There’s a particularly ominous moment early in **Asif Kapadia’**s brilliant new documentary Amy, about the meteoric rise and terrible fall of the Grammy-winning British singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse. It’s 2003, and a very fresh-faced Amy is asked by an interviewer just how far she thinks her star could rise. “I don’t think I’m going to be at all famous,” she says. “I’d probably go mad.”
Anyone watching this movie, of course, already knows that 2003-era Amy Winehouse will soon become as famous as one can be, and that she will, in her way, also go quite mad, spiraling out of control on a sea of alcohol, cocaine, and heroin, until her tragic death in 2011, at age 27, from alcohol poisoning. But the beauty of Kapadia’s film is in showing us, through archival footage, home videos, and intimate interviews with family and friends, a different Amy: one so alive, present, relatable, funny, joyful, and passionate that, even knowing what we know, we feel some flicker of hope that she can still be saved.
“She was the girl next door. Literally,” Kapadia, who hails from the same North London neighborhood as Winehouse, told Vogue.com by phone. “She wasn’t like this person from another planet or the other side of the world. She literally walked down the streets I walked down. For me it was about taking her off the pedestal and humanizing her. I didn’t want her to be grouped with all those other people who died young. I just wanted her to be herself.”
We’re too late to save her, of course, and Amy chronicles the singer’s downward slide as vividly as it does her ascent. Her eventual death, the film seems to say, is on us all, from her family and friends who didn’t force her into early rehab, to her management and label who pushed her too hard, to her fans who wanted more of her than she could give, and to society at large, to our 24-hour news cycle that feeds on the personal tribulations of the stars we lionize. We loved her so much that we made her larger than life; but when that kind of celebrity proved too much for her to handle, when she began to slip away into addiction and self-destruction, we turned on her.
It’s dark stuff, but well worth watching. Read on for more of our conversation with Kapadia about how he got his hands on rare and personal footage, what he makes of Amy’s father’s objections to the project, and why he fell so hard for Amy Winehouse.
How’d this project come to be?
I had previously made a film called Senna, about this Brazilian sportsman, and it was quite a hit. There was somebody at Universal Music who loved that film and contacted my producer, James Gay-Rees, said, "James, would you be interested in making this film about Amy Winehouse?" James was intrigued, so he called me and said, "What do you think?" I knew Amy, but I’d never seen her live. I’d never met her. I would never have called myself a huge fan. There were a couple of things: For one, I’m a proud North Londoner, and she lived down the road from me. I was proud of her, I suppose, because she was a local girl. I had a lot of questions about how things turned out for her. I never really understood how that madness was going on down the street from where I lived, and nobody stopped it. And I wanted to get to the bottom of that. By doing that I thought I was going to be making a film about London.
Would you call yourself a big fan now?
We all kind of fell in love with her by seeing what she was really like in the early days: Her sense of humor, intelligence, charisma. Her character came through. The acoustic sets blow me away much more than the albums. In a way, those all feel overdone, overproduced compared to the rawness of the footage we managed to get a hold of.
Can you remember when you first heard her music?
There’s this great TV show we have called Later. . . with Jools Holland, a live-music show on Friday nights. Anyone and everyone’s been on it. I have a vague memory of seeing her on there. It may well have been the beginning of Back to Black, not during the Frank era. But she looked different. There’s something about her style, her look, the way she sang. I have a memory with my wife of seeing that and thinking, She’s pretty special. OK, she’s not like anyone.
Did you realize how dark this story was going to be when you took it on?
The very first meeting I had with everyone on the film, we had to make it clear: We all know how this ended. Everybody in the world knows that it ended badly. It wasn’t going to be a surprise that we were going to have to deal with some of this stuff. What we had to make clear was that we didn’t want anyone censoring us, saying you can’t deal with that, you can’t talk to that person, you can’t have that. Because it, sadly, all happened very publicly! In the newspapers. We were very clear: If you want us to do this, you have to leave us alone to get on with it.
Were there any details you uncovered that were particularly shocking to you?
