Amy Winehouse was arguably one of the most prolific yet haunted singer-songwriters of the early 21st century. She was hounded incessantly by the media, with a trend of portraying her as a substance-abusing trainwreck whose death at the age of 27 came as no surprise.
This year’s British documentary film about the late artist, Amy, aims to change the public’s perception by following her journey from the girl next door to one of the most talked-about names in modern music. Exclusive interviews and never-before-seen footage offer a new perspective on Winehouse and a glimpse of what goes on behind the artist’s curtain. Director Asif Kapadia explains where the narrative behind the real Amy really began – with her lyrics.
“I started by listening to her music again. I knew her records already but I really listened to them,” Kapadia says. “There was a lot on that first album [2003’s Frank] that I really liked and it came to a point where I asked someone in the office to download all the lyrics. I started reading them as a piece of writing, and having done a little bit of research, suddenly all of these names and moments started popping out. I became very aware that the lyrics felt like pages from her diary. So quite early on in the process, I had a gut feeling that this would be almost like an old-fashioned musical where the spine of the film were her lyrics, which had to be highlighted.
“When you don’t put the text up on the screen you just listen to the music and you slightly zone out. I really wanted people to pay attention to what she was saying, because I realised that every song was based on a real incident or person. Her writing is very beautiful, eloquent and simple but also very dense. It became a road map, and I had to work out how to tell the narrative around the songs.”
One of the central elements of the Amy narrative is that Winehouse was an artist, not a pop star. Unfortunately, this also meant she wasn’t necessarily cut out for the limelight or the intense intention and scrutiny that fame can bring.
“The thing that becomes apparent in her story is that she was in her element when she was in smaller jazz clubs singing live,” says Kapadia. “She just felt more comfortable there, and the big concerts with 20,000 people were not her thing. That’s when you see her drinking a lot onstage to get through it and handle everything. Once you understand the story and understand her, it all starts to make sense. The way she seemed to act in public was aggravated by something else.”
One telling line that Winehouse says in the film is: “I’m just a girl who sings.” Despite her rise to fame, she always saw herself that way.
“One of the reasons I was interested in doing this documentary was because she was a local girl,” the director says. “I’m a North Londoner and she lived just down the road. My connection was to her being this girl-next-door figure with a really good sense of humour who had cultural influences such as jazz. She came from a Jewish immigrant background in this melting pot that’s London. “That’s what I liked about her, and when I started talking to people I realised that so much of her story took place a half-mile from my door.
“For me it felt like a big connection – yes, it was about her, but it was also about us. It’s about the audience, it’s about society, it’s about the well-known streets. We know those clubs, we’ve drunk in those pubs. It’s about the great things in London, but also the darkness of it, and the two go hand-in-hand.
“She wasn’t one of these musicians from another world. Here was this ordinary, local girl down the street who had this talent. She liked singing, she liked writing and she used them as a way of dealing with problems. But the problem with success is that it became the problem.”
The stories about Winehouse during the height of her fame often centred around alcoholism, permeated with terrible photographs that portrayed her as a party girl at best and an addict at worst. These representations held little weight for Kapadia.
“Her friends always asked me if I was going to make this film about ‘the real Amy’. I kept saying that I didn’t understand, and asked who the real Amy was. It was then that I realised there was almost this other person who was pre-fame.
“I saw pages from her diary when she was young – she had amazing handwriting and she always had this intelligence that was way ahead of her peers. One of her friends said to me that when they were seven they all played hide-and-seek and they couldn’t find Amy. Eventually they found her in a corner reading Schindler’s List. When everyone else was running around playing, she was reading these grown-up books.
“She was really intelligent, really bright, really funny, really healthy. It’s that side of her that no-one has seen. I felt that it was really important for the audience to see who she used to be, who she really was.”
Amy (dir. Asif Kapadia) is out now on digital, Blu-ray and DVD.
