#How to watch avicii true stories movie

In the film, even his manager admits that “Tim is going to die, with all the interviews, radio tours and playing. I was running after an ideal happiness that wasn’t my own.”Īvicii – True Stories. “I didn’t take the time to think about what I really wanted to do,” he says. For much of the film, Avicii lets his manager drive him. His passivity bled into his relationship with the business. In the film, Avicii responds by shrugging: “I guess they know what they’re doing.” They wrote scores of prescriptions for drugs such as gabapentin and the opioid Percocet. His doctors compounded the problem by enabling a dependence on drugs. “If I don’t I gradually get more and more nervous before shows,” he says. In the film, Avicii talks about why he turned to drink. The film shows him in 2014 in Australia undergoing surgery to remove his appendix and gallbladder, after another flare of the disease. For 11 days that year, Avicii was hospitalized in New York with acute pancreatitis, brought on by alcohol abuse. But serious issues began to emerge as far back as 2012. The DJ brought a wider musicality, and a broader sense of innovation, to EDM than any other artist of the time, resulting in crossover pop hits such as Levels and the ground-breaking electro-country smash Wake Me Up. Avicii’s talent gave Pournouri plenty to work with. A key figure in his rise was his manager at the time, Ash Pournouri, who comes off in the film as savvy and dedicated, but also driven to the point of obsession. In his early 20s, the DJ had gone from sleeping on people’s couches to becoming a superstar artist, generating tens of millions of dollars while headlining festivals around the world. But they did know they already had a dramatic story to tell. Neither he nor Avicii had any preconceived notions of what the focus of the documentary would be. “It clicked from the beginning,” Tsikurishvili said of their relationship. The musician asked the director to helm a documentary about a charity project he had started which donated $1m to African hunger programs. The director first met the DJ, who was born Tim Bergling, six years ago at a dinner in their mutual home city of Stockholm. It was a very emotional experience.”Įspecially since Tsikurishvili and Avicii had bonded so deeply during their marathon filming sessions. Watching it, I felt everything you can think of. Even the director says he now sees the film “in a very different way. The documentary’s new, wide release will inevitably invite a forensic scrutiny. So, they ran with the story that it had been pulled.”

#How to watch avicii true stories movie

What happened was that people tried to watch the movie in the US and UK and couldn’t find it. But, according to Tsikurishvili, “the film was never supposed to have a wider release back then. He was 28.īecause of that whiplash turn of events, rumors swirled that Netflix had abruptly pulled the film. Just six months later, Avicii died and while details weren’t confirmed, his family said he “could not go on any longer”. It only ran in Scandinavian movie theaters and on Netflix in western Europe, buttressed by a single showing in select US theaters. Of course, it read very differently in October 2017, when the film had a very limited, initial release. The director admits that this ending now seems chillingly false. It culminates with scenes of a tanned Avicii on a tranquil beach in Madagascar, planning a less stressful future by sticking to just producing music in the studio. The film positions that decision as its happy ending. At the end of 2016, Avicii fired his manager and retired from the road. It all builds to the point where, late in the documentary, Avicii flatly says of touring: “It will kill me.”Įventually, he did do something about it.

“He’s a shell of what he used to be,” says a friend in the film, while another describes him as “a ticking timebomb”.