It’s a pretty dark story, there’s no denying it. On all extremes: She was really funny, she was amazingly talented, what happened was dark. There’s a lot of stuff we heard that isn’t in the film. There’s a lot of stuff we’ve seen that isn’t in the film. Mainly because our job was to find the right balance, to show enough so you knew what was going on, but without overstepping the mark.
I know that Amy’s parents haven’t been thrilled with the film.
I would clarify that. It’s not really the parents. It’s one parent.
I was going to ask what her mother’s relationship was to the project. She has a much smaller role than Amy’s father, Mitch.
Her mother’s not been well, actually. She’s had MS for a few years. She’s the slightly shyer of the two, shall we say. She’s very sweet. I like Janis. She doesn’t really want to get caught up in media mudslinging. Her ex-partner, because he’s such a big presence, it almost makes her more quiet than she might naturally be. You have to shout quite loud to be heard; I guess that’s the way it was in the household. She likes to keep things private. We’ve had conversations privately. She hasn’t come out against the film. But I guess she also just doesn’t want to become someone who is a public figure. That was her personal choice, and I totally respect that.
Mitch Winehouse has come out against the film on the premise that it will hurt the Amy Winehouse Foundation’s ability to fund-raise. Do you have any comment on that?
No, not really. The one thing that everyone around the world who’s seen the film has said is that Amy comes out looking great. So I don’t get the connection. People who didn’t like her come out saying, "Oh, my God, she’s great." People who did like her love her even more. So I don’t understand.
What we do hope to do is explain addiction a bit better. It’s no good saying she didn’t die of heroin, she died of alcohol. If you’re an addict, you’re an addict. We can’t fix everything, but we can explain that she had these addiction issues from a very young age. She had them for a long time. They were issues that probably weren’t dealt with at an early stage when they could have been.
Were you surprised to find so much footage of Amy’s life? Do you think we all have treasure troves like that?
I don’t know! It’s really hard to say. I never know going in if I’ve even got a movie to make. Once you start making a film you hope there’s going to be enough material! My job as a director is always to push for more. I think it’s often about making a little bit go a long way. But you get lucky. You need luck when you make anything, any kind of art. Amy, her friends, Nick [Shymansky], Lauren [Gilbert], all of them are coming from middle-class backgrounds. They had money, they had cameras. This is pre-iPhone. This is not camera-phone footage, most of it; this is mini DVD recorders, or VHS recorders. They had enough money to have cameras at home. I think if they had come from a poorer background, maybe they wouldn’t have had any. My family didn’t film anything. But then you look deeper and realize, maybe there are photographs, there are things. It’s also context: You give something a context, and suddenly it becomes really deep or meaningful footage.
This was mostly analog footage. Do you think the next generation might have less, because people are so apt to delete digital files?
Yeah, they delete things. I also think it’s how people are filming themselves; it’s a bit self-conscious now. You’re filming yourself so that you can put it up on Instagram, whereas Amy was being filmed not really with any thought of it being used in any way or shared in any way. That gave it more of an intimate quality. Nowadays everyone films everything with the idea that it might one day be useful, or they’re going to post it. There’s a performance involved. But you don’t know. That’s just the nature of how times are. There will be somebody who finds a way to use this material, I’m sure.
Where did most of that footage come from?
It all came out of the interviews. I interviewed a lot of people. The first stage was for me to build up trust, for them to get to know me and to know where I was coming from. Only once they trusted me would anyone ever want to give me their personal footage. The first stage was just spending time with them, trying to show them that I really do want to get to know who the real Amy was. I really do want to get to the root of this story. Once we got to that stage, then everybody, bit by bit, really opened up, said, I’ve got these videos, I’ve got this diary, I’ve got this answering message. It was a long process. People like Amy’s friends, Lauren and Juliette [Ashby], it took maybe nine to ten months to get them to talk to me. With [producer] Salaam Remi it was more than a year, maybe a year and a half. You have to have a lot of patience to make a film. If I pushed anyone, they would never have wanted to do it.
In a very complex story like this, how do you make sure, as a documentarian, that you’re not exposing your own bias?
