LOS ANGELES — Brett Morgen dashes across his office to grab his phone.
"I wanna play you something," says the documentary filmmaker behind "Moonage Daydream," a trippy and mesmerizing new movie about David Bowie. Morgen is recounting his first three weeks on the project, when he sat alone in this room on L.A.'s Westside and listened to Bowie's entire catalog in the order in which the songs were written. He cues up the droning outro of "Silly Boy Blue," a cut from Bowie's self-titled 1967 debut, and explains that the late rock legend had composed it "at a time when he was thinking about entering a monastery to study Buddhism. It's filled with Buddhistic references and ideas of reincarnation."
Then Morgen plays the title track from Bowie's "Blackstar," which came out two days before he died at age 69 in 2016. "Hear that?" he asks, pointing out a similar descending melodic figure in the middle of the song. "I had the stems for both, and I put them in the Avid on top of each other," he says, referring to the editing platform. "Lined up perfectly. Here he is in one of his last songs — a song about leaving and passing through — and he creates an echo of one of his first songs." Morgen, 53, shakes his head. "It was such an important way for me to understand that it was never about tomorrow for Bowie. It was about being in the moment."
