With “Amy,” director Asif Kapadia takes a look at the troubled life of singer Amy Winehouse, who died of alcohol poisoning in 2011, at the age of 27. We spoke to the London-based filmmaker by phone about the similarities and differences between “Amy” and “Senna” (his previous documentary, about the late Brazilian race car driver Ayrton Senna), and the surprises he discovered about Winehouse, who lived and died in the glare of the spotlight, yet to some degree remained hidden, even in plain sight.
Q: “Amy” contains some surprising footage, including an early clip of the singer at 14 singing “Happy Birthday.” I wondered for a moment if some of it was a re-enactment.
A: You give me far too much benefit of the doubt and intelligence. It’s all real. That’s Amy, not an actress.
Q: Is the ubiquity of cellphone video changing the nature of documentaries?
A: I’ve done two films like this now. The interesting thing about Senna’s and Amy’s period is that, as people were filming, they weren’t ever thinking it’s going to be used for a movie. Now it’s all a bit too knowing.
Q: Do you blame reality TV?
A: I do. It’s like, “Let me get all of this stuff down so when I’m famous they’ll have stuff of me when I’m young.”
Q: How did you convince people to give you the material?
A: The first thing was just getting them to meet me. Only after a long conversation did it ever get to the point of saying, “OK, I have footage.” They were not going to just hand it over.
Q: Was that due to a sense of privacy, painful memories or guilt?
A: All of the above. There’s definitely guilt, anger and frustration that nobody stopped it. Almost everyone felt that they did everything they could have done, but it’s other people to blame. Then there were definitely those who know that they let it slip, that they could have done more. But, you know, they were on a roll. It was all going so well. What could go wrong?
Q: There’s plenty of blame to go around.
A: Life is so much more complicated than the fiction version, where you go, “That was the moment. If we could have just changed that one moment, that one scene, then everything would have turned out differently.” It isn’t like in those movies. All of your experiences add up to make you the person you are. Everyone had a tiny part to play, including us, the audience, including the people who went and bought tickets to concerts, knowing that she’s really terrible right now, but we’ll see her before she dies.
Q: In the paparazzi scenes, the audio of the camera flashes sound enhanced, like weapons.
A: I’m a film director. We should never put documentaries on a pedestal, where everything is pure and untouched. For me, that scene was inspired by the scene in “Raging Bull,” when they’re fighting and the flashbulbs are going off. I wanted you to feel the visceral feeling of being attacked by a bunch of cameras. The flash is very violent.
Q: Both “Amy” and “Senna” focus on charismatic talents who lived fast and died young. What is it about that theme that interests you?
A: When I think about it, they’re this kind of brother and sister, this yin and yang, because the stories have so much in common in terms of the ending. But when I look deeper, there are differences. With “Senna,” you’ve got this amazing, charismatic man, who’s like from another planet, who was surrounded by people who felt nothing but love for this guy, and wanted to help us (with the film). He came from a secure, educated background. He was very eloquent. Amy did not give any interviews after “Back to Black” came out. She didn’t come from a particularly secure background. And when it came to making a film about her, nobody seemed to get along. Everybody was saying, “No, I’m her best friend. Why are you talking to that person?” There were a lot of people pulling her in different directions. (Senna) was this guy from another planet. (Amy) was the girl next door. I like the fact that she was the kind of girl I could have gone to school with.
Q: Amy’s life was so exposed that it’s hard to imagine there could be anything new to uncover. What was your biggest surprise?
A: You’d think that. We found as we were making it though, we were like, you think you know the story, but actually you don’t know anything. I’m not sure I knew some of the basics. I’m not sure how much I knew that she wrote her own songs.
Q: They’re so personally revealing.
A: All of the answers are there. We just didn’t listen very carefully. One way of looking at it is, if this was a thriller, she’s left these clues behind, waiting for somebody to pay enough attention. And who knew she was so funny? Who knew how intelligent she was? You just don’t think that the person that you saw in her latter years was a clever girl. She was always the most intelligent person in the room.
Q: I was unfamiliar with much of the music.
A: There’s very little in the film that is actually off the records. Most of the music is live. She sings some Donny Hathaway. There are some early songs that have never been released. Most people in the U.S. have never heard of the first album (“Frank”). It wasn’t released there. It’s only halfway through that we get to “Back to Black,” which is the album that most people here know.
Q: Amy develops what seems to be a guarded quality as she became more famous, as if her whole look — the wig, the makeup — were a protective mask.
A: It is a mask — you’re absolutely right. The whole thing’s a charade. The hair is not real. The makeup’s not real. There’s this footage after the Grammys of her looking at herself on her computer. That’s what she really looks like underneath the hair and the makeup. She hardly had any hair.
Q: You’ve said that you hope “Amy” makes people angry.
A: This was happening in front of everyone’s eyes. I’ve yet to come across a person who hasn’t heard of Amy Winehouse. I haven’t come across anyone who’s said, “Oh really? She died?” If you don’t know anything, you know that much. There was one screening where all of the women were crying, right at the beginning. I said, “Why were you crying?” and they said, “We’ve never seen her happy before.” Then I thought, “Well, what do you want people to feel at the end of the film?” It wasn’t just, “Aww, that was sad.” I’m not sure I’m comfortable with how we live today, with how we treat young kids — they may not be talented, they may not have anything going for them — but we publicly humiliate them. Everyone’s seen that YouTube footage from Amy’s last concert in Serbia (where the singer was incoherent and booed off stage). We weren’t there, but we all saw it.
