Episode 1365 - Brett Morgen
Marc:Lock the gates!
Marc:all right let's do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the fuck nicks what's happening i'm mark marin this is my podcast welcome to another day i hope everybody got through the dark anniversary of our country yesterday september 11th uh grieving people still from that and i hope uh i hope you're okay today
Marc:I hope you're okay in general, to be honest with you.
Marc:We got some rain in Los Angeles, which is so fucking rare and so weird and so welcome.
Marc:Like, I lost my mind.
Marc:I was hoping for a deluge.
Marc:I was hoping for the type of rain where homes slide down mountains, where roads get washed away.
Marc:I needed a biblical rain for L.A.
Marc:I needed the soil to be wet for weeks.
Yeah.
Marc:But instead, it seems that the sky is not quite sure how to create rain anymore.
Marc:It's like you look at the sky here and it's sort of like, do those clouds know what they're doing?
Marc:Have they lost their ability to do what they're supposed to do?
Marc:It's a very strange thing.
Marc:what's happening in the atmosphere but we did get some rain and it was uh it was amazing and i got somebody reached out to me because i've been sort of rambling on apocalyptically uh about water and somebody got 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
Marc:At Largo here in L.A.
Marc:tomorrow night playing some music with the fellas and also doing some comedy.
Marc:And I'll have Hannah Einbinder there doing some comedy as well.
Marc:And Dan Telfer will be there.
Marc:And me and the band going to do some of my simple three chord covers, maybe four chords.
Marc:Occasionally a fifth chord comes in.
Marc: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
Marc:No squeakies.
Marc:Yeah, you're welcome.
Marc:Those of you who are hung up on that today on the show, I talked to this guy, Brett Morgan.
Marc:OK, so he's a documentary filmmaker.
Marc:He he made the kid stays in the picture years ago.
Marc:Kurt Cobain montage of heck.
Marc:He made that as well.
Marc:Jane, the Jane Goodall documentary.
Marc:He also made a doc called June 17th, 1994, which was part of ESPN's 30 for 30 series.
Marc:And he just directed a doc about David Bowie called Moon Age Daydream, which I saw.
Marc:But this guy and I go back.
Marc:I couldn't quite remember the exact details.
Marc: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.
Marc:and he clears up for me what it was and what the situation was.
Marc:And I remember, you know, that he had a certain swagger to him.
Marc:He still does.
Marc:But I'll be honest with you.
Marc:I've watched many of these things.
Marc:I think I've seen everything he's made, actually.
Marc:And I believe that the documentary that he did for ESPN called June 17, 1994, is one of the great documentary films.
Marc:It was kind of a brilliant conceit given the assignment.
Marc:I will talk to him about that.
Marc:I'll talk to him about this David Bowie movie, which is a bit challenging and a bit interesting.
Marc:It's a long piece of work.
Marc:And it's it's all footage of Bowie talking.
Marc:It's all most of it is, I believe, his words.
Marc:There's other things in it.
Marc:There's a lot of montages of things he's done, bits and pieces.
Marc:There's bits and pieces of things that moved him to do things.
Marc:And it's interesting the choices this guy made because, you know, it took me a while to realize and to learn.
Marc:that documentary filmmaking is not journalism.
Marc:It's a director's genre.
Marc:The director has a point of view and presents whatever he wants to present out of the facts that he's pulling from.
Marc:There's a broad context.
Marc:And it's interesting...
Marc:What any director will sort of provoke in you with the way he's put together the facts or his interpretation of the facts.
Marc:And it was challenging a little bit.
Marc:The Bowie movie was pretty spectacular.
Marc:The family was on board.
Marc:The estate was on board.
Marc:So they got to use music.
Marc:I think it's going to be some sort of big IMAX experience, which is great.
Marc:Bowie's great.
Marc:But ultimately, it did make me look at Bowie in a different way for better and for worse.
Marc:Humanizing is a is a you know, it's a double edged sword.
Marc:You know, when somebody is mythic or amazing or even charismatic.
Marc:Once they become humanized, you have to reckon with that.
Marc:You have to reckon with the realization that these people are mortal.
Marc:They're just people.
Marc:I mean, I do that.
Marc:It happens to me all the time here.
Marc:But obviously, I didn't have the opportunity to talk to David Bowie.
Marc:So it's quite an undertaking.
Marc:It was good talking to Brett about it.
Marc:So here's what's happening here.
Marc:The rain came and created this humidity.
Marc:Look, I hope for for happy endings, but they're not real.
Marc:And I've been very apocalyptic about the water situation.
Marc:I've been apocalyptic about almost everything.
Marc:Politics, the drug problem, the water situation.
Marc:I think about it all the fucking time.
Marc:But I had to sort of try to understand what exactly I was thinking about.
Marc:There's an entitlement to it where I've lived in this house for a few years.
Marc:My old house didn't have much of a lawn.
Marc:But this house came with this beautiful landscaped situation.
Marc:And there's a selfishness to it.
Marc:It's sort of like, well, I don't want to watch this die.
Marc:I mean, I don't want to get depressed and watch it die.
Marc:I don't want to necessarily rip it all out.
Marc:But that's probably going to be the right thing to do.
Marc:But it's not somewhere in my mind.
Marc:It's like, why is the environment fucking us like this right when things were getting OK for me and the house and this and that?
Marc:Why does the world have to end at this inconvenient time for me when I'm just starting to feel OK about myself in my life for the first time?
Marc:So this guy reaches out.
Marc:Subject line.
Marc:CA water situation from an expert.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Great.
Marc:Hi, Mark.
Marc:Big fan.
Marc: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.
Marc:Bureau of Reclamation, the agencies and utilities that oversee L.A.
Marc:'s water supply.
Marc:This guy's on the inside.
Marc:He's going to lay it out for me.
Marc: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.
Marc:We're in the same situation with water, and I continue to work on water projects all over the Southwest.
Marc:All right, we're going to get some truth.
Marc:Is there enough water for L.A.?
Marc:Yes.
Marc:But with serious changes needed.
Marc:OK.
Marc:Southern California will have to stop using water to irrigate landscaping.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:OK.
Marc:Kind of knew that.
Marc:I see no way around that very soon.
Marc:Say goodbye to the green grass and lush landscaping of Los Angeles.
Marc:Southern California will soon look like Arizona.
Marc:And this is not apocalyptic craziness.
Marc: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 will be plenty of consumable water well beyond our lifetimes.
Marc:Will you get a message from Gavin?
Marc:Yes, but it will be to stop watering your lawn and plants.
Marc:Not a message to only water a few days a week, but a message that doing so will have serious consequences.
Marc: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.
Marc:You will get an adequate monthly water allowance exceeding will either result in heavy fines or shut off.
Marc:That will be the main dystopian change.
Marc: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.
Marc:Now, I think that's, he was speaking to me.
Marc:I'm going to take that personally.
Marc:Sleep a little easier knowing there are plenty of smart people like myself, hopefully, that are working on sound science-based solutions.
Marc:Scott.
Marc:Okay, so here it is.
Marc:Everything's going to be fine.
Marc:You just got to...
Marc:Dig up your yards, dig up your current sprinkler situation and get rid of all of that and just sort of welcome back the desert.
Marc:If you've been to Phoenix or Tucson or Utah, that's where L.A.
Marc:'s going.
Marc:Just another desert town with the heat beaten down.
Marc:No more yards, no more trees.
Marc:I guess maybe the palm trees will be all right.
Marc:Probably more cacti.
Marc: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.
Marc:And if if you don't honor what it says, you will be fined or have to learn to live without water.
Marc:So that's comforting.
Marc:Just get ready for the desert and get ready for the big gauge out in the yard.
Marc:Thank you, Scott.
Marc:It's sobering, but I appreciate being sort of educated.
Marc:So that said, the rain came, but not enough rain.
Marc:So look...
Marc: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.
Marc:And I thought we would have that kind of conversation because I kind of remember meeting him before.
Marc: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.
Marc:And this is me talking to Brett Morgan.
Marc:You see, I was just talking about that with my producer about these sanctioned docs that are pretty common in music.
Marc:And, you know, I've watched...
Marc:The ZZ Top one.
Marc:I watched the Lynyrd Skynyrd one.
Marc:And I watched the Clapton one.
Marc: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.
Marc: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.
Marc:It's marketing tool.
Guest:Yeah, that's all, yeah.
Guest:When Mick hired me to do Crossfire Hurricane, it was 2011, and he said he wanted to do something for the 50th anniversary, but...
Guest:What he didn't tell me was they were planning to tour in November of that year.
Guest:And so, ultimately, I was making a promotional product.
Guest:I just didn't know.
Guest:You know, it makes sense because they're basically marketing tools, advertisements for the product, the band.
