Avicii speaks for himself in new documentary: Watch clip

In the six and a half years since Avicii’s death, many of the late artist’s colleagues, critics, fans and friends have tried to understand his suicide and legacy.

A new documentary now lets the artist speak for himself. Out tomorrow (December 31) on NetflixI’m Tim follows the producer born Tim Bergling from his childhood and youth in Stockholm to the global fame he achieved as Avicii, with the film narrated by Bergling himself.

“When I decided that he would be the one to tell this story, I thought that maybe this was how I could be close to him,” says the film’s director Henrik Burman. “Maybe that’s how I can meet him.”

Burman began work on the project in 2019 – following the groundbreaking artist’s death at the age of 28 the previous year – where he originally planned to make an hour-long program for Swedish National Television about the final, posthumous Avicii album, 2019’s Hours. A longtime musician and music journalist in Sweden, Burman had completed the 2020 Yung Lean documentary Yung Lean: In my head and was ready to take on another music-related project.

Working with the blessing of Bergling’s parents, Burman had full access to the vast Avicii archives. He found hours of interviews with the producer conducted at different periods of his career, including some in the later part of his life, when he was able to reflect on stopping touring in 2016, his problems with alcohol abuse, his approach to making music and more.

“There were moments in these interviews where he said, ‘This really describes me as a person, so if there’s ever a documentary made about me, use this to tell the story,'” Burman says of the moments he discovered amid in. the archive recordings. “He would say things like, ‘If there’s a documentary, we have to talk about alcohol; we have to talk about the bad things in my life.’ I’ve been looking for clues like this – I’ve been listening to Tim for hours and hours trying to understand him and piece together who he was as a person and who Avicii was as this amazing artist.”

In addition to the material from the archive, Burman scoured the Internet for other Avicii interviews and found a bunch of clips on YouTube and other platforms “that are five or four or three minutes long,” Burman says. He and his team pieced these small segments together into the larger puzzle they “worked like crazy” to construct.

At the same time, Burman and his small team from Stockholm traveled between the US and Europe to interview many of the key figures in Bergling’s life and career. I’m Tim features Neil Jacobson, who was A&R for Avicii while he was president at Geffen Records; Aloe Blacc and Dan Tyminski, who worked on Avicii’s 2013 country crossover album genuine; Per Sundin, who signed Avicii’s breakout tracks “Seek Bromance” and “Levels” to Universal Music Sweden; Ash Pournouri, the leader who engineered Avicii’s rise; fellow EDM pillar David Guetta; Nile Rodgers; Coldplay’s Chris Martin, who worked with Avicii on music including the 2014 hit “Sky Full of Stars”; long-time friend and early collaborator Filip “Philgood” Åkesson; close friend Jesse Waits; and Bergling’s parents, Anki Lidén and Klas Bergling. (Editor’s note: the author of this article also appears in the documentary.) Burman’s “super-long interviews” with each of these subjects allowed him to research his subject at the same time as he was capturing footage for the film.

“We had thousands of hours of video by the end,” he says. But he had a guiding theme in trying to break into the Superstar DJ world of Avicii and show who Tim Bergling was as a person. “In the material from the first years, there is so much humor and so much warmth. It’s very personal before it got really big and things got harder for him,” says Burman. “That’s what I was really drawn to and how I started thinking about it like, ‘Okay, who was Tim as an artist and a musician, and who was Avicii?'”

It took Burman and his team years to cut their thousands of hours into the 90-minute film, which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival in June and is nominated for the Guldbagge Award, Sweden’s biggest film award, for editing. (The winners will be announced on January 13.)

The non-linear story goes from a sonogram image of Bergling in the stomach, to lo-fi footage of the artist as a baby dancing with his father in the family home, to him as a pimply teenager, to him developing an interest. in electronic music production and subsequent rise. In one sequence, Universal Music’s Per Sundin tells the story of manager Ash Pournouri asking for €500,000 to sign Avicii’s “Levels,” a track Sundin initially balked at but eventually paid. The song grossed a whopping €500,000 within six weeks of its release.

The film also features plenty of studio footage that highlights Bergling’s approach to making music and his special gift for melody. (Check out the look of singular satisfaction on his face as he and singer Audra Mae are in the studio recording vocals for 2013’s “Addicted to You”.) See additional unreleased footage from I’m Tim focused on Bergling’s study process below.