A documentary entitled 'Amy' about the late singer Amy Winehouse.
The director of a controversial doco about Amy Winehouse talks to Lydia Jenkin about his take on the singer's short tragic life.
This new story of Amy Winehouse - a modern tragedy about a victim of celebrity culture and addiction, assembled from archival footage, interviews, music, and memories - is a hit.
Amy has been one of the most anticipated British documentaries in years. Glowing reviews, commentary, interviews and, of course, controversy have kept it in the headlines since its opening at Cannes Film Festival in May. It also recorded the biggest-ever opening weekend for a British documentary in the UK two weeks ago, and continues to pull in the punters.
And perhaps that's not surprising given how many column inches Amy Winehouse occupied when she was alive, but it's been a little disconcerting for director Asif Kapadia. The man who made acclaimed documentary Senna (about racing car driver Ayrton Senna) had plenty of people questioning the whole notion of the film when he first began the project.
"Everyone thought they knew everything about her. And I suppose that's why it was a good subject for me, because I quite like making a film about a thing that people think they've got no interest in.
"It happened with both Senna and Amy, for different reasons. With Senna, most people were like, 'I don't care about racing car drivers, why would you make that film?' and with Amy, people went 'But we know everything, we're sick of her!' So there was that doubt about whether it was a good idea."
The whole project began when David Joseph, the head of Universal Music in the UK, contacted Kapadia's producer James Gay-Rees asking if Kapadia and his team would be interested in creating a no-holds-barred kind of documentary about Amy's life.
Amy Winehouse features on the cover of this week's TimeOut:
"There's something about Amy that has always connected with me. I never met her and never saw her live, but I loved her music, I owned her records, and there was something there, a question mark, that I never really understood - how did things turn out the way they did? And why did they turn out the way they did? She seemed like a girl from down the road, like somebody I could've grown up knowing
"The obvious problem though, was her death was still very raw at that point (only two years had passed), and those close to her weren't keen to talk.
"When we started, we were wracked with guilt and doubt more than anything, because nobody wanted to talk to us. I think partly because it was suggested by the record company, maybe from the outside it looked like, 'Oh you're just going to do another thing for the machine'. When you think about it, that becomes a problem. It was important to have the record label involved, because you can't tell this story without the music. But I'm sure that would've been one of the doubts that people felt, that this was just going to be a continuation of what had gone before, with this representation of her that everyone else had laid out."
Asif Kapida director of Amy, a doco about Amy Winehouse.
Kapadia also knew the film wouldn't find a direction until they started speaking to her friends and family, and uncovering the story that wasn't just the one which had been told by the tabloids.
"That was the complicated thing really, because you can't quantify that in the beginning, we didn't know what we were going to come up with when we started, so that had to happen naturally along the way. It was a very unusual process - I hadn't really worked this way before."
So they spent many months slowly convincing those closest to Winehouse to open up. But once they started, the floodgates opened, and the audio interviews which form the backbone of the film, became a very emotional and cathartic experience for those involved.
"Each one would be sort of like a therapy session for another person. And I think the word that keeps coming up in conversations, is traumatised. There are a lot of people who came away feeling a bit traumatised by the whole thing. And that stems from seeing this tragedy unfold and not being able to stop it, or watching nobody else stop it. You know everything is going wrong, and rather than trying to stop it, people just kind of joined in, and let it happen. And hearing people talking about that did become quite heavy. It was draining and exhausting, and sad."
It was the first time that many of them - her best friends, her parents, her collaborators, and her ex-husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, among them - had really talked about Amy's life since her death. And to make it a more comfortable setting, Kapadia opted to record just audio, and leave cameras behind.
"We were often just sitting in a room, pretty much in the dark even sometimes, and we'd just have the mic on the table, and the two of us sitting there, and we'd just talk about whatever they wanted to talk about. One-hour interviews would end up going on for four or five hours, and then they'd come back the next day and we'd talk again. These conversations, that's really where the film came from.
The question then becomes what will people be seeing on the screen while they're hearing these interviews and musings. Fortunately there were thousands of hours of footage that slowly trickled in - from professionally filmed interviews and behind-the-scenes tapes, to paparazzi footage (much of which is very confronting) and things filmed by fans, or friends, or Winehouse herself.
Asif Kapida director of Amy, a doco about Amy Winehouse.
The first major breakthrough came when her early manager and long-time friend Nick Shymansky opened up to them, sharing some remarkable footage of Winehouse as a teen and in her early 20s.
"All those wonderful early videos were shot by him. And that was a big moment, I felt like I could see a film then, because I felt like I'd discovered an Amy I hadn't seen before, you know doing her makeup in the loos, and driving around in cars, playing pool, just hanging out. And that point in time was very interesting too, in terms of her fame, it was just before the first record [Frank] was about to come out, and I think that was a bit of a turning point for her."
Shymansky was also the one who helped Kapadia and his team to connect with two of Amy's oldest and closest friends, Juliette Ashby and Lauren Gilbert.
"He said, 'You know if you really want to get to the bottom of Amy, you've got to talk to her two friends, Juliette and Lauren. And they won't want to talk to you, they're really tough, they're difficult.' I think what he meant by tough and difficult was actually that they were really damaged by the whole thing. When they did finally meet us, that was another breakthrough, because they really offer the emotional part of the film. It's interesting because even though the film is theoretically about a famous person, it's really the people who are quite ordinary, who weren't in the spotlight, who give you the deepest opinion of her."
It is a warts-and-all approach - there's no glossing over her struggles with drugs, alcohol, bulimia; and the men in her life, from her father Mitch (who has denounced the film) to husband Fielder-Civil. You see Amy at her most raw, messed-up, and vulnerable, but you also see her at her radiant, cheeky, intelligent, soulful best. We get to witness the process behind her brilliant lyrical writing, her rare vocal talents, and her love of music, and we also get to revisit just how cruel the tabloids, and ultimately the public were to her.
"Once we got into making the film, we felt like, if we can get this film right, there's something important here. It's about her, but it's about us as well, and how she was seen and portrayed and consumed. I felt that for the film to really work, I wanted it to make people think about how we played a part, or how we didn't play a part, or how we could've done more, or maybe we should've had nothing to do with it.
"I guess I'm interested to see how people will have different readings of it, but hopefully overall, I hope people will see a different Amy, a real Amy that they haven't met before. And I hope it will make people think. Nobody starts off wanting to be addicted to drugs or alcohol, it's circumstances that take them down a certain path."
Who: Asif Kapadia, director What: New documentary film, Amy, about the life of Amy Winehouse Where and when: Screening at the NZ International Film Festival on Friday July 17 at 1.15pm, and Saturday July 18 at 6.30pm, both at the Civic Theatre. Opens in cinemas on August 6.