Guest:I've been very lucky on Montage of Heck and on Moon Age Daydream, the executors gave me Final Cut.
Guest:And, you know, that's a huge risk because you're putting the whole brand, if you think of it as a brand.
Marc:Well, they do.
Marc:Certainly, Duncan does.
Marc:You know, I did a movie about...
Marc:Bowie that he wouldn't sign off on.
Marc:I had nothing to do with the movie.
Marc:I just played an A&R guy.
Marc:And I've talked to Duncan before, but they're very protective of that estate.
Guest:In my situation with Moon Age, it was the opposite, where once I acquired the rights, the executor said, David's not here to approve the film.
Guest:It's never going to be David Bowie on David Bowie.
Guest:It needs to be Brett Morgan on David Bowie and you need to embrace that.
Guest:So from the very beginning, it was one artist's interpretation of another and with no strings attached and full access to anything in the archive.
Guest:And Cobain's executive, David Burns, gave me the same permission.
Guest:And I remember when David, when I had the first cut, I called him up and I said, I'm ready to show you the film.
Guest:And he said, am I going to like it?
Guest:And I was like, well, you're not going to sell any T-shirts.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So it depends on what you're looking for.
Guest:But I think in both cases, they were looking for something authentic.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And they rolled the dice that it would work out okay.
Right.
Marc:Well, yeah, I mean, and also, I mean, those two documentaries are what you did both of are very different approaches to that type of film.
Marc:You know, I mean, they're they're different.
Marc:I could see the seeds of what realizing the Bowie doc became in the Cobain doc.
Guest:I have tried to make each film in my career like a theme park ride of the subject.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:So they're not really documentaries that are... Cobain probably more so than the other ones.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But they're all designed to kind of personify the subject.
Guest:They're meant to be the act of experiences.
Guest:So Bowie is not a film about David Bowie.
Guest:It's a film that's designed to sort of...
Guest:Be Bowie.
Guest:It's the experience of Bowie.
Guest:From your point of view.
Guest:Clearly, yeah, yeah.
Guest:What's interesting about that, but wait, before we embark on the full discussion.
Guest:What would have been interesting if I did it from your point of view.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:I mean, there is no way, I mean, obviously, yeah, your point of view.
Marc:But there's no, you know, I had this conversation with Barbara Kopel about the notion of journalism when it comes to documentary, and she was like, that doesn't exist, and that's not our responsibility.
Guest:Yeah, I'm not a journalist.
Marc:But it was my misconception at the time, just because I don't know what's wrong with my old-timey head, that somehow or another, there was some... That was the motivating force.
Marc:But I know that's not true.
Guest:Because we're raised in a generation that trusted...
Guest:Walter Cronkite 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
Guest:There's still an onus.
Guest:It's still an onus that when people are going to a nonfiction film, that it's somehow fact-based, information-based.
Marc:Sure, but now, given...
Marc:You know, even the work of... I mean, it's just a nature of... Even when I talk to my producer about studying photography, that in order to establish photography as an art form, they had to break it into two schools of thought, which were documentarians and artists.
Marc:And I guess also with film, I mean, you know, when you look at using reality or pieces of it, you deal with movies like, I would say, a source for...
Marc: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 is up to you.
Marc:We have bits and pieces of found footage or footage of this or that to make a point.
Marc:But I think when you look at the Cobain doc, that's sort of more traditional doing in that doc a fairly straight up talk to the friends kind of doc.
Marc:Yeah, that's true.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But before we get into it, though, I saw Doug Herzog at the screening last night.
Marc:And I asked him, because didn't we do a thing for Comedy Central?
Guest:We did a pilot in 2003, I want to say, for Comedy Central called Confessing It.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Based on eating it.
Guest:Yes, with Patton Oswalt, Patrice O'Neill.
Guest:I mean, he was an amazing cast.
Guest:Bob Schimmel, too, right?
Guest:Bob Schimmel.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Moon Unidzappa was on it.
Guest:Me?
Guest:You were on it?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But all I remember is the couch.
Guest:You were on a couch, yeah, on a set that I, yeah, at Sony Studios in New York.
Marc:Yeah.
Yeah.
Marc:But the premise was, tell the story, and you were going to do the magic animation thing, right?
Guest:Yeah, I didn't want to animate it.
Guest:That's why I never got pushed forward.
Guest:I thought the stories were so good that they didn't need to be animated.
Guest:Oh, then they didn't want it?
Guest:No, see, I get ... There was the ...
Guest:The Comedy Central wanted it to be, your story is animated, and we'd drift off into animation, but I couldn't take my eyes off the storytellers.
Guest:Right, sure.
Guest:And I didn't see there was any reason to do that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I thought it would be really kind of shitty and gimmicky, so it didn't get- So that was it.
Marc:That was it.
Marc:So yeah, I remember that.
Marc:I remember the stage.
Marc:I remember Big Red Couch.
Marc:Yep.
Marc:And I remember seeing Schimmel and I remember people around.
Marc:There was no audience, so no.
Guest:There was an audience.
Guest:We did one day without an audience and then we brought an audience in and I flipped the script.
Guest:So I had you on a white psych and then I flipped it to like, I had another setup that looked like kind of, that was designed like Lenny.
Marc:Oh, like a nightclub?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, okay.
Marc:So, but that was right on the... What was that?
Marc:That was you coming out of the success of The Kids Stays in the Picture.
Marc:Yes, yeah, yeah.
Marc:Which employed the sort of like the exciting zooming into still photographs and three-dimensionalizing them.
Marc:Yeah, photo animation, yeah.
Marc:Photo animation.
Marc:That was the big thing.
Marc:And basically, that doc...
Marc:Because of the weird, almost underground popularity of the audio book, which was being passed around.
Marc:I remember it was on tape.
Marc:And it was something that you could buy.
Marc:But people were passing it around like, you know, you can't get this shit.
Marc:It was like two or three, maybe three or four cassettes of him talking.
Marc:And it was like Satan.
Marc:He was like Satan talking.
Yeah.
Marc:I mean, it was just like listening to just a devil that had the time of his life.
Guest:Have you heard Patton's impersonation?
Marc:Yeah, I remember him doing it back in the day.
Marc:He did a bit on it.
Guest:He did okay.
Guest:But that film, speaking of what we were talking about, what we were speaking with earlier, the first line of that film is there are three sides to every story.
Guest:Your side, my side, and the truth.
Guest:Known is lying.
Guest:Memories serve each differently or something.
Guest:That was, for me...
Guest:a massive political bomb onto the documentary, this idea of documentary as truth.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest: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 know,
Guest:not an objective truth, but I think something that's more truthful to Bob to revealing the character that's being depicted.
Marc:And that was something he said in his book.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And was that the reason that you said, like, was that what made you say, I'm doing this guy?
Guest:No, I wanted to do Bob because I wanted to make a documentary comedy.
Guest:And it's really hard when you're making a documentary, unless you're doing it on a comedian, to create... Think about it.
Guest:In the history of documentary, there's Hands on a Hard Body, American Movie.
Guest:I mean, there's a real handful of...
Marc:Yeah, and I'm not even sure American movie set out to be that.
Marc:But it's really funny.
Marc:Oh, no.
Marc:It's great.
Marc:It's great.
Marc:But ultimately, it's rooted in a profound sadness and delusion.
Marc:As most comedy usually is.
Marc:True.
Marc:The sadness being the point of view of the person and the delusion to think that they can make it as a comic.
Marc:But okay, so I do remember you did use that footage of him playing a lunatic of his brief acting career.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:To pretty good use.
Guest:Yeah, and the photos in that were...
Guest:We sold that film before we made it to Focus Features, the company that became Focus Features.
Guest:So it was a documentary that was designed to go into movie theaters.
Guest:And so we felt we had to do something different, not just talking head and what have you.
Guest:And Bob's...
Guest: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.
Guest:This is Bob's ache.
Guest:It's sort of a distorted truth, if you will.
Marc:Well, that's sort of like that old French new wave trick of you're watching a movie.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, it was a Brechtian technique to pull you out of it.
Guest:And yet at the same time, it serves to be seductive and sublime
Guest:So it's seducing you.
Guest:It draws you in.
Guest:It draws you in, yeah.
Marc:Right.
Marc:It had a profound impact.
Marc:But already... So where do you come out of?
Marc:I mean, what was the beginning of it?
Marc:Because clearly with this Bowie movie, you've launched into some other thing in the sense that you...
Marc:Ultimately, my feelings about Bowie probably shifted watching it.
Marc:Probably not for the better.
Marc:Interesting.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But it seems to me, though, in talking about subjectivity, what you were doing with this subject was moving through ideas about time, art, death, death.
Marc:Work, love, life, and honesty.
