British filmmaker Asif Kapadia approached Oscar-winning documentary “Amy,” which was released 10 years ago, as if he were a detective investigating a crime, he told an audience of documentary professionals this week at Visions du Réel, a film festival in Nyon, Switzerland. So, who killed Amy Winehouse?
As he was making the film, Kapadia was conscious that it was “really dark.” “A friend said to me, ‘If you tell the truth, this film’s never going to come out.’ I thought: ‘What’s the truth? I don’t know what the story is.’ And then once I learned the story, I thought, ‘My God, this thing will never come out. It’s really heavy.’ There’s a version of this film that is 15 minutes longer, which is like really heavy, and my wife is still annoyed that we didn’t release that one, but it’s just a bit too much.”
“My language that I use is like I’m investigating a crime, like something awful happened,” he told the audience in Nyon, which is on the shore of Lake Geneva, with a view across the water of the Alps. “And so, if you came to our edit suite, it’s literally that kind of scene from a ‘Zodiac’ or something, like some David Fincher film, with all these lines and whiteboards, where you’ve got pictures of everyone – all the suspects, whatever, all the characters – and you’re trying to connect the dots.”
His “evidence,” so to speak, was culled from pre-existing material – archival footage from YouTube and the like, and private footage given him by friends and family – accompanied by interviews he conducted with those who knew her best.
Asif Kapadia
Courtesy of Visions du Reel
The reason he’d taken on the film in the first place was that, when she was alive, there were questions he had had about the British singer-songwriter: “Why is she in such a bad way on stage? Why does she keep turning up on the front pages of newspapers? Why is nobody looking after her?” And then after she died, it was: “How could she die at 27 in this modern age and no one got in any trouble? I didn’t understand.” That was what impelled him to take on the case … er … the film: “To reveal some sort of truth,” he said.
Initially, he and the film’s producer, James Gay-Rees, met with some of the central characters in her story: her father, the head of the record label, and her second manager, who wanted him to make the film because they liked what he did on his previous film, “Senna,” another film centering on a talented individual whose life was cut short: Brazilian racing driver Ayrton Senna, who died at the age of 34.
“We laid down our rules before we came on board,” Kapadia said. “I said: ‘Okay, so if we do this film, you need to give us all the music, you need to give us all the publishing. You’re going to pay for it. Leave us alone for two years. Don’t tell me who I can speak to. Do not tell me what to do. Just leave us for two years, and then we’ll give you a film. But we have to be really clear: it’s not a happy ending, is it? Right? You know, she died of addiction, really young, so we’re going to have to deal with that. We’re going to have to really dig into it.’”
He added: “I ended up interviewing like 120 people, people who were a part of her life, all over the world. The key thing was: Nobody trusted journalists. Nobody trusted cameramen. Everyone was a potential paparazzi. Everyone was potentially there to somehow sneak a photo and sell it to the newspapers. A lot of her friends were quite paranoid about everything. They definitely didn’t trust me or trust us because they were like, ‘If you’re making this film, you must have the permission of the people who control everything,’ and there was a lot of tension between people, so I had to really earn the trust of every single person I spoke to. And the worst thing I could do would be to turn up with a camera. So, how do I interview someone? The process became: Earn their trust, not have a camera, just myself in a room with a microphone on a table. The microphone would be running and we’d talk, and I’d just turn the lights off, and we’d sit in the dark.
“I’ll be like, ‘I’m happy to do it at two in the morning, whenever you want to come in, Saturday, Sunday, anytime. I’m here, you let me know. I’m not going to ask you to sign a release. You just talk to me, and at the end of the film, if you’re in the film, I’ll show you the film. If you’re happy, sign the release.’”
Kapadia explained that while he’s doing the interviews and archival research, he is editing the footage at the same time, and that would give him new leads to follow.