That’s instinct. If your heart is in the right place, you’re doing everything for the right reasons. I don’t have a side. I’m not trying to trick people. I basically said to all the key contributors, "Don’t sign a release. If you don’t sign a release, I can’t use your footage. If you’re not happy you can just walk away at any point." In one way that’s a big gamble, but in another way, I’m not hiding anything. The power was always in their hands. They could at any point say, "I refuse to be part of the film." That’s their prerogative.
I guess the backup was really that the more people I spoke to, everyone backed up what everyone else was saying. Even though these people had never met or spoken to one another, and actually they thought they didn’t like one another. Because a lot of times people would think, that other person, they’re the ones enabling her or helping her. Then I’d meet the [other] person and go, no, you’re exactly the same. The problem was you never did meet. You never did come together to try to help her. Everyone was kept separate. Everyone was arguing among themselves rather than coming together to help her. Everyone kind of backed up the same narrative. That’s when I knew I was on the right track.
Have British audiences reacted differently to the film than American audiences?
It’s kind of more personal in London particularly. Everyone is directly connected to Amy somehow. People met her or knew her or were one or two steps away from her. Over here [in the States], I think people came to Amy’s story later. In a way they had a lower opinion of her. There was a greater journey to go on. People really did think she was this messed up person who never spoke, never had anything eloquent to say. They probably didn’t even believe that she wrote the record. How could she? She can’t even speak. I think people were quicker to judge and now realize: Maybe we were wrong. What’s your feeling?
Yeah, I think you’re right. My impression of Amy Winehouse was that she was a train wreck. I knew she was regarded as very brilliant, and there were a couple songs she did that I really loved, but there was so much about the film that was surprising to me. That I had no context for. I didn’t really understand how seriously she was taken, I think.
You just used the term everyone used about her: train wreck. Sadly that was how she was summed up. For me, the big mission of the film was, let’s reassess: She was intelligent, she was funny, she was beautiful, she was really, really talented, she was an amazing guitarist, she wrote the music, she did everything. That’s what I realized, people here only became aware of her, only met her, after the Grammys in 2007 or 2008. And that whole beehive look, her being really skinny, that’s all you knew. Whereas in England, I can sort of remember her being healthier. People remember the first album [Frank, which didn’t come out in the U.S.]. And then everyone I know here has come across her. Bumped into her. People saw her. Friends of mine went out with her. I went to the same school as people from her band. She’s really close to home.
The film is meant to make us all feel somewhat culpable in her downward spiral. Do you remember that period when she was declining and the media smelled blood? What was your experience of that time?
It’s a tricky one because I would have been on different projects. A lot of the time when I’m working, I’m abroad. I was living in that part of London, but I wasn’t necessarily in London at that time. Also I’m not really a big TV watcher, so I can’t remember seeing those shows. I remember the music shows. I’m aware of her tabloid image in newspapers. I’m aware of how she was on the cover of the newspapers. She used to make the evening news because she was going into a pub, and someone said something so she punched them. Her walking in and out of court, surrounded by these people, this huge pack just following her everywhere. I have a vague memory of all of that, but not something much deeper, no.
I’ve heard you say that this story has obsessed you. Now that the film is living in the world, are you ready to move on?
Once I stop giving interviews and my voice comes back! How can I move on if you won’t let me? [Laughs] Because it’s opening all over the world at the same time, I’ve been doing international press for months nonstop, and my voice can’t cope with it. Which is a good problem. That’s what you dream about.
Yeah, I only feel so bad for you.
No, no, don’t feel bad for me! I’m joking. But it’s part of it. It’s become something strange when you spend so much time talking about someone you’ve never met. It’s a weird life that we lead. I have to every now and then remind myself, I am not a spokesperson for this person. I’m trying to explain the film and the process of making the film.
Is there anything I’m not asking you that you always wish people would ask you about the film?
The main thing for me is to really try to emphasize the positive. Don’t get caught up in the narrative of people who are complaining. That kind of happened in her life. It all got confused. It all became about everyone else and she got lost. The whole point of making the film was to kind of bring it back to Amy. To tell the world how great she was. She had the talent, she had the intelligence, she was the one who did it all. And she’s not the one around anymore.
This interview has been condensed and edited.