Brett Morgen says it’s cool to do drugs and watch ‘Moonage Daydream’
Music documentaries are perhaps the perfect set and setting for a psychedelic experience. While we here at Far Out would certainly never condone the act of procuring and using illicit substances, we can report that viewing certain movies with said substances makes for a pretty engrossing experience. Whether you’re looking to trip out while taking in The Grateful Dead Movie or do what I did and toke up before the one-night screening of Paul McCartney’s concert film/animation hybrid The Bruce McMouse Show, drugs and musical movies can lead to some interesting headspaces.
Director Brett Morgen knows the feeling. The visionary director’s style tends to land somewhere between dreamlike and spaced out, taking his audiences down different avenues that surround some of their favourite artists. That’s what he did with Kurt Cobain in Montage of Heck, that’s what he did with The Rolling Stones in Crossfire Hurricane, and that’s what he’s done in his most recent project, the David Bowie musical documentary Moonage Daydream.
While sitting down with Consequence to talk about the film, the discussion moved to Morgen’s unique non-linear and non-traditional way of forming his film’s narrative. It’s a hazy, highly saturated world around David Bowie, and that’s what Morgen wanted to capture. If you want details about Bowie’s life story or a true-blue biography of the singer, you can go read one of the many books on him. Instead, Morgen is more fascinated by the feeling of experiencing David Bowie rather than the particulars of his life.
Naturally, since Bowie was known to dabble a bit himself, the talk turned to the subject of experiencing Morgen’s film in a more, shall we say, heightened state. “It’s happening a lot,” he tells Consequence. “I’m having people come up to me at the end of screenings lit and tripped out.” Morgen’s not surprised, either. The way he sees it, his films are uniquely structured to experience in a mind-altered state.
“I like to think most of my films work well in that regard,” he says. “They have music and a lot of images, and they’re very densely layered, so you can extract new meanings upon multiple viewings.” But if you want to enjoy the film stone-cold sober, there’s room to do that as well. Just be prepared for the film to take you on a bit of a trip anyway.
“What a lot of people are saying is it gives you that effect,” he says. “I think that film does have that sort of intoxicating quality to it. So I think that’s why it may work very well in that regard. If you want to turn your brain off and just allow the film to swallow you, that can happen. There’s an invitation for that. If you want to get lost in David, you know, his philosophizing, I would imagine in a heightened state that can also get very deep.”
Maybe that’s not an explicit endorsement, but hey, enjoy the film at your own transcendental speed. Moonage Daydream is out in theatres now.
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