Marc:Through a guy like Bowie who talked the way he did about things and also presented the way he did and evolved and changed the way he did, it was almost an amazing palette for you as somebody to explore these ideas.
Absolutely.
Guest:Possibly the best canvas ever, yeah.
Marc:So to me, it's a transition into something that is, I guess it still falls within documentary, but this is a big movie about big ideas, and it's specifically an art film, really.
Marc:Is that wrong to call it that?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yes and no.
Guest:I mean, do we consider Bowie's music art music or pop music?
Guest:And I think that what Bowie did is he created art music that also has pop music.
Marc:Sure.
Guest:Anything he created in the Berlin period is straight up avant-garde, experimental music.
Guest:And his construction, how he arrived there-
Guest:And the techniques he employed can only be considered, if you will, art.
Marc:Well, it's interesting because, yeah, right.
Marc:Okay, so you focused on that.
Marc:You're conscious of it.
Guest:So I had a conversation early on after I got the keys to the archive.
Guest:And I flew back to New York.
Guest:And I sat down with Bill Zisplat, who's David's executor, was his manager for years.
Yeah.
Guest:And I said, Bill, Bohemian Rhapsody had come out.
Guest:And I saw Bohemian Rhapsody 14 times the first 15 days.
Guest:The biopic?
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:I saw the sound in the movie.
Guest:I was fascinated by the mix.
Guest:And...
Guest:And I realized, and you know, like Rocketman was coming, and it was like, I was like, look, we can approach this, there's a way to make this film that is incredibly accessible, like a jukebox musical.
Guest: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
Guest:a significant number for a nonfiction file.
Guest:Or we design and package it like Bowie, which is a little more challenging, a little more engagement.
Guest:But a little more experimental.
Guest:And Bill looked at me and was like, well, that's your problem.
Guest:I can't imagine that they're really concerned about making money.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So what I realized shortly thereafter was the way to make the most...
Guest:pop or accessible David Bowie film, if we believe that David Bowie's music can be pop or accessible, is to sort of mirror Bowie.
Guest:And so the Bohemian Rhapsody version for Bowie is hopefully Moon Age Daydream, which is... Well, that's interesting.
Guest:Which is, a Bowie film cannot be, should not be...
Marc:a through z wikipedia that doesn't get you or believing played by anybody well you you had that yeah well no i saw that happen right in front of me it's difficult you know and but you know oddly you know johnny flynn did not do a bad job no you know like it's bowie is ridiculous yeah and and and certainly at that point in his career it was almost embarrassing and
Marc:And, like, I didn't really know that, you know, when I started doing that movie.
Marc:I thought, like, hey, look, no shit's going to fall on me.
Marc:He's the guy, right?
Marc:But when I looked at what he was drawing from research-wise, it's ridiculous.
Marc:And even watching your movie, like, look, I stopped with him.
Marc:But with Bowie, probably at Scary Monsters.
Marc:And that came out in high school, when I was in high school.
Marc:And I might have checked back in around Let's Dance, and I did see him at Foxboro Stadium on the Let's Dance tour, but I was so far away, it didn't have an impact.
Marc:But, you know, when I was a kid, I was in it, you know, and I and I had tutelage from an avant garde musician in the town I grew up in, you know, in terms of, you know, what Eno meant, what you know, what Hassel meant, what Fred Frith meant, what that world meant in the residence and this and that, you know, in coming into what became that Berlin period and understanding some of that.
Marc:But ultimately.
Marc: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.
Guest:People who know things, like, if you know, if you have your own, you know a little bit about Bowie, a lot about Bowie.
Marc:No, probably middle.
Guest:Middle, okay.
Guest:You bring that to the film.
Marc:Sure.
Guest:And you fill in the blanks.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Ultimately what happens in the movie for me is that this guy, and it happened a bit with the Cobain one too, is that whatever you're doing, in the way that you humanize these guys,
Marc:What you're up against is the myth versus the sort of weird, fragile egos that they are and also the sort of half-baked people that they are.
Marc:Like with Cobain, it's very hard, even in the shadow of the music and whatever the fuck his life 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.
Marc:And with Bowie, you know, it's hard not to watch and go like, holy shit, 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 L.A.
Marc: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.
Marc:Mm hmm.
Marc:through exhaustion, overwork, drugs, whatever the fuck it was, by the time he gets to Berlin, he had to have almost died, in my mind.
Marc:Does that track for you?
Marc:I think he was 85 pounds when he... Right.
Marc:So by the time he gets to Berlin, he's got no choice but to regroup somehow and to approach it honestly 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...
Marc:for however many records is not who I am and I can't continue it because it almost killed me.
Marc:So then he aligns himself and collaborates and really gets his hand on the pulse of stuff.
Marc:I think he's a very good intuitive cipher of stuff.
Marc:But it seemed to me that seeing him talking in those pieces of footage about Berlin was about as honest as I ever imagined him capable of being.
Guest: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 chilling, sometimes deflecting, not wanting to get
Marc:But no matter what, in any manifestation, he was present because he liked to be jarring, too.
Marc:This was my single greatest takeaway of David.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Was that he viewed each moment as an opportunity for an exchange for growth.
Guest:Yeah.
Yeah.
Guest: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.
Guest:And then he gets into the mid to late 80s and suddenly he's being interviewed by Entertainment Tonight.
Guest:And I would see the pre-roll before the cameras are rolling and David just engaging with them.
Guest:And he never condescended.
Guest:He never looked down.
Guest:He would talk to them about books he just read and trying to share stuff.
Guest:And it was like...
Guest:I was kind of in awe.
Guest:I was like, why is he even talking to this person?
Guest:They haven't done their work.
Guest:And that's where I just kind of honed in that it was like every moment, he made every moment matter.
Guest:And it was most illuminated by seeing him with these really dodgy reporters and seeing how he was there.
Guest:But he would, when he was touring Berlin, the character,
Guest:people like to refer to characters with David and the movie.
Guest:I don't talk about characters other than Ziggy.
Guest:Um, someone asked me the other day what my favorite character was.
Guest:And I said, well, I don't know if this is an official character, but I like the professor.
Guest:The professor was the character, if you will, when he was promoting heroes, um,
Guest:in the mid 70s, who was a great intellect, who loved talking about chaos and fragmentation and Nietzsche and everyone, and Einstein and Freud breaking down the fabrics of art.
Guest:And he got off, and this is why he's trying to sell heroes.
Guest:And he said something there,
Guest: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.
Guest:He's not a futurist.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And what I started to recognize was that Bowie, and again, I think people tend to think he's a futurist.
Guest:There's this interview where he's talking about the internet that gets put on social media every three weeks.
Guest:Right.
Guest:He wasn't a futurist.
Guest:He was like a great artist, more sensitive to what was happening now.
Guest:The rest of us just took a little longer to process it.
Marc:I understand what you're saying.
Marc:And I guess going back to what I'm saying is that it seemed to me the reason that resonated with me, not in terms of character, was that it felt to me that it was the first time he was fully taking responsibility for his
Marc:for his drive as an artist and being collaborative in a way that was a lot more conscious.
Marc:And I also think he knew he was down for the count.
Marc:I think he knew that whatever he had done was done.
Marc:And either he was gonna live the rest of his life playing those fucking 15 songs that were hits,
Marc:Or he was going to take a chance.
Marc:There was a vulnerability there of a guy who had emerged from an experimental life and was going to take more responsibility over what he saw as expression.
Guest:Can I offer another path forward for that?
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Because you suggested he would just play those same songs or whatever.
Guest: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, cling on to that success and that formula.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And what Bowie did and what I think is so revolutionary about the Berlin thing is he blew the whole system up.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he said, I'm not even going to write songs anymore.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I don't have a parallel for that.
Guest:It would be like James, I don't know, maybe Christopher Nolan, a filmmaker who works with a huge ensemble.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Saying, I'm going to go make this other film with a camcorder by myself.
Guest:It was so stripped down.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest: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... 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.
Guest:And Bowie wasn't a joke.
Guest:And he could have very easily written eight more albums and they would have sold great.
Guest:And Lowe sold great, but he did it on his terms.
Guest:And then, you know, talking about Let's Stance, to me, one of the revelations when I was going through all this stuff is, so we're, I think, the same age.
Guest:I'm 57, 58.
Guest:You're a little younger.
Guest:I just helped you out.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'm 53.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So Scary Monsters was my introduction.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I was seventh grade in punk ish enough to think the let's stands, you know, was a bit of a sellout.
Guest:Um, and by the time he got to the one after that, it was like this, this is, yeah.
Guest:Um, when I was listening to interviews for the film, there was this great interview with Lisa Robinson, um, great music journalist.
Guest:And, uh,
Guest:And David, it was pre Let's Dance.
Guest:It's in the film.
Guest: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.
