David Bowie did not know he was dying of cancer until three months before his death, according to a documentary that is expected to air on BBC2 Saturday.
"David Bowie: The Last Five Years" will air the day before what would have been Bowie's 70th birthday. Bowie died Jan. 10, 2016, the day after he turned 69 and the release of his last studio album "Blackstar," The Guardian noted.
Bowie stopped his treatment while he filmed the music video for the single "Lazarus," the newspaper noted.
"I found out later that the week we were shooting is when he found out that it is over," music video director Johan Renck told the Press Association. "We'll end treatment or whatever capacity that means, that his illness has won."
The "Lazarus" video showed Bowie lying in a bed with bandages covering his eyes, but it was not about the star's illness, the Press Association wrote.
"To me it had to do with the biblical aspect of it, you know the man who would rise again, and it had nothing to do with him being ill," Renck told the Press Association. "That was only because I liked the imagery of it."
The documentary is a follow-up to the 2013 "David Bowie: Five Years," documentary, noted the Press Association. The new film also will include rarely seen interviews while the singer was in his Ziggy Stardust persona, the news agency said.
"What it is really is that I want to be productive," Bowie said in one of the interviews. "I'm not content to just be a rock 'n' roll star all my life. I am trying to be one at the moment because I need it at the moment for a particular reason so I can get off and do other things."
Documentary filmmaker Francis Whately said it would be "simplistic" to think "Blackstar" was Bowie's final gift to his fans, The Guardian reported.
"I still don't know if he started making 'Blackstar' before he knew he was ill, or after," Whately told The Guardian. "People are so desperate for 'Blackstar' to be this parting gift that Bowie made for the world when he knew he was dying but I think it's simplistic to think that. There is more ambiguity there than people want to acknowledge. I don't think he knew he was going to die."
Bowie was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996.
"… Bowie has positioned himself on the cutting edge of rock and roll," said his hall biography. "His innovations created or furthered several major trends in rock and roll, including glam-rock, art-rock and the very notion of the self-mythologized, larger-than-life rock star."
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