David Bowie may not have been in the best health during the final years of his life, but that didn’t stop him from making his final five years, from 2011 to 2016, some of the most productive of his career. During that time, he released his comeback album The Next Day in 2013, his first album since 2003, and worked on his final record, Blackstar, which was released just two days before his death. It’s this fascinating period of Bowie’s life that is being put under the microscope for HBO’s upcoming documentary, David Bowie: The Last Five Years.
In the just-released trailer for the film, above, archival footage and new interviews are used to tell the story of how Bowie got to the final stretch of his life and career, and how, as one interviewee put it, he was “a man at the top of his game.” There are also Bowie interviews that put his boundary-pushing ways into words: “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.”
The movie is set to premiere on January 8, 2018 (which would have been Bowie’s 71st birthday) on HBO. Watch the trailer above.
