‘How on earth is this man not sweating?’ Director Brett Morgen’s painstaking 10-year remaser Bowie’s ‘greatest filmed performance’

Moonage Daydream director Brett Morgan has turned lost footage of two 1978 concerts into an arena spectacular. ‘You can feel the danger and excitement’, he says

In 2017, when Brett Morgen began work on his acclaimed 2022 David Bowie documentary, Moonage Daydream, he was given complete access to the late star’s entire, cavernous archive. “My eyes were immediately drawn to a stack of gleaming 35mm cans with the word ‘Stage’ written on them,” he remembers.

At first, the director – whose work also includes Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck and the Rolling Stones documentary Crossfire Hurricane – assumed the cans might contain some sort of footage shot around Bowie’s 1978 live album, Stage, recorded in mostly in Philadelphia. However, he soon realised they actually contained the holy grail of Bowie artefacts: footage of the legendary Earl’s Court shows later that year, which had remained unseen for almost 50 years. “Making Moonage Daydream, I had access to every filmed performance in existence of David Bowie,” he says, “but when I saw this one I knew this was without question the greatest filmed performance of his career.”

In 1978, Bowie had commissioned Just a Gigolo director David Hemmings to film two of the three sold-out summer shows at the venue – where the star was touring Low and “Heroes” – with a view to showing the film in theatres in lieu of a physical tour (he wouldn’t take the road again until 1983). However, the singer subsequently started making the Lodger album, moved to Switzerland, was reportedly unhappy with the film’s editing and the entire project was subsequently left behind. “He was moving on to other things at the speed of light,” Morgen explains. “So at that point I think the idea of looking backwards was distasteful to him.”