Guest:And so imagine this, Mark, 15 years into his career where most artists are like retiring or playing the heritage circuit.
Guest:He actually says as a social experiment,
Guest:Now I'd like to try pop stardom.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's like a movement, like a Picasso movement.
Guest:He's like, I've tried this, I've tried this, I've tried this, let's try this.
Guest:Let's be a superstar.
Guest:And then becomes the biggest superstar in the world, and then it becomes sort of a Greek tragedy in the sense that he stayed too long.
Guest:He enjoyed the trappings of success.
Marc:Yeah, because that's where the turn, like, it's sort of interesting.
Marc:When he's saying, like, I just love to be an entertainer.
Marc:That was death.
Guest:That was the death now.
Guest:And it's funny, my distributor was trying to put a piece on...
Guest:tick tock you know like a quick little sandbite so they they pulled that thing where he talks about planning for a future 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
Guest:I think the thing with Amon, though, is he had to sort of get bankrupt, if you will.
Guest:I don't think he would have arrived at that station if he had skipped out of Let's Stans quicker.
Guest:If he had done three years there and said, okay, moving on to the next, our thing.
Guest:I think that he had...
Guest:he wasn't gaining satisfaction through his work.
Guest:And it was from that point that he was like, there's something that I'm missing.
Guest:I'm not an apologist, but I will say this.
Guest:So when I met David in 2007,
Guest:I met with him to talk about a hybrid nonfiction film.
Guest:Not this, something different.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we met at his office on 57th Street.
Guest:We sit down at a small little space.
Guest:There's four of us in the room.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you know how these things usually go.
Guest:You go in for a pitch and it's a lot of people kissing ass or whatever.
Guest:And I sit down and David immediately launches into a pretty harsh critique of my most recent film.
Guest:Which was?
Guest:It was a movie called Chicago 10.
Guest:The animated movie.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I can't say he was entirely wrong in retrospect.
Guest:But did you say, hey, we take chances?
No.
Guest:By the way, this is what I was freaking me out because he starts, when I say he's ripping me, it felt very much like an assault.
Guest:And he wasn't caustic in it.
Guest:He was saying it in a very polite way.
Guest:He was like, I didn't care for that at all.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he said, have you seen the Weather Underground by any chance?
Guest:And I said, the PBS documentary, the Talking Head one?
Guest:And he goes, yes, I much prefer that one.
Guest:And I was like, wow, that's really interesting because that's very kind of traditional.
Guest:And I would have thought you would have appreciated some of what I was doing.
Guest:And then his assistant who was in the room said, what's your favorite Bowie album?
Guest: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.
Guest:And David locked in on me and goes, touche.
Guest:Nobody has ever said, I mean, do you ever hear someone say touche in conversation?
Guest:It's like you see it in movies.
Marc:Well, I mean, one of the things that you really capture pretty thoroughly in this documentary is that he was kind of a dork.
Marc:And, you know, that there is this underneath thing, underneath whatever the hell he's doing is this ridiculous mime and this ridiculous, you know, sort of posturing dance.
Marc:It's like...
Guest:Well, I don't know if it's dark.
Guest:What I dig about it is he's not the greatest dancer.
Guest:He's not the greatest singer.
Guest:He's not the greatest actor.
Guest:He's certainly not the greatest mime.
Guest:There you go.
Guest:But he's putting himself out there, and he's putting himself out there.
Guest:This is the price David pays for taking a shot at you in 2007.
Guest:Whoa, whoa, whoa.
Guest:Let me finish that story, Mark.
Guest:So that he said, I said, well, I didn't really appreciate anything since Let's Dance.
Guest:I hadn't heard anything he had done since Let's Dance.
Guest:I was just being a bit of a dick.
Guest:And David passes.
Guest:In 2016, I received the assignment to work on this film.
Guest:An assignment?
Guest:Whatever you want to call it.
Guest:I did.
Guest:I hired myself to make the film.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The time had come.
Guest:So I start going through the catalog.
Guest:I fucking love post-95 Bowie.
Guest:I know you were- No, no, no.
Marc:The Tin Machine, I played the shit out of the Tin Machine.
Guest:Heathens, to me, speaks so much to where I am right now in my life.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I got to give it a go.
Guest:You got to give it a go.
Guest:Listen to Heathens, The Rays.
Marc:Look, The Day After and Darkstar, I got into.
Marc:I like Darkstar.
Marc:I like the musicians that he pulled together there.
Marc:It was an inconsistent record for a death note, but it was okay.
Guest:I think what happened after Iman is after the 80s, all of us who were fans pre Let's Dance, I think a lot of people stopped paying attention.
Guest:He was at a much better place than he'd ever been.
Guest:Emotionally.
Marc:Well, that's the other thing I was going to tell you is that, you know, that, you know, you dug into that Terry stuff and I think it was important.
Marc:And I think his struggle for, you know, against and with mental illness was a real thing.
Marc: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.
Marc:So by the time Iman comes, you realize like, well, you know, he's finally...
Marc:You know, figured out that, you know, life is beautiful.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And that and I get that, you know, and then I appreciate it.
Marc:And it was touching.
Marc:And it did, you know, in a less cynical way, kind of save the character of Bowie for me in the film, you know, in a genuine way, because I believed it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And, you know, you you made that I could feel that.
Marc:I like that footage too of him with the 12-string guitar, like clearly the grown-up kind of elder Bowie playing the hits in a way that he could find palatable.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:What was that from?
Guest:That was from his 50th birthday party at Madison Square Garden.
Guest:That was something.
Guest:Yeah, it was.
Guest:It was really... Well, you know what's interesting is I'm sure you noticed that the...
Guest:This was one of my, again, I had never, prior to giving myself the job, I had never read a book on David, per se.
Guest:David talks in the film about how alienation and isolation are a stock in trade, but he never feels alienated and isolated.
Guest:During the 70s, during what I call the transit period, post-Berlin, pre-Let's Dance,
Guest:I thought that 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.
Guest:And I never thought of it like that.
Guest:And he didn't present it that way himself.
Guest:He presented it as, I'm on the move to gain experience.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Like it was never- Sure, we all rationalize ourselves.
Marc:Right, right.
Guest:And so I did find that kind of illuminating a bit because he was so insightful about his goals and objectives.
Guest:And I thought that was one area that he wasn't able to necessarily overtly connect to or maybe not want to discuss with the- Well, I think there is that element of him that is like kind of British.
Marc:That there is a lack of communication about emotions in all the games he's sort of playing.
Marc:Because he couldn't even admit that, really, there's that one bit of interview where he kind of mischaracterizes love and then kind of corrects himself later, right?
Guest:No, he says he can't love it.
Guest:No, it's a contradiction, I suppose.
Guest:No, he says he loves love, but he cannot invite it into his life because he's too selfish.
Guest:Yeah, it takes up too much time.
Guest:That's pretty honest.
Guest:It's about the most honest thing I've ever heard.
Guest:I mean, I wish there were more, there would be less divorces in this town.
Marc:I guess, but that's also given whether or not you can express or feel love.
Marc:properly you know like what is the definition of that you know you you know he clearly has some sort of like his the way he holds his ground on stage is very interesting and it's not it's unlike anybody else that there's an intensity and almost a of looking far and away kind of thing that that is that is in and of itself kind of distant
Marc:You know, he's not needy up there.
Guest:No.
Guest:No.
Guest:I mean, especially if you saw the 95 Nine Inch Nails tour.
Guest:Well, he had a piece of that, right?
Guest: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-
Guest: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?
Guest:Yeah, Reeves on guitar.
Guest:By the end of those shows, there were half-empty arenas because people were there to see Nine Inch Nails.
Guest:Who went on before him?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And...
Guest:And he wasn't changing it up.
Guest:Like he could have changed the set list halfway into that tour, but like.
Guest:Fuck you.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:It's kind of fucking awesome.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, let's go back now because like I think we've kind of like explored that.
Marc:You know, in terms of like, you know, I like the way that they like the one thing that that keep coming up that that I kept trying to wrap my brain around because of the nature of how he died and knowing he was going to die and not everyone else knowing he was going to die and kind of writing this record in the last record, you know, in the shadow of his own death was kind of like great.
Marc:And you want to kind of put a bunch of magical thinking onto that.
Marc:And you want to bring Crowley back into it and symbols and everything else.
Marc:There was some sort of through line.
Marc:about life, I don't know.
Marc:There was a way he was looking at death or moving towards it that seemed to make it part of a continuum, not so much on a spiritual level, but maybe that I find provocative.
Marc:And I'm not putting my finger on it right now.
Marc:Do you know what I'm talking about?
Guest:Yeah, I mean, the theme is transience to the whole family.
Guest:It is transience, yeah.
