On Tuesday, HBO premiered the teaser trailer for their upcoming David Bowie documentary, David Bowie: The Last Five Years, which focuses on the particularly fertile years of creativity leading up to his death on January 10th, 2016 following a largely secret 18-month battle with liver cancer. The film will premiere on HBO and its various mobile platforms on January 8th, the day on which the iconoclastic artist would have turned 71 years old.
However, while Bowie was battling cancer, and in the years right before his diagnosis, he had ramped up his creative production considerably. In his last five years on Earth, Bowie released two albums, The Next Day and Blackstar (released just days before his death, featuring eerily prophetic themes about death and the after-life) as well as oversaw the creation his stage musical, Lazarus. HBO acquired the U.S. rights to the documentary from the BBC.
In the newly released teaser trailer, you can hear Bowie speak about the concept of creativity and his approach to exploring it. As he explains, “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.”
You can watch the new trailer for David Bowie: The Last Five Years, below, courtesy of Billboard:
David Bowie: The Last Five Years, directed and produced by Francis Whately, follows Whately’s 2013 documentary, David Bowie: Five Years which covered Bowie’s career from 1970 to 1975 in addition to taking its title from the opening song on Bowie’s 1972 classic, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars.
For further information about the soon-to-be-released new David Bowie documentary on HBO, or to set a reminder about its release date, head to the network’s website.
[h/t – Billboard]