David Bowie's 'Stage' Concert Documentary: Brett Morgen Speaks

Although he released two albums during the final dozen years of his life, David Bowie had effectively retired from active duty, focusing on his family and, as his extensive posthumous catalog of sound and vision shows, curating his life’s work.

It’s been a treasure trove for longtime fans, but one thing in particular has been missing: Videos of his legendary concert tours from the 1970s. Aside from the legendary 1973 “Ziggy Stardust” farewell concert — which has been available for years but was finally released in its entirety in a 50th anniversary edition — there are TV appearances and occasional live footage, but nothing in full.

All that will change on Feb. 14, 2027, when “Stage,” Brett Morgen’s immersive concert experience of Bowie’s 1978 tour, will be premiered at Berlin’s Uber Arena. It is even less conventional than the director’s previous Bowie documentary, the Grammy-winning “Moonage Daydream,” which Variety described as “the first graduate-school music doc.” It will be presented on multiple screens in arenas, with immersive sound and an elaborate light show.

The tour was a landmark in Bowie’s career for many reasons. It was focused on songs from the challenging first two albums from his so-called “Berlin Trilogy,” “Low” and “Heroes,” which combined angular rock music with atmospheric instrumentals and included extensive contributions from Brian Eno. These songs often required patience from the audience, yet they show also included earlier crowd-pleasing hits like “Fame,” “The Jean Genie” and “Rebel Rebel,” as well as nearly half of his “Ziggy Stardust” album, which he’d barely performed live for several years.

“Stage” was created from meticulously restored footage taken from the final dates of the tour in London in July 1978. Bowie had commissioned director David Hemmings, who starred in the classic 1966 film “Blow-Up” and directed the considerably less-classic Bowie-starring film “Just a Gigolo.” However, Bowie was unhappy with the results and, as he often did, moved on.

But perhaps most strikingly, the shows featured Bowie the person, rather than a specific character he’d decided to inhabit, like Ziggy Stardust (1972-73), Halloween Jack (1974) and the Thin White Duke (1976).

“It really cuts against the image of him as a kind of distant, cold, detached, kabuki-esque performer,” Morgen, who has screened every scrap of visual footage in the Bowie archive, tells Variety. “There is no mask for this show. There is no character — maybe just this one time, right? Because in my opinion, even on [later] things like ‘Serious Moonlight,’ he’s playing a character.

“There is no question in my mind that this is the best film performance of David Bowie’s career,” he adds. “I don’t think I ever saw David more engaged or present or happier than this show.”

Presented in association with the Berlinale, the production is a collaboration between Rob Hallett’s Wonderworld, the David Bowie Estate and Morgen. It features elaborate lighting design by renowned lighting designer Patrick Woodroffe, whose credits include collaborations with the Rolling Stones and Elton John, and a specially created sound mix from Academy Award winner Paul Massey (“Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Michael,” “Moonage Daydream”).

In this exclusive interview, Morgen spoke with Variety for nearly an hour about “Stage,” Bowie’s career, and some other tantalizing items residing in Bowie’s vast archive.

Let’s start at the beginning. How did this project come about?

In 2017, I was invited to tour the David Bowie archive in preparation for “Moonage Daydream,” it’s this big, cavernous room filled with materials. Immediately, a stack of 35-millimeter [film] cans caught my attention, and I made a beeline for them and saw that they said “Stage.”

The archivist explained to me that this was a concert that David had commissioned in 1978, and the materials hadn’t been touched in nearly 40 years. The visuals were extraordinary, but it took us nearly eight months to sync [the sound with the video]. Once we did, it became clear to me immediately that this was the finest and best-filmed performance of David Bowie’s career. The concerts had been recorded on 24-track audio by [longtime Bowie producer] Tony Visconti — I think there were nine mics on the drum kit alone, at least.

The access I had to the estate afforded me the opportunity to screen every piece of [Bowie] media in existence, including thousands of hours of shows that were recorded just for the vault. At that time, concert films were a difficult sell in the film industry, and the last thing I wanted to do was put a concert film into a theatrical environment that would be playing to smaller crowds by the end of the first week, which is generally what happens with the concert films. But I was very excited by the idea of creating a communal experience.

So right from the get-go, I had the idea of presenting this work as a multimedia experience in arenas, and initially, the plan was to play the same arenas that David had played on the [1978] tour. The original vision called for multiple screens, an integrated lighting system, and an immersive sound design.

It took nearly 50 years for the technology to arrive for us to realize the show in the manner that we’re about to do. Paul Massey’s sound mix is, in my opinion, possibly the finest music mix for a concert film anyone’s ever heard.

