Asif Kapadia on Amy: ‘The drinking, the bulimia, the drugs – nobody stopped it’
Paul MacInnes
Saturday 27 June 2015
The Senna director fought hard to tell Amy Winehouse’s true story in his hugely hyped biopic and the result is a film that makes everyone feel complicit
Talking to Asif Kapadia can feel like talking to an obsessive; someone so fascinated by one thing that they have not only consumed all they could about their subject, but sworn to preserve the truth about them, too. That subject is Amy Winehouse. That truth is the complicated conjunction of circumstance and agency that led the singer to die from alcohol intoxication at the age of 27.
“There’s a point in the process where you can start correcting your interviewees because you know the story now. I know it,” he says. “I know when someone’s telling me something true and when they’re making it up. I know when they’re putting themselves in her life. Or, I’ll start saying to people who say they met Amy: ‘I don’t think you really met Amy. The person you describe, that’s not Amy, by that point she’d changed and I don’t know what you’re talking about.’”
A 43-year-old Londoner, Kapadia is the man behind Amy, a documentary that chronicles Winehouse’s tragic decline from bright-eyed prodigy to doomed tabloid obsession. Assembled from 100 interviews and incorporating 20 months of editing in a process that took three years in total, the film presents what feels like a true version of events. It is also incredibly moving.
The film has already been the subject of controversy, particularly with Winehouse’s father, Mitch, who told the film-makers they were “a disgrace” and believes the film is “trying to portray me in the worst possible light”. He also claims that interviews he gave for the film were edited, specifically those regarding what is now perceived as a turning point in Amy’s life – an attempt to send her to rehab in 2005 to deal with her drinking. The attempt failed and became the material for Amy’s biggest song. The film claims, like the song, that Amy didn’t go to rehab only on the say-so of her father. Mitch says he only thought Amy shouldn’t go to rehab “at that time”. He claims that those three words were edited from his interview.
“He says that quite a lot, I think,” sighs Kapadia, who doesn’t use Mitch’s name once during our interview. “I interviewed him twice. The first time he didn’t say ‘at the time’. But the story is in the present. The lyrics of her song don’t say ‘at the time’: ‘Daddy says I’m fine, at the time,’ it doesn’t say that. When Amy writes something down [in song] it’s based on a real experience. That whole incident happened exactly the way [it’s described in the song]. Everyone involved admits that’s exactly how it happened.”
Kapadia came to fame as the director of Senna, another study of a talented but tragic figure, the racing driver Ayrton Senna. The film used an innovative style Kapadia sometimes likes to call “true fiction”. Constructed almost entirely from archive footage, the story was told without any guiding voiceover, a weirdly unheard-of break with convention in the documentary format. Senna was also edited to feel like a drama, every moment put in service to the story. As it unfolded, the film grew from a chronicle of a sporting life into a study in ambition, bravery and – again – obsession. It went on to become a touchstone for other film-makers and a driver of the boom in cinematic documentary. For a while, conversations across the country began: ‘I’m not into motor racing but...”
The success of Senna led directly into Amy, thanks in part to Nick Shymansky, who had been having just that conversation with his new wife. It was the summer of 2011, it was raining, so the couple had ducked into a west London cinema. They loved the film they saw, despite not loving motor racing, and the format also inspired an idea in Shymansky. He had been Amy Winehouse’s first manager and was very much of the mind that someone should tell her story. Then, a few weeks later, Amy died.
By 2012, Kapadia had been approached by Universal, Winehouse’s label, and invited to make a “warts and all” documentary, with full access to her back catalogue. Getting people to open up about her life, however, was to prove a different challenge. “There was no go-to person who knew Amy’s story, that’s what I found very early on,” he says. “There’s no definitive book. She just seemed to have a lot of people in different compartments. That’s what I started to find with the people I spoke to. And no one liked each other, they were all arguing, there was a lot of tension around her, always.” The first door that opened was with Nick. “When I called him, he said it was too soon, to leave her alone, let her rest in peace. But he told me the story [about Senna]. He said: ‘I’ll meet you, but I’m not interested.’”
