Film

In the six-and-a-half years since Avicii’s death, many of the late artist’s colleagues, critics, fans and friends have tried making sense of his suicide and legacy.
A new documentary is now letting the artist speak for himself. Out tomorrow (Dec. 31) on Netflix, I’m Tim follows the producer born Tim Bergling from his childhood and adolescence in Stockholm to the global fame he achieved as Avicii, with the film narrated by Bergling himself.

“When I determined that he’d be the one who’d narrate this story, I thought that maybe it was how I could be close to him,” says the film’s director Henrik Burman. “Maybe that’s how I can meet him.”

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Burman began work on the project in 2019 — shortly after the pioneering artist’s death at age 28 earlier that year — where he initially planned to make an hour-long program for Swedish National Television about the final, posthumous Avicii album, 2019’s Tim. 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 sprawling Avicii archives. He found hours of interviews with the producer conducted during different periods of his career, including some in the later part of his life, when he was able to reflect on quitting touring in 2016, his problems with alcohol abuse, his approach to making music and more.

“There were moments in these interviews where he’d say, ‘This really describes me as a person, so if there’s ever a documentary made about me, you should use this to tell the story,” Burman says of the moments he discovered amid the archival footage. “He’d say things like, ‘If there’s a documentary, we need to talk about alcohol; we need to talk about the bad things in my life.’ I’ve been looking for clues like this — I’ve listened to Tim for hours and hours trying to understand him and put together the puzzle of who he was as a person and who Avicii was as this amazing artist.”

Beyond the material culled from the archive, Burman scoured the internet for other Avicii interviews, finding a bounty of clips on YouTube and other platforms “that are like, five or four or three minutes long,” says Burman. He and his team pieced together these tiny segments into the larger puzzle they were “working like maniacs” to construct.

Simultaneously, Burman and his small team from Stockholm were traveling between the U.S. and Europe to interview many of the key figures in Bergling’s life and career. I’m Tim features Neil Jacobson, who was the A&R for Avicii while president at Geffen Records; Aloe Blacc and Dan Tyminski, who worked on Avicii’s 2013 country crossover album True; Per Sundin, who signed Avicii’s breakout tracks “Seek Bromance” and “Levels” to Universal Music Sweden; Ash Pournouri, the manager who architected 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”; longtime friend and early collaborator Filip “Philgood” Åkesson; close friend Jesse Waits; and Bergling’s parents, Anki Lidén and Klas Bergling. (Editor’s note: the writer 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 he captured 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 penetrate the superstar DJ world of Avicii and show who Tim Bergling was as a person. “In the material from the early years there’s 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 the thing I was really drawn to and how I started thinking about it as ‘Okay, who was Tim as an artist and a musician, and who was Avicii?’”

It took years for Burman and his team to edit down their thousands of hours into the 90-minute film, which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival in June and is nominated for Guldbagge Award, the biggest Swedish film award, for editing. (Winners will be announced on Jan. 13.)

The non-linear storyline goes from a sonogram image of Bergling in the womb, to lo-fi footage of the artist as a baby dancing with his dad in the family home, to him as a pimply-faced teenager, to his 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 number Sundin first balked at, but eventually paid. The song recouped the entire €500,000 within six weeks of its release.

The film also presents loads of studio footage, highlighting Bergling’s approach to making music and his special gift with melody. (Check the look of supreme satisfaction on his face while 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 studio process below.

But of course, given that viewers know how this story ends, the film is also laced with darkness. Bergling talks about developing a dependance on alcohol, saying the “magical cure of having a few drinks before going on stage” helped him loosen up before performances. His drinking ultimately led to pancreatitis and a general downturn in his health, which is apparent in scenes where he appears gaunt and haunted looking. Other interviews in the film discuss his later opiate addiction.

“I saw complexity from early on,” Burman says of tracing the lines of Bergling’s physical, emotional and spiritual health. “I didn’t want to point fingers or speculate. I wanted to listen in and see layers.”

The film is, of course, stacked with Avicii music, with the documentary being released alongside My Last Show, a 30-minute performance film from Avicii’s final live show at Ushuaïa Ibiza on August 28, 2016 that’s meant to function as a companion piece. “When you’ve seen this film, you want to also feel who Avicii was on stage,” Burman says.  “It’s his last show, but it’s such a happy feel around it.”

I’m Tim comes amid a broader shoring up of the Avicii legacy, with the Avicii Experience museum opening in Stockholm in 2022, a biography, Tim― The Official Biography of Avicii, also coming out in 2022, and an official photobook being released earlier this year, around the same time as an auction of Bergling’s personal effects that raised $750,000 for charity. These projects have been done in collaboration with Bergling’s parents and the Tim Bergling Foundation, which his parents founded after their son’s death. The Foundation focuses on suicide prevention among young people, with Bergling’s parents focusing their work on the mental health crisis and the core factors leading to suicide among young people.

Burman says the thought of Bergling’s parents seeing the film was “hard because I was of course so nervous.” But seeing it months after its Tribeca premiere, they texted Burman to say, he recalls, that “they liked the warmth and honest perspectives. They also said it kind of felt like being able to get Tim back for 90 minutes.”

If you or anyone you know is in distress or experiencing suicidal thoughts, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255. Free confidential support is available 24/7.