incredible. Beautiful. And yeah, that was that. So I almost said no. Yeah. I basically said no. and then i finally caved and the day they sent me the hundred and whatever hours of raw footage and i put it on i walked out of my office i looked at my system was like can you believe i almost turned

this down yeah this is like the greatest film i have ever seen like we will never have an archive this pristine and this like i mean you're watching something that's never going to happen again yeah like we can't play with chimps in the wild that's never happening so it's like as fucked up as it was and there's a you know obviously you're watching you're like we know better now obviously you're like wait what you're giving them bananas like what do you yeah yeah but i mean it's just like adam and eve in the jump i mean it's it's insane it was great yeah so that was exciting it was really exciting yeah what's the next

thing you got going you gonna sell this movie oh you mean like this selling it like talking to you yeah yeah I don't know yet I don't know oh really yeah take a break no no just yeah sort of

I just finished another one recently. What? I can't. Oh. Yeah. And what do you read books? What do you do? Oh, for fun?

Yeah. My favorite thing is just like look at clouds. Uh-huh. Yeah. Just in your house, outside? We have a house on the island in hawaii oh yeah which one big island oh yeah uh up near ypo valley yeah um how much time you spend there as much as seemingly possible so i cut bowie there and uh for for big chunk of it i cut a lot of jane there

yeah um and uh honestly that's where i i i unplug yeah And it's where the trade winds meet. You know, we're on the North Coast. Yeah. So there's no greater spectacle than watching the clouds kind of form above your head. Yeah, I go to Kauai. I used to go more. I can't afford Kauai, so I'm in the Big Island.

I mean, I don't own a house there. You know, but I can't live there. I mean, like, you know, if I... 11 days is it. That's what everyone told me that i was gonna get bored and i we've been there seven or eight years and but i think on the big island there's more to do like you know kawaii is it you know it's it you got a farmer's market you got two restaurants and hike. Yeah, we don't even have that. I mean, we're 30 minutes from a restaurant. So I just, I stay put.

Yeah. But you like it. I love it. All right. And you bring, you got a big family, right? I have a wife who is a huge fan of yours. Oh, yeah? Yeah, she wanted to be on the.

She wanted to come? She wanted to be outside. She thought it would be. Yeah. But yeah, she's very excited. She's a filmmaker deborah eisenstadt yeah and we have three kids yeah they don't really like going there if they're teenagers so it's uh oh it's like prison isolation yeah well they're all there you know it's sort of they're on their phones like it it doesn't really make sense for anyone yeah how's that how's that play for you like you know what i mean how do you adjust to that i guess we all are

but like when i see teenagers like when i just i can't it's still a weird shift for me to just watch everybody just looking at that thing in their hand and it's you got to remember that that's their language that's their norm and all we're doing is being like our parents looking at us going like, what these crazy fucking kids. So sadly, most of us are going like, tell me how to do it. So I went from fighting it and thinking like, this is just, you know, we're out. You know, you're in the most beautiful place on earth and you're on your phone. you know you're in the most beautiful place on earth yeah and you're on your phone like you know yeah completely fucked up to just kind of like that's how i see it and you know the way my dad used to want to listen to old time now i did like listening to the old time radio shows with my dad

but it was totally anachronistic at the time he was doing it but he was like hey let's sit in the living room and listen to uh you know the lone And it was like, dad, can we watch television? Sure, but it was also not a, you know, I mean, like how this takes over your brain, it's very different than analog. You know, like if you're sitting in a living room with your dad listening to a music you don't like, there's a million other things you could be doing in your head,

in the room. But once you fucking lock into this thing, it's all of you. All I'm saying is imagine what this generation is going to be saying to their kids. Because there's going to be a whole nother. They're going to say, sorry, but the world is ending. Sorry, there's nothing anymore. Sorry for all the strange smoking ruins everywhere. sorry for all the the strange uh smoking ruins everywhere and yeah we people used to be able to live west of utah

yeah it's gonna be great yeah maybe i'm being too cynical oh yeah you had said earlier in that you had um that that the film had changed challenge your understanding or impression of Bowie? Well, it challenged it in the sense that whatever my understanding was, and I remember this when he died as well, that my experience of Bowie, his impact on me, was kind of mythic, and it was shallow in a way. The fact that I did lose touch with him, you know, post Let's Dance. I didn't know a lot of that stuff.