You’ve said there will be several screens — how is that going to work?

Since the advent of cinema, back to Edison, we’ve been watching movies in a rectangular box, and the way we watch cinema has not really changed that dramatically. When the idea to use multiple screens first came to mind, I wasn’t sure if that was going to be a triptych, like Woodstock, where there would be three images or multiple images on one screen, or whether there would be multiple screens. Here’s what it comes down to: If you have three images on one screen, the viewer can take in all images at the same time. That is what cinema does — the director shows you where they want you to put your attention.

But in theater or in live entertainment, the viewer has their own discretion, and so by presenting this on multiple screens, it invites the viewer to kind of create their own experience. That basically meant that I had to edit the film several times to fit each screen, and figure out how these screens would engage and interact with each other. I was converting a single-screen version into a multiple-screen version, which affords me the opportunity to hold shots of David longer than I would normally, and [have other shots] on the sides. And in other moments, maybe we don’t even need to be seeing picture and let the lightning show power it. It’s a very different way of telling a story and experiencing film.

Both “Moonage Daydream” and the way you’re describing this film are not normal documentaries, they’re unconventionally structured and assume the viewer already knows a lot about the subject. Bowie probably would have been bored by conventional documentaries — were you trying to reflect his ethos in making these films?

Yes — these are not two separate projects. I was very much thinking about which songs to use “Moonage Daydream” and which ones I wanted to save for “Stage.” And I took my directions from Bowie, because in most of interviews in “Moonage Daydream,” he talks about his creative process.

But I did have “Oblique Strategy” cards [created by longtime Bowie collaborator Brian Eno and artist Peter Schmidt, containing prompts intended to encourage unconventional ideas and solutions], two inches away from my keyboard, that I would draw upon constantly.

To me, every film is an opportunity to explore new ways to tell stories, and a lot of my work is designed to be experiential. IMAX is an amazing environment for that work, but financially, as an independent producer, it’s very difficult to get much of a return off IMAX. And I love the [Las Vegas] Sphere, but we’re limited at the Sphere due to the resolution.

So what other options or opportunities are there for doing the sort of immersive work I want to do? I saw an opportunity with arenas to build a fan experience, and I’m hoping that this is the first of many, to put screens wherever you want, to use pyrotechnics. I think it’s really exciting.

Coming out of the pandemic, people seemed to yearn for a kind of communal experience, and I can’t think of anything more exciting than bringing together seven to 10,000 to 15,000 Bowie fans to have a shared experience. So hopefully we can put a tour on the road that has the integrity and authenticity and the grace and elegance that convey David Bowie.

I assume you can’t give details, but is anything on the books beyond the Berlin premiere at this point?

Yes.

In some of your online comments about this film, you seemed quite anti-AI. You said that you wouldn’t be able to show footage of, for example, Bowie’s 1974 “Soul Tour” without using AI, but couldn’t you do a “Get Back” and use it to clean up what already exists without doing anything gross?

I want to be very clear: I have no issues with AI. But I think that those particular shows would require so much AI that it would go beyond just the cleanup and would become something pretty artificial. My guess is that Bowie was the forefront of digital technologies, and he probably would have been doing all sorts of AI things [if he were alive today]. But a fan asked that question, and that was just my knee-jerk response.

So the footage from those amazing early tours would really require that much work?

Yes, they’re not releasable. They’re just not. I’m so sorry! There is a half-inch reel-to-reel tape of the [1974] “Diamond Dogs” show, there were two cameras and on one of them, you can barely see anything. No one knows where the masters are. And the [later 1974] “Soul Tour” tape, unfortunately, it was a single camera, very low to the stage. It’s not good.

I’m so grateful that “Stage” exists. I don’t believe they could have finished it in 1978 if they’d wanted to, for technical reasons: There were some very serious challenges with some of the lensing and lighting that contributed to us needing over 1,000 hours of calibrating to pull things into [the final film].

Anything else you’d like to say?

I think one of the things that people will be surprised by is that David is the credited producer on the film. It was commissioned and produced by David Bowie. And there is no question in my mind that this is the best film performance of David Bowie’s career. Nothing [better] is going to emerge.

I don’t think I ever saw David more engaged or present or happier than this show. And part of that is because in this show the cameras stay with David [rather than cutting to musicians] when the band goes into a jam. There’s a scene in “The Jean Genie” where the band are trading solos and David goes offstage and into the shadows, grabs a beer and lights up a cigarette, just smiling and dancing and there’s no lights on him. David is as engaged and entertained as anyone in the audience.