Guest:And at the end, the last thing he says is,
Guest:something along the lines of, does it matter?
Guest:Like why, if we're gonna fry out, why should we even invest in this thing?
Guest:And he says, you do it just to do it.
Guest:You know, just to carry on.
Marc:But I mean, given that this movie is all about
Marc: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.
Marc:I mean, did this... What did you learn from... Why were... It's all about death.
Guest:So, in...
Guest:January 5th, 2017.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest: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.
Guest:Of what?
Guest:Of the movie Tower, an animated documentary.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And I had a massive heart attack.
Guest:In your car?
Yeah.
Guest:No, in the movie theater.
Guest:Oh my God.
Guest:And fortunately we were three minutes from Cedars.
Guest:I flatlined in the ER and was then put in a coma for a week.
Guest:It was my son's birthday.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And my daughter's born on David's birthday.
Guest:So I was in a coma on her birthday year to the day David died.
Guest:And I was 47, and I didn't have a heart attack by accident.
Guest:I had a heart attack because my life was totally out of control.
Guest:I smoked.
Guest:I ate like shit.
Guest:I didn't exercise.
Guest:I was workaholic, worked seven days a week.
Guest:Totally stressed out.
Guest:No balance in my life.
Guest:And when...
Guest:I, when I started to, you know, recover, I began the research in a Bowie.
Guest:And so I had...
Guest:And when you have an incident like this, right?
Guest:I had three young, three preteen kids.
Guest:And you ask yourself, so if I die, what's the message?
Guest:What was the purpose of my life?
Guest:And I was like, oh, my kids used to give me these Father's Day cards.
Guest:They would say, dad, thanks for showing me the great work ethic.
Guest:I'm like, no irony.
Guest:And I was like, what's the message of my life?
Guest:That you work hard and you die at 47.
Guest:And it was from that vantage point that I started
Guest:ingesting Bowie and started the Bowie research.
Guest: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.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:But you needed answers.
Guest:But suddenly I realized through Bowie, there would be this opportunity to provide a roadmap for my children, a sort of blueprint for how to live a balanced and fulfilled life.
Guest:And that's kind of the messaging of the film.
Guest:Bowie wasn't...
Guest:gaining knowledge for Nirvana.
Guest:There was something that he was trying to drive towards.
Guest:It was just improving the day-to-day.
Guest:Right.
Guest: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 to improve your own music.
Marc:No, I, I, yeah, no, that's true.
Marc:But I'll, yeah, you go, sadly, I think most people go for nostalgia.
Guest:They go to have a, a, a, a, a illustrated Wikipedia of, of our, which is fine, which is not a bad thing.
Marc:But like ultimately if it's good, even if it's, it's more kind of a sorted and, and hacky, you know, you do see something you didn't see before.
Guest:I, I, I,
Guest: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.
Guest:And I was like, wow, this is really good.
Guest:Not good in like art film good, but it's really entertaining and it's really easy.
Guest:And I was like kind of, why am I making it so difficult for myself?
Guest:The Bee Gees film is the Bohemian Rhapsody when I sat down with the estate and said we can do one of two ways with this.
Marc:But the reason that you do it the way you do it is because you have a formidable creative ego and the only way...
Marc:Is that what it's called?
Marc:And the only way that you can really weigh these guys is to move through it with your own tone and creating whatever you're serving the Bowie thing is that you have feelings about Bowie 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 and your own point of view in this you are equal to Bowie in the presentation of
Marc:Bowie.
Guest:Well, in this instance on the film, yes, where it's a collaboration.
Guest:But you're making choices about how to depict this guy's life.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:No, no.
Guest:It's a collaboration.
Guest:I don't know why this is going to sound controversial, but all nonfiction is autobiographical.
Guest:I mean, this sounds, it's so trite.
Guest:It's going to be controversial to nine people.
Marc:There's not going to be a lot of clickbait on that one.
Guest:Headline!
Guest:But I will say, as someone who creates biographies, 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 personally and be more direct about what I'm exploring.
Marc:That must have started... I mean, because the OJ doc is a big piece of work.
Marc:That's an important...
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Or whatever in terms of, you know, what you were able to do.
Marc: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 fuck all you guys.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:We're going to reel this.
Marc:We're bringing it all in.
Marc: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.
Guest:But it's just a question of if you've seen it before, why in the world are you doing it?
Guest: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.
Guest:I'll tell you what happened respectfully to ESPN.
Guest:They got my show.
Guest:It's called June 17th, 1994.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And what did I receive?
Guest:The same thing I received on The Kid Stays in the Picture, the same thing I received on every film.
Guest:I got a note from the network saying, you need to go put Talking Head interviews in.
Guest:And I was like, well, I'm not gonna do that.
Guest:You guys can take the film back.
Guest:But if I put Talking Head interviews in, it's cookie cutter.
Guest:And the art is that it's not that.
Guest:And it allows the audience to kind of bring their own interpretation.
Guest:Fortunately, they backed off and let me do the film.
Guest:But what I realized then is that
Guest:When you're getting network notes, it homogenizes everything.
Guest:They're giving the same notes.
Guest:I've been Netflix documentaries.
Guest:I think they're so unbelievably entertaining.
Guest:And this will probably make sure I never work at Netflix again.
Guest:It's okay.
Guest:Yeah, it's okay.
Guest:There's a few other places.
Guest:But I was doing a talk about the construction of Moon Age somewhere, and this woman who I later found out was a top exec at Netflix was in the audience, and she said, it sounds like you don't like to collaborate, and film is a collaborative medium.
Guest:And I said, well, I didn't really have the opportunity to collaborate.
Guest:I didn't have the budget and I had to make this film by myself.
Marc:But you're collaborating with the entire history of motion pictures and television because of the way you do it.
Guest: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.
Marc: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.
Guest:Yeah, so that it looks like everything else on their network.
Marc:But this is exactly why these artists become hacks.
Marc:The delivery system is hackneyed.
Marc:Like we were talking about before, maybe it's a stretch that the other people
Marc:the other trajectory of an artist like Bowie could have been to make more records that sounded like his hit records, is that once anybody thinks they get a system that makes some bread, they're going to lock everybody into it.
Guest:That's where my deep... Going back to the Berlin, where I just don't know what the... I don't have a parallel.
Guest:I mean, I don't... Can you think... Maybe we could probably do with actors, an actor who...
Marc:Yeah, I guess, who take chances.
Marc:But the chance of an actor just sort of like, well, you might not get cast as this again.
Guest:You ready for me to blow you away?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Here's the actor who I think has most emulated Bowie.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Nick Cage.
Guest:For sure.
Guest:Nick would do three romantic comedies in a row.
Guest:And you go, oh, he's a romantic comedy guy.
Guest:And then do the most depraved non-box office film where you go, no one's gonna see this, and you're kind of totally, your character is so depraved and vulgar, and you're coming off of these Frank Capper romances.
Guest:What are you doing?
Guest:And then going, I'm gonna flip the script again.
Guest:And those were, to me, very conscious, deliberate decisions to both keep it interesting for me.
Marc:Oh, did you see the new one?
Guest:The unbearable?
Guest:I did, yeah.
Marc:It's great.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:The self-awareness.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:And I loved Pig, but you're right.
Marc:Oh, Pig's Pig is incredible.
Guest:It's a fucking masterpiece.
Marc:But let me just go back to kind of build this up.
Marc:And also, I don't know if we really characterized Moon Age Daydream in terms of how visually spectacular it is.
Marc: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.
Marc:It's really kind of a...
Marc:An old school kind of, you know, punk rock film in some parts where, you know, you're just you know, you've got this incredible catalog of things that, you know, just go bang.
Marc:And, you know, you know, you're not asking why as a viewer, but you're sort of like, OK, you know, this is all part of it.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:So you're kind of bringing that all in.
Marc:I can't even imagine if we were still doing things on film, you would have been just in a room with thousands of strips of film hanging.
Marc:I don't even know what your desktop looked like in terms of what you were pulling from.
Guest:You know, the interesting thing about that is when Bowie was like a...
Guest:Cultural passport.
Guest:You know, I was introduced to Burroughs when I was a teenager through Bowie.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I was introduced to German expressionism.
Guest:And it would be or he would make a reference to some artist or like one word and that would trigger something.
Guest:So I wanted to incorporate some of that sort of.
Guest:vocabulary into the film where you don't have to know the reference.
Guest:If you get it, you get it.
Guest:And if you don't, you don't.
Marc:But it's not gratuitous.
Marc:That's interesting.
Marc:So it's rooted in decisions that you made.
Guest: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.
Guest:Oh, there you go.
Yeah.
Marc:But let's go back in terms of what drives you.
Marc:We talked about the kid stays in the picture.
Marc:And I think that line resonating with you about subjective.