I'd never been, you know, seeing any of the footage that you see. I didn't care anymore. But how I held him in my heart and my mind was specific. And, you know, I was in awe and had him. He was part of me in a very specific way. So the way it changed, like I actually leaned into my girlfriend. I said, at some point during the movie, I said, this is going to make me hate him. If I keep watching, it's going to make me hate him.

Because of what you talked about, because of acknowledging that almost everything that he presented, there was a painful vulnerability to it. And the risks that he took much of the time exposed an uncomfortable vulnerability that I don't know that I noticed in the Bowie that I had in my mind. Why would that make you hate him? Not hate him. I was being facetious. But it would just humanize him to the point where I would have a hard time, you know, keeping him where I kept him. But that happens with everybody.

I talk to people. But there was a point where, you know, and it happened when I made the movie about Bowie, when I had to go do the research to say, like, he couldn't have looked this ridiculous. Not David Bowie, but there was a time where he really did mime for everybody. And it was ridiculous. But the way you frame it is that, is that there's an incredible vulnerability in that. I'm like, okay, but it's embarrassing. So I think what my thing is, I have a tremendous fear of embarrassment.

That's where my shame is in me. I had an embarrassing mother, and the way I overcome it is by putting myself, I became a comedian. As Harry Shearer says, you do comedy to try to control why people laugh at you. So there's that vulnerability, which makes me uncomfortable. And I think seeing that in Bowie and seeing that he really was an ill-defined personality as himself in a way, and that all he was was this sort of risk-taking artist. I think it just made me uncomfortable.

So, but I can appreciate it. I think what it did was made me realize that like a lot of the vulnerable, like when you show those segments of him in The Elephant Man, I'm like, oh my God, I was always under the belief that this was some amazing uh effort in acting and when you look at those scripts i'm like this is ridiculous i would feel terrible you know but where he's like i have a home and i'm like oh my god you know okay this is how much i drink the kool-aid deborah my wife came in and she who was an actress on broadway yeah and um

and uh she she saw this scene from The Elephant Man. Yeah. And she goes, you got to cut this. And I was so deep in. I was like, what are you talking about? And she goes, it's acting. You got to cut this. Yeah.

And I was like, I had no idea. I was like, the vulnerability, like what he's saying, it's not John Merrick, it's him. And again, this is what we said earlier. It's not about being a virtuoso. So even if you think, I don't think David's the greatest actor. No, I get it. I just, here's why that moment is so awe-inspiring.

Again, he's the biggest star in the world. Doing this thing. Doing this, going on to do the elephant man which he's not really trained to do yeah and he's doing it with no prosthetics and he's naked on stage and like and one of the things that i never got about bowie until i started making this film is the how deliberate his choice and characters were in relation to his own sort of exploration. Like Merry Christmas,

Mr. Lawrence. I'll never watch that film and not think of his brother. Yeah. It's so obvious. Yeah. I just didn't know that really the story of the brother. And now I see the film.

I'm like, Oh, it's about a, that's the, the, the, the character who's embarrassed by his brother. And it's like,

you know, it stands. Right. I mean, it's so, and you, then when you see Bowie act on it now, it's like. Yeah, see, like you got in very deep and you're willing to, you know, to see it in a very empathetic way and also in a very sort of like respectful way in terms of an artist taking chances, you know, even failing.

