AMY directed by Asif Kapadia. A Mongrel Media release. 128 minutes. Opens Friday (July 10). For venues and times, see listing.
Asif Kapadia brings the dead back to life.
His 2010 documentary Senna did a remarkable job of reconstituting the late Brazilian Formula One driver Ayrton Senna through archival footage and interviews. And now he’s done the same for Amy Winehouse, examining the rise and fall of the English singer, a damaged human being whose tragedy became the stuff of garish tabloid headlines.
“Let’s be honest, no one had a good point of view of her as a person,” he says during Amy’s Toronto press day at the Trump Hotel. “People liked the voice, some people like the songs. [But] there was very little that was positive to be said about her as a human being.”
Kapadia’s documentary seeks to rehabilitate Winehouse’s image by showing us the real woman, not the caricature. He and producer James Gay-Rees went through “thousands of hours” of videos shot by friends and family – as well as chats and stills saved by Winehouse herself – and came away with a completely different impression of their subject.
“Suddenly you realize, ‘Oh my god, she’s actually really funny,’” he says. “‘She’s actually quite nice to be around. She’s great, she’s got a sort of intelligence. My god, she can write.’ There’s all these things that I didn’t know.
“I mean, none of that is obvious at the beginning of the process,” he continues, explaining that he came to the project with just the vaguest understanding of who Amy Winehouse was.
“Life’s never boring with her,” he says. “She’s either brilliant or things are terrible – there’s no in-between. [And] she’s a Londoner – she lived down the road from me. This story went on down the road, and I had questions. ‘Why did this happen? Why is she on stage? Why is no one stopping it? Why is she doing this to herself?’
“Then you do your research and you talk to people… and then you find out what these songs are about. ‘Oh my god, it’s a real incident! Which incident? And who’s this song about?’ There’s all of these things that bit by bit start to come together, so you go, ‘Okay, all of the answers have been there right in front of my eyes.’ I just didn’t realize they’re in these songs.”
Perhaps the saddest thing about Kapadia’s film is the way it shows Winehouse’s father, Mitchell, as the key person in her life – or at least the one person who might have been able to get her into rehab early enough to save her. Instead, he seemed more interested in keeping her out in the public eye, the better to occupy some of the space of her fame. (Though he was happy to be interviewed for the film, Mitchell Winehouse has since come out against it.)
“That dynamic is kind of everything,” Kapadia says. “Because [her stardom] is about her, and some people cannot take it if it’s not about them. And so they just do everything, all the time, to try and make it about them. And I think somewhere deep down that was a problem for her.”
Asif Kapadia on finding the earliest video clips of Amy Winehouse:
Read our Amy review here.
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