He said: “There’ll be someone in the shot, behind Amy in a room, and I’ll go, ‘Who’s that person? Are they are holding a camera? Maybe they’ve got some footage.’ So a lot of it becomes about investigating the image very carefully. Then I talk to someone and then they tell me something that then leads me off somewhere else.”
After watching a clip that included a phone message from Winehouse to Nick Shymansky, her first manager, as well as other material, Kapadia said: “There’s probably 50 different archive elements in that little sequence, like someone’s kept a mobile-phone message so personal and they are willing to share that with me only comes after months of building up trust. They don’t just hand anything like that over. In fact, everyone initially says, ‘I’ve got nothing.’ You’ve got to get to the point where they give you material that you wouldn’t even think of asking for.”
Kapadia explained that Shymansky was the first person among Winehouse’s friends to befriend him. “He came to see me to say, ‘No, I’m not going to talk to you. I’m not going to be a part of this film. I don’t think you should be making this film, but annoyingly, I really like ‘Senna,’ so I thought I’d meet you.’ I thought: ‘I’m in. I’ve got something to work with here.’ I brought him to the edit suite, and said, ‘This is the team,’ and he was looking at all of the work we had up on the walls, and he’s like, ‘No one’s ever taken Amy that seriously before, like you’ve literally been studying her in a way that no one ever has.’ So, for him, that was like: ‘You’ve already put in more effort than most people around her did.’ So that helped.’
“And then he said, ‘I haven’t got anything. I’ve just got these few videos.’ I’m like, ‘Can I see them?’ He said, ‘No, I’m not going to give them to you. I’ll show them to you but I’m not going to give them to you.’ And he showed them to me, and then they ended up in the film. The beginning of the film is all his stuff. And that all comes from trust and building up the relationship.”
Other material, like photos and Winehouse’s notebooks, came out of a similar process of detection and persuasion. “One person would lead to another five people, and each person would lead to another five people. And initially everyone said no, and then eventually there’s a tipping point where people start talking to one another, saying, ‘You should talk to him,’ and then they’d start recommending to people that they should talk to me. Because with this film, particularly, more than any of the other films, it was therapy for them to be able to honestly speak about their grief and their sadness and guilt and everything else that was in-built in that friend of yours dying young and feeling like, ‘It wasn’t me, it was all them,’ is what everyone said. ‘I was her best friend.’ Everyone I met was her best friend, and everyone else wasn’t.
“My job is to never tell one person what someone else has said. Always remain impartial. I’m just going to go with what I find, but then I back up everything with what I can show. My job is always to figure out, ‘How can I visually tell the story,’ and if I don’t have footage, in this case, we have quite a lot of stills, which tell a lot of the story. And so that’s kind of how it works.”
The film opens with Winehouse talking to her friend Lauren Gilbert, who is holding the camera, on Gilbert’s 14th birthday. “The key thing that’s really interesting in this film was it’s a particular period of time when people had home video cameras,” Kapadia said. “It’s pre-iPhone, it’s mini DV cameras. So what you’ve got is people holding the camera to their eye. It’s really a film about who’s holding the camera. So that opening scene is her friend Lauren, and then it becomes her first manager, Nick, filming, and Amy’s always talking to the lens. She’s always talking to her friends, and therefore us, the audience, and we’re always the people holding the camera. And that journey goes from Lauren, her friend, to her first manager, Nick, to her performing to the camera, and then eventually becomes she’s performing on TV. And then paparazzi come along, and then it’s her boyfriend who’s holding the camera, and then it’s her dad holding the camera. And then, she’s kind of like being hounded by the camera, physically attacked by the camera. And then eventually there’s a particular, very moving moment when she’s filming herself alone, and she’s kind of broken, but she’s got some sort of peace, almost, but it’s a really low point.
“So all the way through, she looks at the audience, and that is a really powerful emotional element that plays through the film that she’s performing to us, and then we are attacking her. We are literally chasing her down the street, and we’re with a point of view of the paparazzi.”
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