Ray Manzarek, the Doors’ keyboardist, on Morrison’s wild life, mysterious death and the new film about the iconic band

When the lights dimmed in Sundance on that cold January night for the screening of When You’re Strange, it was like a flashback to the Sixties. Seeing Jim leap about in the ether, larger than life, was a very exciting moment, but also incredibly emotional. I felt as devastated as I did when I heard the news of his death. A moment that made me choke back a tear, was when I saw Jim as a young, vibrant Adonis, so handsome, so alive, so filled with energy and potency.
There was my best friend, my poet, and seeing this personal footage made me relive those days on Venice Beach when we were poverty-stricken film students filled with life, with potency, with possibility. When You’re Strange is the first feature documentary to tell our story as it happened. We used rare footage shot between 1965 and Jim’s death in 1971 to follow us from the corridors of UCLA’s film school, where I met Jim, to the stages of sold-out arenas.
I felt it was time for a true story about the Doors. We didn’t want to be saddled with the Oliver Stone fiasco [the 1991 biopic with Val Kilmer] for the rest of our lives. Jim’s legacy would be as a drunken lunatic, but this film is the real Jim Morrison, it’s the real Doors. Johnny Depp narrates it in a very sensitive, soulful way — Johnny has beatnik blood. If Jim were alive today he would have loved the documentary.
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