Photograph by Leslie Hasler |
BAFTA-winning
filmmaker, Asif Kapadia has crafted an interesting niche for himself. He’s
gained an admirable momentum for producing stirring biopics about icons the
world has loved and admired. Archival footage forms the backbone of his
directorial language—ingeniously, he pieces together footage shot at varying
points of time, to mold a narrative that is truthful and visceral in its
account of retelling the icons’ story. His eccentric and arguably
ground-breaking style has brought him much acclaim, celebrating him as one of
the most gifted documentarians of contemporary times. With praiseworthy films
like Senna and The Warrior under his belt, Asif now takes on the role of telling
Amy Winehouse’s story.
For Amy, it was drama from the beginning—a tragic tale built
for mass consumption. She had mastered the art of translating her grief, her
romantic ruminations and her disappointments with men, into beautiful, haunting
music that turned into Grammy-winning
anthems overnight. Amy was an enigma—a seductive songstress with an absurd
hairdo and a tiny frame, but a voice that could hit you like a cannon ball. The
television and the tabloids transformed her into a dysfunctional goddess—crowds
worshipped her, followed her, imitated her and fed on every morsel of
information they could get a hold of through the media. As Nick Johnstone,
author of Amy Amy Amy would go on to
write, ‘Everyone wanted a piece of her.’
Through his documentary, Asif, like a relentless scalpel
peels off layers of this larger-than-life persona to present the real Amy—the
bruised, broken, utterly human Amy. The film takes you back to the starting
point and maps her tragic trajectory. ‘You already know the ending,’ Asif says,
‘but you don’t know why that ending happened… the film tries to make you
understand what happened in between for her to reach that point.’ I spoke to
Asif about his stunning biopic (which released this July), on the musical
superstar who burned out before she even began.
Before venturing out to make a biopic on Amy, what was the
relationship that you shared with her?
Photograph by Alex Lake |
When I started making the film, I knew
her songs, I knew her voice, I had the records, but I didn’t know her—I had
never met her. I normally make films about subjects I don’t really know too
much about; I learn on the journey. Now of course, I know a lot about her—I’ve
seen so many of her incredible performances. What is interesting about her is
that it’s not just the voice, it’s her writing. For me, the hardest thing ever
is to write something that is original, emotional, personal, which has depth
and humour. You will be surprised to know how funny and intelligent she is!
When you meet her young, she is so different to the person who becomes famous.
I think that was a big part of her journey. The more I sat down and watched her
[footage], the more I learned about her and felt it was a story that needed to
be told, because people have such a skewed idea of who she was, and there is so
much more to her than just the voice.
How did you immerse yourself into her highly intense,
glamorized world? Where did you begin?
Well, I just started talking to people.
I interviewed people: we would just sit down and have a chat; there was no
agenda. I had a lot of questions, but I never got around to asking them. I
would just let them talk, and through talking, one thing would lead to another.
Most of the people I spoke to had been carrying a lot of pressure and pain
inside of them and nobody had ever spoken to them. Since I was not a part of
her story, because I was not connected to her life or was in the music
business, they felt free to tell me what they really felt. It became almost
like this therapeutic process for them. I interviewed over a 100 people. During
those interviews, they would tell me, ‘Look, I have this video, I have this
photograph, I have these phone messages’—and they’d share their memories [with
me]. So the film is not only their interviews, but also the memories they have
of Amy. They shared material that they held very close to themselves, and they
trusted me enough to give me that material to put in the film. So the film is a
construction of the material that I discovered as I was going around talking to
people. In a way, this is a film within a film.
Amy was constantly followed—the cameras catapulted her into
stardom, the cameras brought her fame, and it was this fame that unfortunately
dictated her downfall. Now, it is the footage from these cameras that tell the
world her story.
Yeah, I mean the cameras are a big part of the story. When you
see the film, you’ll realize that it starts off with the camera being friendly
towards her— the videos are basically footage shot by her friends, her first
manager, her boyfriend—you know, people who she knows and loves. However,
slowly as you go along, her relationship with the camera becomes darker and in
a way, more violent. You can see her becoming more and more afraid of the
camera, because rather than friendly people filming her (and her filming
herself a lot as well), there are people who are filming her to sell the
footage. So it becomes paparazzi—you see people using the camera to humiliate
her. So the camera, rather than being a friendly tool which helps you take a
photograph and make a memory, becomes the very means of attacking her, and
that’s very much a part of the movie experience.
Could you talk a bit about who Amy was as an adolescent?
I would say that you just need to read the lyrics of her songs. The clue is already there—she’s talked about it all. It’s very hard to explain, because there are so many elements to her. So there is no one obvious answer. It’s her real life which is much more complex—family, friends, boyfriends, husbands, depression, drink, drugs, falling in love, being dumped by the one you love—so many things happened to her that created insecurities within her that manifested themselves in many ways. Then she became famous and was surrounded by people, and she wondered, ‘Are they here because they like me or because I’m rich and famous?’ And if you’re not sure of yourself, if you are not confident, then you don’t know whom to trust. So these were all issues that were intrinsic to her life.
The irony about biopics is that most of us already know the
individual’s story. More importantly, we know how it’s going to end. In the
case of AMY, we already know that the
narrative has a sad ending. Was that a cause of worry?
Well, that’s where the filmmaking comes in. Of course you already know the
ending, but you don’t know why that ending happened. It is the beginning that
is really important. You know that her story ends a certain way, but my
questions always are, ‘Why did it happen? How did it happen?’ And that’s why I
made the film, because it made no sense to me as to why someone would die that
young in this day and age in front of our eyes? How was it possible? Why didn’t
anyone do anything to stop it? So the film is really going backwards from that
point. You already know the ending, but the film tries to make you understand
what happened in between for her to reach that point. Amy’s life was very
complicated—she was incredibly intelligent and complicated—so the film became
my way of giving you enough of the back story to understand how things
transpired.
This interview appeared in Platform Magazine's July/Aug 2015 Music Issue.
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