The pair eventually met in a Soho editing suite. On the wall, Kapadia and his editor Chris King had assembled a collage that resembled something from CSI or Homeland; a massive, interlocking mural telling the story of Amy’s life as they knew it. It struck Nick as being more effort than anyone had previously made in understanding what had happened to her. And so he began to talk.
continued here http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jun/27/asif-kapadia-amy-winehouse-doc
Paul MacInnes
Saturday 27 June 2015
The Senna director fought hard to tell Amy Winehouse’s true story in his hugely hyped biopic and the result is a film that makes everyone feel complicit
Talking to Asif Kapadia can feel like talking to an obsessive; someone so fascinated by one thing that they have not only consumed all they could about their subject, but sworn to preserve the truth about them, too. That subject is Amy Winehouse. That truth is the complicated conjunction of circumstance and agency that led the singer to die from alcohol intoxication at the age of 27.
“There’s a point in the process where you can start correcting your interviewees because you know the story now. I know it,” he says. “I know when someone’s telling me something true and when they’re making it up. I know when they’re putting themselves in her life. Or, I’ll start saying to people who say they met Amy: ‘I don’t think you really met Amy. The person you describe, that’s not Amy, by that point she’d changed and I don’t know what you’re talking about.’”
A 43-year-old Londoner, Kapadia is the man behind Amy, a documentary that chronicles Winehouse’s tragic decline from bright-eyed prodigy to doomed tabloid obsession. Assembled from 100 interviews and incorporating 20 months of editing in a process that took three years in total, the film presents what feels like a true version of events. It is also incredibly moving.
The film has already been the subject of controversy, particularly with Winehouse’s father, Mitch, who told the film-makers they were “a disgrace” and believes the film is “trying to portray me in the worst possible light”. He also claims that interviews he gave for the film were edited, specifically those regarding what is now perceived as a turning point in Amy’s life – an attempt to send her to rehab in 2005 to deal with her drinking. The attempt failed and became the material for Amy’s biggest song. The film claims, like the song, that Amy didn’t go to rehab only on the say-so of her father. Mitch says he only thought Amy shouldn’t go to rehab “at that time”. He claims that those three words were edited from his interview.
“He says that quite a lot, I think,” sighs Kapadia, who doesn’t use Mitch’s name once during our interview. “I interviewed him twice. The first time he didn’t say ‘at the time’. But the story is in the present. The lyrics of her song don’t say ‘at the time’: ‘Daddy says I’m fine, at the time,’ it doesn’t say that. When Amy writes something down [in song] it’s based on a real experience. That whole incident happened exactly the way [it’s described in the song]. Everyone involved admits that’s exactly how it happened.”
Kapadia came to fame as the director of Senna, another study of a talented but tragic figure, the racing driver Ayrton Senna. The film used an innovative style Kapadia sometimes likes to call “true fiction”. Constructed almost entirely from archive footage, the story was told without any guiding voiceover, a weirdly unheard-of break with convention in the documentary format. Senna was also edited to feel like a drama, every moment put in service to the story. As it unfolded, the film grew from a chronicle of a sporting life into a study in ambition, bravery and – again – obsession. It went on to become a touchstone for other film-makers and a driver of the boom in cinematic documentary. For a while, conversations across the country began: ‘I’m not into motor racing but...”
The success of Senna led directly into Amy, thanks in part to Nick Shymansky, who had been having just that conversation with his new wife. It was the summer of 2011, it was raining, so the couple had ducked into a west London cinema. They loved the film they saw, despite not loving motor racing, and the format also inspired an idea in Shymansky. He had been Amy Winehouse’s first manager and was very much of the mind that someone should tell her story. Then, a few weeks later, Amy died.
By 2012, Kapadia had been approached by Universal, Winehouse’s label, and invited to make a “warts and all” documentary, with full access to her back catalogue. Getting people to open up about her life, however, was to prove a different challenge. “There was no go-to person who knew Amy’s story, that’s what I found very early on,” he says. “There’s no definitive book. She just seemed to have a lot of people in different compartments. That’s what I started to find with the people I spoke to. And no one liked each other, they were all arguing, there was a lot of tension around her, always.” The first door that opened was with Nick. “When I called him, he said it was too soon, to leave her alone, let her rest in peace. But he told me the story [about Senna]. He said: ‘I’ll meet you, but I’m not interested.’”
The pair eventually met in a Soho editing suite. On the wall, Kapadia and his editor Chris King had assembled a collage that resembled something from CSI or Homeland; a massive, interlocking mural telling the story of Amy’s life as they knew it. It struck Nick as being more effort than anyone had previously made in understanding what had happened to her. And so he began to talk.
continued here http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jun/27/asif-kapadia-amy-winehouse-doc