Marc:And then the Cobain doc, what was the kernel?
Marc:And I know there's other ones.
Marc:And I really, look, I don't know if you listened to me talk to Jane Goodall, but we talked to her.
Guest:Yeah, that was great.
Marc:Yeah, where she's sort of like, well, he manipulated them.
Marc:I very much so.
Marc: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, existing footage of the day and some stuff, you know, from OJ's past.
Marc: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 an interesting document that represents the end of media culture as we know it.
Guest:Yeah, I mean, it didn't set out that way.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It just set it out to make a Bruckheimer documentary.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like, I was like, oh, we could do the car chase.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Like, great.
Guest:Yeah, but you made a choice that we're only going to use footage of the day.
Guest: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...
Guest:to be able to reflect on their own experiences, bring whatever.
Guest:My films, there's no forced narration, and I'm trying to invite the audience to participate.
Marc:Yeah, but I think by bringing all those things together, by bringing Arnold Palmer's last World Open, and then the Rangers winning the only time or the second time in history, and then the NBA playoffs.
Marc:Like, all this was happening simultaneously.
Marc:And then, you know, like, this horrendous story is unfolding, you know, with OJ.
Marc:And then by the end of the day, no one gives a shit about any of that other stuff.
Marc:And the world changes forever.
Marc:And just all that stuff with, you know, people off mic, you know, Costas.
Marc:And, you know, it was back in a time where some of these broadcasters had some humility around things and were sort of embarrassed in moments where they...
Marc:Didn't know how to report something or whether they should or, you know, but they were being pushed to follow the blood.
Marc:And now it's all like that.
Marc:But also this sort of strange, you know, these victories in sports and you just even dealing with Rangers fans.
Marc:It's just like and I like that about the Bowie movie to just this sort of disturbing.
Marc:uh uh lingering on on teenage fans who were were just so it was only disturbing in 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 data 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 well that yeah that's his own fault
Marc:Because, like, there would be no reason at that time where he wouldn't have been on stage with Phil Collins.
Marc:That's a good way of looking at it.
Marc:You know, like, you can't pull that shit anymore, dude.
Marc:You are Phil Collins.
Guest:You're so true.
Marc:But, like, I do like the... Even all the stuff around the OJ thing.
Marc:But I just thought that that was...
Marc:how they're all sort of different.
Marc:Because I've seen, I don't watch a shit ton of docs, but I watch Adam Curtis.
Marc:I watch his stuff.
Marc:Because I think that there is something that you guys are taking chances in different ways, but you're out there in the chaos.
Marc:You're out there on the edge of things, making decisions that are your own and provocative in a way that hasn't been seen in the medium before.
Guest:I think, again, I'll meet someone, a filmmaker, and when I did Montage Effect, I met this director who said, oh, you must have seen my film.
Guest:Who was that?
Guest:I don't want to say.
Guest:And I said, why would I have seen your film?
Guest:And they said, well, it's considered one of the great rock docs of all time.
Guest:Yeah, of course.
Guest:And I was like, well, that's weird.
Guest:Why would...
Guest:If I see something, this may sound really punkish.
Guest:If I've seen someone do something, then I can't do it.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:So I'd rather not see it.
Guest:Because to me, the enjoy and excitement is trying to be a pioneer and find a different way.
Guest:When we were cutting Montage of Heck, I walked into the edit room.
Guest:And my editor was, not my editor.
Guest:I always think, when someone says, I always think of when Mick Jagger got punched by Charlie Watts for calling him my drummer.
Guest: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.
Guest:And I said, what's wrong, man?
Guest:And he said, he said, oh man, I'm reading about this chapter where Kurt
Guest:you know, heard Nirvana on the radio for the first time.
Guest:I'm just so bummed we don't have the footage.
Guest:And I was like, why?
Guest:And he was like, well, because it's like the first time.
Guest:I was like, but we're not making that film.
Guest:Like that's the most cliched scene in like rock and roll history.
Guest:Like if we had that footage, I wouldn't even use it.
Guest:It's like, what's that to do with the story we're telling?
Guest:And then I said, you know, Kevin, 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.
Guest:It's like, this is what happened.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What's really exciting is when you don't have the footage and you have to like figure out how to create that
Guest:moment or that that experience and that to me is where it gets um 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 yeah
Guest:with all my films.
Guest:This one more so than any one I've done, which really pushed me into an area where I'm not comfortable, which is not a rigorous narrative.
Marc:Right, yeah, because you do a lot of time travel.
Marc:But also, you can sort of justify that.
Marc:It's a cut-up trip, man.
Guest:Well, it's a film that, again, from where we started, is intending to reconstruct the Bowie experience, which is the enigma, the mystery, the intimate, the sublime, and create an experience that presents that.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And the film is cut up, and there are references flying left and right, and it's all performance.
Guest:It doesn't strip away the persona of David Jones or Dave Bones, but that's why we love Bowie.
Marc:Right, but the thing that's beautiful about it, because he mentions chaos all the time, that there's this idea that it's there, and that to deny it is crazy.
Marc:And also he mentions this idea about all these different things that are happening in every moment around you.
Marc:You're just choosing whatever your little reality is at that moment.
Marc:But there's all this other stuff coming up.
Marc:But ultimately, the bed or the sort of through line, whatever intellectual through lines or spiritual through lines there are, is that you have the music.
Marc:And that, you know, you will, you know, you run, you know, almost loops at times.
Marc:So there's never a quiet moment.
Marc:There's always some piece of Bowie music kind of moving through all of this.
Marc:So no matter what the fuck happens or what the timeframe is, the continuity is the magic, which is the fucking music.
Marc:It's a jukebox musical with a rich subtext.
Marc:Well, no, but music is fucking magic.
Marc:And there's very few artists, and I was talking about this with my producer, that as I get older, there are bands that I will go back to.
Marc:The Stones are one of them, and that Beatles doc, and I'm not even that old, but I couldn't not watch that Beatles doc.
Marc:And it didn't make, of course it made me cry and freak out.
Marc:I'm like, oh my God, this is crazy.
Marc:They're just a dumb band.
Marc:You can't explain the magic.
Marc:Who the fuck can explain that?
Marc:But that is what makes these guys bigger than life, that makes them forever.
Marc:I don't feel this way about Bob Seger.
Marc:But if you're gonna take a bunch of Bowie songs, you got pretty guaranteed magic.
Guest:Well, that was, so the Bowie film started off as a series of 15 films.
Guest:That was a project I created called the IMAX Music Experience.
Guest:And the idea was that there would be the 15 biggest heritage and contemporary artists of all time
Guest:And I would create a space in an IMAX theater for just that.
Guest:So you can just go listen, see, experience, and not learn.
Guest:Well, this is going to be an IMAX thing, right?
Guest:Yeah, it's an IMAX exclusive for the first week.
Marc:That's great.
Marc:But but but getting back to like, you know, other people's work.
Marc:I mean, I only bring up Adam Curtis because, you know, I watch his stuff.
Marc:I haven't seen a lot of it.
Marc:But, you know, that hyper normalization and and the century itself and stuff is that, you know, he's barking up a different tree.
Marc:But the risk he's taking by, you know, mashing together stuff to have the audience, you know, you know.
Marc:go on these journeys of thought that are much more disturbing i mean 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 like it's fucking over dude but but but you know there is uh you know i just 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 film
Guest:No, I have, and I think he's brilliant.
Guest:He's far more intelligent than I am.
Guest:You're doing different things.
Guest:We're doing different things.
Guest:I think I work more emotionally.
Guest:I think I'm working on it more emotionally.
Marc:I'm glad you've got to figure it out for yourself how you're different.
Marc:That must have been a tough day for you.
Marc:That day must have started with, fuck.
Marc:God damn it.
Marc:Oh, you're fine.
Marc:Fuck.
Marc:Yeah, man.
Marc:But look, you've done great work.
Marc:But I do want to come back to, in terms of people watching the other stuff, too.
Marc:That, like, to go find that, you know, that the OJ one, June 17, 1994, because you can, it's just right there on Hulu.
Marc:And the Kurt Cobain one's on HBO Max, and it's easy to watch.
Marc: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.
Marc:And it has to do with music, right?
Guest:Well, here's what...
Guest:Montage was for me.
Guest:It was about our generation.
Guest:It was about the latchkey kid generation.
Guest:It was very specific to, and hopefully this is my entry point and then hopefully it transcends beyond this.
Guest:kids whose parents were married between 61 and 70.
Guest:It's a very macro moment.
Guest:The parents who got married because they wanted to fuck.
Guest:My parents, your parents.
Guest:My parents.
Guest:They wanted to have sex, so you had to get married when you were 18.
Guest:And then the 60s happened, and suddenly they're seeing everyone else having fun and fucking.
