Watch the Trailer for David Bowie’s ‘The Last Five Years’
HBO has released a trailer for the upcoming documentary David Bowie: The Last Five Years, which will be broadcast on Jan. 8, on what would have been artist’s 71st birthday.
Bowie died on Jan. 10, 2016, after a cancer battle, and the film focuses on his last three major works, which director Francis Whateley argues were the most revealing of his long career.
“Focusing on the artist’s final years, David Bowie: The Last Five Years presents a nuanced look at the evolution of Bowie’s music as told through archival footage and interviews with the musical legend’s bandmates,” HBO said in a statement. “Largely focused on Bowie’s final two albums, The Next Day and Blackstar, the film also explores his musical, Lazarus, which he began developing in the midst of his illness.”
In the trailer, Bowie can be heard outlining his approach to risk-taking in the creative process: “Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in; and when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”
Whateley told Rolling Stone in October that he’d initially struggled with the challenge of finding footage for the 90-minute production, until he hit on the idea of reuniting the band that had recorded Blackstar and filming them performing in the venue where Bowie first saw them.
Archive material from previous years is also featured. “I wanted to look at his final period through the prism of the past,” said Whateley, who previously made a Bowie documentary called Five Years. “Near the end of his life, he wrote to see how I was doing. He said to me, 'I'm very happy with my lot in life and the new album. What more can any man ask for?' It really showed the dignity of the man.”