Avicii Speaks For Himself in New Documentary: Watch Clip

Within the six-and-a-half years since Avicii’s demise, most of the past due artist’s colleagues, critics, fanatics and pals have attempted making sense of his suicide and legacy.

A brand new documentary is now letting the artist discuss for himself. Out day after today (Dec. 31) on Netflix, I’m Tim follows the manufacturer born Tim Bergling from his adolescence and early life in Stockholm to the worldwide repute he accomplished as Avicii, with the movie narrated via Bergling himself.

“After I decided that he’d be the one that’d narrate this tale, I believed that perhaps it was once how I may well be on the subject of him,” says the movie’s director Henrik Burman. “Perhaps that’s how I will meet him.”

Burman started paintings at the undertaking in 2019 — in a while after the pioneering artist’s demise at age 28 previous that 12 months — the place he first of all deliberate to make an hour-long program for Swedish Nationwide Tv concerning the ultimate, posthumous Avicii album, 2019’s Tim. An established musician and song journalist in Sweden, Burman had finished the 2020 Yung Lean documentary Yung Lean: In My Head and was once able to tackle every other music-related undertaking.

Running with the blessing of Bergling’s folks, Burman had complete get admission to to the sprawling Avicii archives. He discovered hours of interviews with the manufacturer carried out right through other sessions of his occupation, together with some within the later a part of his existence, when he was once ready to replicate on quitting traveling in 2016, his issues of alcohol abuse, his strategy to making song and extra.

“There have been moments in those interviews the place he’d say, ‘This in point of fact describes me as an individual, so if there’s ever a documentary made about me, you should utilize this to inform the tale,” Burman says of the moments he found out amid the archival pictures. “He’d say such things as, ‘If there’s a documentary, we wish to speak about alcohol; we wish to communicate concerning the unhealthy issues in my existence.’ I’ve been on the lookout for clues like this — I’ve listened to Tim for hours and hours looking to perceive him and put in combination the puzzle of who he was once as an individual and who Avicii was once as this wonderful artist.”

Past the fabric culled from the archive, Burman scoured the web for different Avicii interviews, discovering a bounty of clips on YouTube and different platforms “which are like, 5 or 4 or 3 mins lengthy,” says Burman. He and his staff pieced in combination those tiny segments into the bigger puzzle they have been “running like maniacs” to build.

Concurrently, Burman and his small staff from Stockholm have been touring between the U.S. and Europe to interview most of the key figures in Bergling’s existence and occupation. I’m Tim options Neil Jacobson, who was once the A&R for Avicii whilst president at Geffen Data; Aloe Blacc and Dan Tyminski, who labored on Avicii’s 2013 nation crossover album True; Consistent with Sundin, who signed Avicii’s breakout tracks “Search Bromance” and “Ranges” to Common Track Sweden; Ash Pournouri, the executive who architected Avicii’s upward thrust; fellow EDM pillar David Guetta; Nile Rodgers; Coldplay’s Chris Martin, who labored with Avicii on song together with the 2014 hit “Sky Stuffed with Stars”; longtime good friend and early collaborator Filip “Philgood” Åkesson; shut good friend Jesse Waits; and Bergling’s folks, Anki Lidén and Klas Bergling. (Editor’s be aware: the creator of this text additionally seems within the documentary.) Burman’s “tremendous lengthy interviews” with each and every of those topics allowed him to analyze his matter on the similar time he captured pictures for the movie.

“We had 1000’s of hours of video via the top,” he says. However he had a guiding theme in looking to penetrate the celebrity DJ international of Avicii and display who Tim Bergling was once as an individual. “Within the subject matter from the early years there’s such a lot humor and such a lot heat. It’s very non-public, prior to it were given in point of fact giant and issues were given more difficult for him,” says Burman. “That’s the article I used to be in point of fact attracted to and the way I began fascinated with it as ‘Okay, who was once Tim as an artist and a musician, and who was once Avicii?’”

It took years for Burman and his staff to edit down their 1000’s of hours into the 90-minute movie, which debuted on the Tribeca Movie Pageant in June and is nominated for Guldbagge Award, the largest Swedish movie award, for modifying. (Winners shall be introduced on Jan. 13.)

The non-linear storyline is going from a sonogram symbol of Bergling within the womb, to lo-fi pictures of the artist as a toddler dancing along with his dad within the circle of relatives house, to him as a pimply-faced youngster, to his creating an pastime in digital song manufacturing and next upward thrust. In a single series, Common Track’s Consistent with Sundin tells the tale of supervisor Ash Pournouri inquiring for €500,000 to signal Avicii’s “Ranges,” a host Sundin first balked at, however ultimately paid. The music recouped all of the €500,000 inside of six weeks of its free up.

The movie additionally gifts a lot of studio pictures, highlighting Bergling’s strategy to making song and his particular reward with melody. (Test the glance of perfect pleasure on his face whilst he and singer Audra Mae are within the studio recording vocals for 2013’s “Hooked on You.”) See further unreleased pictures from I’m Tim fascinated by Bergling’s studio procedure beneath.