Guest:And then they're like, well, I want to do this too.
Guest:It's like when Kurt's mom said, is this it?
Guest:Is this all there is?
Guest:There's got to be something more for me.
Guest:I'm like,
Guest:You got a fucking kid.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like the time to have arrived there has passed.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Like when you have a kid, you kind of have to move beyond that.
Marc:But that's not on her.
Marc:It was generational.
Marc:It was generational.
Marc:Sure.
Guest:It was generational.
Guest:But so that was my entry point.
Guest:And Kurt's issues with shame were I had a...
Guest:a really serious speech impediment.
Guest:I couldn't speak until I was five and I was in therapy until I was 16.
Guest: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?
Guest:I mean, that was, I, I, I, you know, that was to my face, like, and standing, like, looking for an, like, no, I'm not, I'm all good.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:I mean, it was like, it was, yeah.
Guest:Hard to stay strong.
Guest:Yeah, it was, well, you do what you need to do, but, but there is some sense to, you know, I have some, some of those, well, we all do, and I think, you know,
Marc:Well, yeah, I mean, right.
Marc:And I remembered seeing it the first time, but I didn't remember the whole movie until I watched it again.
Marc:But I do remember the animated story of him needing to get his first sexual experience out of the way and returning to the house of the mentally ill person.
Guest:Now, do you remember, did you see it recently?
Guest:I just watched it, most of it.
Marc:I'm almost done.
Marc:We watched most of it.
Guest:What do you?
Guest:Did you think that that was...
Guest:a short fictional story, a piece of art that Kurt created, or did you feel that he was telling that to an interviewer like it was a true story?
Marc:Oh, I felt like, I didn't sense that there was an interviewer at the end of it, but I sensed he was telling a story about himself.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Because there are details of it that are not fictional, that can't be really manufactured.
Guest:What was interesting, that story became really controversial.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And it was...
Guest:And it was, there was Buzz Osborne from the Melvins came out and blasted the film because of it and said, oh, that story's bullshit.
Guest:If it had happened, I would have known.
Guest:And I was like, I remember being really confused because I was like, I thought it was really obvious that that was a short film.
Guest:fictional story that he wrote and then recorded because of his cadence he's not talking to someone he's using voices and he's 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
Guest:Oh, I animated it in part to make it very clear that it's not factual.
Guest:In fact, there's 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.
Guest:As he's saying that, you don't see that.
Guest:You see Kurt sitting up on the thing watching the train go by very deliberately to distance his narration.
Marc:Why do you think it's a fictional story?
Guest:And I don't think of it any different than Cobain's music.
Guest:I think that it has truths.
Guest:That's why it's fantastic.
Guest:It's filled with truths.
Guest:Are they historical truths?
Guest:Did these things really happen?
Guest:Did he sleep with that, as he calls a retarded girl, or is that a metaphor for something else, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest: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.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it was recorded on a tape he did with a lot of other poems and short stories.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:That one had a lot of what appeared to be biographical components.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But there was some stuff mixed in there as well that weren't necessarily directly biographical.
Guest:So at the beginning of Montage of Heck, I said this film is going to be told using Kurt's art, you know, both his music, short stories, blah, blah.
Guest:So to me, it was not intended to be like anything factual.
Guest:It's it's better than factual.
Guest:It gives you like a direct shot into his brain.
Guest:One way or the other.
Marc:It's art.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:The story of Montage was we're going to tell a biography through a third person autobiography and allow the artist's art
Guest:to tell the story.
Guest: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.
Marc:Huh.
Marc:Well, yeah, okay.
Marc:I get it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, I wonder though, I mean, what would it look like if you didn't do the interviews?
Guest:Oh, it would have been a montage of hack.
Marc:Now, how do you get to, like, you know, where do you fit this sweet kind of like sad Jane Goodall doc into?
Marc:How did that become part of the oeuvre?
Marc:Did you just say sad Jane Goodall doc?
Marc: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.
Marc:Yeah, it's devastating, yeah.
Guest:Nacho saw Montage of Heck.
Guest:And someone there called me up and said- Who saw it?
Guest:Who's that?
Guest:I'm sorry, National Geographic.
Guest:Oh, Nat Geo.
Guest:Okay, got it.
Guest:This is the true story of that film.
Guest:So supposedly the Murdochs, when they still own National Geographic, wanted to do a rebranding.
Guest:At that point in 2014, it had become a pretty dodgy reality, unscripted story.
Guest:and they kind of lost their identity a bit.
Guest:Nat Geo did.
Guest:Yeah, so there was this sort of directive to go back and sort of rebrand as this sort of adventurer explorer's place.
Guest:Jane's their iconic story.
Guest:I think I might have asked them since then, but I get a call from my agent said, National Geographic wants to talk to you about Jane Goodall.
Guest:I said, what?
Guest:I said, I don't know anything about science.
Guest:Haven't I seen that film a million times?
Guest:I have no interest.
Guest:And I was like, this is fucking weird.
Guest:Why would they call the guy who did Montage of Heck?
Guest:So I do a call with them.
Guest:All it takes is one person, you know, that liked the movie.
Guest:This is true.
Guest:I did a very quick call and my agent calls me back and says they want to do another call.
Guest:And I said, I don't want to do another call unless they agreed to Final Cut.
Guest:I don't want to waste anyone's time.
Guest:And they agreed to Final Cut, which I thought was totally insane if they're going to brand their whole...
Guest:If they want to use this to brand the network and they're going to give me final cut, I just did a montage of heck.
Guest:Like I said, we weren't selling any t-shirts, you know what I mean?
Guest:But anyway, they did.
Guest:And what I was interested in in Jane was, and again, all these things become very self-reflective.
Guest: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.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's what Jane was about.
Guest:How do you, how do you, how do you find that balance in life?
Guest:And, um,
Guest:you know, particularly for- Especially because she had, you know, several families.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Her family and then the monkeys.
Guest:Yeah, true, true.
Guest: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 who'd go out for those adventures.
Guest: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.
Guest:And all these women in the audience were going...
Guest:And he didn't get it.
Guest:And he was like, what?
Guest:What?
Guest:She's fucking, that was fucked up.
Guest:She dropped her kid off.
Guest:He was six.
Guest:And I had to look at him.
Guest:I was like, dude, you're not saying that about the dad.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Right, right, right.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:It's like, yeah.
Marc:We all got to learn.
Marc:There's a learning curve on this.
Marc:The respecting and empathizing for women learning curve.
Marc:It's a steep one for dudes.
Guest:But Jane was also like, that was an opportunity to do real life.
Guest:um very i mean like that footage yeah so yeah it's all there oh my god it was so incredible uh beautiful and uh 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
Guest:This is like the greatest film I have ever seen.
Guest: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.
Guest:Like we can't play with chimps in the wild.
Guest:That's never happening.
Guest:So it was like as fucked up as it was.
Guest:And there's a, you know, obviously you're watching and you're like,
Guest:we know better now because 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 yeah 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're gonna sell this movie no no this oh you mean like this selling it like yeah yeah yeah uh uh i don't know yet i don't know oh really yeah take a break
Guest:No, no, just sort of, I just finished another one recently.
Guest:What?
Marc:I can't.
Guest:Oh.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And what, do you read books?
Marc:What do you do?
Guest:Oh, for fun?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:My favorite thing is to just like look at clouds.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Just in your house, outside?
Guest:We have a house on the island in Hawaii.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Which one?
Guest:Big Island.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Up near Waipio Valley.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:How much time do you spend there?
Guest:As much as seemingly possible.
Guest:So I cut Bowie there for a big chunk of it.
Guest:I cut a lot of Jane there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And honestly, that's where I unplug...
Guest:and it's where the trade winds meet.
Guest:We're on the north coast, so there's no greater spectacle than watching the clouds kind of form above your head.
Guest:Yeah, I go to Kauai.
Guest:I used to go more.
Marc:I can't afford Kauai, so I'm in the big island.
Marc:I mean, I don't own a house there.
Marc:you know, but I, I don't, I'm not, I can't live there.
Marc:I mean, like, you know, if I, 11 days is it.
Guest:That's what everyone told me that I was going to get bored.
Guest:And I, we've been there seven or eight years and,
Marc:But I think on the Big Island, there's more to do.
Marc:Like, you know, Kauai is it.
Marc:You know, it's it.
Marc:You got a farmer's market.
Marc:You got two restaurants.
Marc:And then you hike.
Guest:Yeah, we don't even have that.
Guest:I mean, we're 30 minutes from a restaurant.
Guest:So I just, I stay put.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But you like it.
Guest:I love it.
