Cameron Crowe

I want to see the mirror that you hold up.

And that's what I did.

I'm not sure he appreciated totally the mirror that I held up to him.

But he did know that it was an accurate portrait of what he was going through in those 18 months, which are kind of referred to as a lost weekend when he was living untethered in Los Angeles and not sure if he was going to become a movie actor for a while.

He fired his manager and he was just kind of learning what was going to be next and trying to reinvent.

And he was playing around with this character called the Thin White Duke.

And one day he put 12 pages of an autobiography in my hand and signed it and said, I wanted you to have this.

And it was called The Return of the Thin White Duke.

He never finished it.

It's 12 pages.

It's striking.

And this was the time David Bowie was trying to figure out what was coming next.

And I was lucky enough to be around.

And I asked him all kinds of stuff.

And he was both...

warm and engaging, steely and brilliant, and lost.

It's so funny that you asked that.

I asked him at one point, because his real name was David Jones, right?

So I asked him at one point,

am I meeting David Jones or am I meeting David Bowie, the creation?