But the thing is, is that like, you know, ultimately outside of the arc of his career, I don't know that anyone sees those things as failures. So they were always sort of presented as like, you know, this guy's, you know, doing it. So I think for me, you know, to get back to the shift in my understanding of him, it's like just that little bit of, like I always thought like, you know,

Bowie nailed the elephant man. And like, you know, you had this like two, like one minute beat. I always thought, you know, Bowie nailed the elephant man. And you had this one-minute piece, and I'm like, he did not nail it. Good talking to you, man. Thanks, Mark. There you go. That was engaged. I've been engaging lately. Again, the movie, Moon Age Daydream, which is totally worth seeing, opens in theaters this Friday, September 16th, including in IMAX theaters.

And let's continue this in a second. Can you hang out? Can you hang out? Hang out. Hi, it's Terry O'Reilly, host of Under the Influence. Recently, we created an episode on cannabis marketing. With cannabis legalization, it's a brand new challenging marketing category. And I want to let you know we've produced a special bonus podcast episode

where I talk to an actual cannabis producer. I wanted to know how a producer becomes licensed, how a cannabis company competes with big corporations, how a cannabis company markets its products in such a highly regulated category, and what the term dignified consumption actually means. I think you'll find the answers interesting and surprising. Hear it now on Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly. This bonus episode is brought to you by the Ontario Cannabis Store and ACAS Creative. It's a night for the whole family. Be a part of Kids Night when the Toronto Rock take on the Colorado Mammoth

at a special 5 p.m. start time on Saturday, March 9th at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton. The first 5,000 fans in attendance will get a Dan Dawson bobblehead courtesy of Backley Construction. Punch your ticket to Kids Night on Saturday, March 9th at 5pm in Rock City at torontorock.com

Okay, so look, on Thursday we've got Bradley Whitford back on the show. He was on episode 909 back in 2018 after all the success of Get Out. And you can go back and listen to that one before Thursday if you want. Ever since then, he's been saying he would love to come back on. So he did, for nothing in particular. Just to hash it out. And we hashed it we definitely we definitely uh got into some shit and uh also here's a little heads up there will be

new cat mugs available from brian jones on thursday i'll mention again at the beginning of thursday show but those mugs tend to sell out very quickly. So if you want to get a head start, you can bookmark the page, brianrjones.com slash shop and go there at noon Eastern on Thursday. And remember LA, you just, you just, just, it's going to be desert again. That's all. Just dig up everything that uses water and figure out where you want your, your state gauge to be in the future. We're going back to the desert.

It's going back to the way it used to be. We're going primitive, people. So, look, as I said, tomorrow night at Luna Lounge. Oh, my God. Wow. At Largo. Largo at the Coronet here in L.A. with some music and comedy. Hannah Einbinder will join us.

Me and Jimmy Vivino and Brandon Schwartzel and Ned Brower. Next week, I'm in Tucson, Arizona at the Rialto Theater on September 16th. Phoenix, Arizona at Stand Up Live on September 17th. Boulder, Colorado at the Boulder Live on September 17th. Boulder, Colorado at the Boulder Theater on September 22nd. Fort Collins, Colorado at the Lincoln Center on September 23rd. And Toronto, Ontario at the Queen Elizabeth Theater on September 30th and October 1st. Then I'm in Livermore, California at the Bankhead Theater on October 6th. And Carmel by the Sea, California at the Sunset Center October 7th. That will be an intimate Sea, California, at the Sunset Center, October 7th. That will be

an intimate show, just me and the four people that bought tickets for that. I'll be in London, England at the Bloomsbury Theater, Saturday and Sunday, October 22nd and 23rd. I believe both those shows are sold out. We may add a show. I may be doing a live WTF there. And I'll be in Dublin, Ireland at Vicar Street, Wednesday, October 26th. I have dates in November and December in Oklahoma City, Dallas, San Antonio, Houston, Eugene, Oregon, Bend, Oregon, Asheville, North Carolina, and Nashville, Tennessee. And my HBO taping at Town Hall in New York City is on Thursday, December 8th. Go to WTFpod.com slash tour for all your dates and ticket info. Now, I'll play you out. Thank you. boomer lives monkey in the fonda Boomer lives.

Monkey in La Fonda. Cat angels everywhere.