Guest:all right and you you bring the you got 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 was she wanted to be outside she thought it would be uh yeah uh yeah she's very excited she's a filmmaker right she's filmmaker deborah is instead yeah um and we have three kids yeah they don't really like going there they're teenagers so it's uh oh it's like prison isolation
Guest:Yeah, well, it's sort of they're on their phones.
Guest:It doesn't really make sense for anyone.
Marc:Yeah, how does that play for you?
Marc:I mean, how do you adjust to that?
Marc:I guess we all are.
Marc:But when I see teenagers, it's still a weird shift for me to just watch everybody just looking at that thing in their hand.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:You got to remember that that's their language.
Guest:That's their norm.
Guest:And all we're doing is being like our parents looking at us going like, what these crazy fucking kids.
Guest:Sadly, most of us are going like, tell me how to do it.
Yeah.
Guest: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, like, you know, completely fucked up to just kind of like, that's how I see it.
Guest:And, you know, the way my dad used to want to listen to old time.
Guest:Now, I did like listening to the old time radio shows with my dad.
Guest:But it was totally anachronistic at the time he was doing it.
Guest:But he was like, hey, let's sit in the living room and listen to, you know, the Lone Ranger.
Guest:And it was like, can we watch television?
Marc:Sure.
Marc:But it was also not a, you know, I mean, like the how this takes over your brain is.
Marc:It's very different than analog.
Marc: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.
Marc:But once you fucking lock into this thing, it's all of you.
Marc: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.
Marc:Sorry there's nothing anymore.
Marc:Sorry for all the strange smoking ruins everywhere.
Marc:Yeah, people used to be able to live west of Utah.
Marc:Yeah, it's gonna be great.
Marc:Maybe I'm being too cynical.
Guest:Oh yeah, you had said earlier in their interview that the film had challenged your understanding or impression of Bowie.
Marc: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,
Marc:was kind of mythic and it was shallow in a way.
Marc:The fact that I did lose touch with him post Let's Dance, I didn't know a lot of that stuff.
Marc:I'd never been seeing any of the footage that you see.
Marc:I didn't care anymore, but how I held him in my heart and my mind was specific and I was in awe and had him, he was part of me in a very specific way.
Marc:So the way it changed, like I actually leaned into my girlfriend.
Marc:I said, at some point during the movie, I said, it's going to make me hate him.
Marc:If I keep watching, it's going to make me hate him.
Marc:Because of what you talked about, because of acknowledging that almost everything that he presented, there was a painful vulnerability to it.
Marc:And the risks that he took much of the time exposed an uncomfortable vulnerability that I don't know that I noticed.
Marc:in the Bowie that I had in my mind.
Marc:Why would that make you hate him, though?
Marc:Not hate him.
Marc:I was being facetious, but it would just humanize him to the point where I would have a hard time keeping him where I kept him.
Marc:But that happens with everybody.
Marc:I talk to people, but there was a point where...
Marc:And it happened when I made the movie about Bowie, when I had to go do the research to say, he couldn't have looked this ridiculous.
Marc:Not David Bowie, but there was a time where he really did mime for everybody.
Marc:And it was ridiculous.
Marc:But the way you frame it is that there's an incredible vulnerability in that.
Marc:I'm like, okay.
Marc:But it's embarrassing.
Marc:So I think what my thing is, I have a tremendous fear of embarrassment.
Marc:That's where my shame is in me.
Marc:I had an embarrassing mother and the way I overcome it is by putting myself, I became a comedian.
Marc:As Harry Shearer says, you do comedy to try to control why people laugh at you.
Marc:So there's that vulnerability, which makes me uncomfortable.
Marc:And, you know, 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.
Marc:I think it just made me uncomfortable.
Marc:So, but I can appreciate it.
Marc:I think what it did was made me realize that, like, a lot of the vulnerability, like, when you show those segments of him in The Elephant Man, I'm like, oh, my God.
Marc:I was always under the belief that this was some amazing effort in acting.
Marc:But you look at those scripts, I'm like, this is ridiculous.
Marc:I would feel terrible.
Marc:You know, where he's like, I have a home.
Marc:And I'm like, oh, my God.
Marc:You know?
Guest:Okay, this is how much I drink the Kool-Aid.
Guest:Deborah, my wife, came in, who was an actress on Broadway, and she saw this scene from The Elephant Man, and she goes, you gotta cut this.
Guest:And I was so deep in.
Guest:I was like, what are you talking about?
Guest:She goes, it's acting.
Guest:You gotta cut this.
Guest:And I was like...
Guest:I had no idea.
Guest:I was like, the vulnerability, like what he's saying, it's not John Merrick, it's him.
Guest:And again, this is what we said earlier.
Guest:It's not about being a virtuoso.
Guest:So even if you think, I don't think David's the greatest actor.
Guest:No, I get it.
Guest:Here's why that moment is so awe-inspiring.
Guest:Again, he's the biggest star in the world.
Guest:Doing this thing.
Guest:Doing this, going on to do The Elephant Man, which he's not really trained to do.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he's doing it with no prosthetics, and he's naked on stage.
Guest:And one of the things that I never got about Bowie until I started making this film is how deliberate his choice in characters were in relation to his...
Guest:own sort of exploration.
Guest:Like, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.
Guest:I'll never watch that film and not think of his brother.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's so obvious.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I just didn't know really the story of the brother.
Guest:Now I see the film.
Guest:I'm like, oh, it's about the character who's embarrassed by his brother and is like, you know, it stands.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I mean, it's so... And then when you see Bowie act on it now, it's like...
Marc: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.
Marc: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.
Marc:So they were always sort of presented as like, you know, this guy is doing it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Uh, so I think for me, you know, to get back to the shift in, 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.
Marc:And like, you know, you had this like two, like one minute piece and I'm like, he did not nail it.
Marc:Good talking to you, man.
Marc:Thanks, Mark.
Marc:There you go.
Marc:That was engaged.
Marc:I've been engaging lately.
Marc:Again, the movie Moon Age Daydream, which is totally worth seeing, opens in theaters this Friday, September 16th, including in IMAX theaters.
Marc:And let's continue this in a second.
Marc:Can you hang out?
Marc:Can you hang out?
Marc:Hang out.
Marc:Okay, so look, on Thursday, we've got Bradley Whitford back on the show.
Marc:He was on episode 909 back in 2018 after all the success of Get Out.
Marc:And you can go back and listen to that one before Thursday if you want.
Marc:Ever since then, he's been saying he would love to come back on.
Marc:So he did, for nothing in particular, just to hash it out.
Marc:And we hashed it.
Marc:We definitely got into some shit.
Marc:And also, here's a little heads up.
Marc:There will be new cat mugs available from Brian Jones on Thursday.
Marc:I'll mention it again at the beginning of Thursday's show, but those mugs tend to sell out very quickly.
Marc: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.
Marc:And remember, L.A., you just...
Marc:It's going to be desert again.
Marc:That's all.
Marc:Just dig up everything that uses water and figure out where you want your state gauge to be in the future.
Marc:We're going back to the desert.
Marc:It's going back to the way it used to be.
Marc:We're going primitive, people.
Marc:So, look, as I said, tomorrow night at Luna Lounge.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:At Largo.
Marc:Largo at the Coronet here in L.A.
Marc:with some music and comedy.
Marc:Hannah Einbinder will join us.
Marc:Me and Jimmy Vivino and Brandon Schwartzel and Ned Brower.
Marc:Next week, I'm in Tucson, Arizona at the Rialto Theater on September 16th.
Marc:Phoenix, Arizona at Stand Up Live on September 17th.
Marc:Boulder, Colorado at the Boulder Theater on September 22nd.
Marc:Fort Collins, Colorado at the Lincoln Center on September 23rd.
Marc:And Toronto, Ontario at the Queen Elizabeth Theater on September 30th and October 1st.
Marc:Then I'm in Livermore, California at the Bankhead Theater on October 6th.
Marc:And Carmel by the Sea, California, at the Sunset Center October 7th.
Marc:That will be an intimate show, just me and the four people that bought tickets for that.
Marc:I'll be in London, England at the Bloomsbury Theater Saturday and Sunday, October 22nd and 23rd.
Marc:I believe both those shows are sold out.
Marc:We may add a show.
Marc:I may be doing a live WTF there.
Marc:And I'll be in Dublin, Ireland at Vicar Street Wednesday, October 26th.
Marc:I have dates in November and December in Oklahoma City, Dallas, San Antonio, Houston, Eugene, Oregon, Bend, Oregon, Asheville, North Carolina, and Nashville, Tennessee.
Marc:And my HBO taping at Town Hall in New York City is on Thursday, December 8th.
Marc:Go to WTFPod.com slash tour for all your dates and ticket info.
Marc:Now let's play out.
Marc:Boomer lives.
Marc:Monkey in La Fonda.
Marc:Cat angels everywhere.