It will soon be four years to the day the tragic news came down that singer Amy Winehouse had died at age 27, a death in her London flat that was later ruled as accidental alcohol poisoning.
Her brief and tumultuous life is harrowingly chronicled in a new feature-length documentary, “Amy,” which utilizes home movies of her childhood and young adulthood, studio rehearsal footage and interviews with friends, family and people in the music industry who knew her well.
Filmmaker Asif Kapadia, like Winehouse, grew up in North London. “Something happened with Amy Winehouse and I wanted to know how that happened in front of our eyes,” the director said. “How can someone die like that in this day and age? And it wasn’t a shock; I almost knew it was going to happen. You can see she was going down a certain path.”
Yet as a viewer, watching clips featured in the documentary of Winehouse as a vibrant teenager with a powerful voice, there is overwhelming sadness that her story did not have to end in tragedy.
Kapadia wanted to explore it in detail. “For me, she was like a girl from down the road. I grew up in the same part of the world. It could be someone I knew, someone I was friends with or might have gone to school with.”
He and editor Chris King and producer James Gay-Rees began assembling footage and came up with the concept of telling the story through Winehouse’s lyrics, which hauntingly appear on screen throughout the film, often as she seen in the studio or performing.
The filmmakers delved into unraveling the meaning behind the lyrics, seeking an understanding of Winehouse’s being.
“Everyone knew she could sing, but maybe people didn’t realize how well she could write. She wrote the music herself as well. The whole thing was her,” said Kapadia.
After they decided on using the songs and lyrics as the narrative vehicle of the film, they began the interview process of trying to find the right subjects. Often in such cases, there is a definitive book that can be used as source material, but not with Winehouse. The books written about her were inconsistent with each other, with a good amount of conflicting information.
“With Amy it became apparent that no one knew the story, or that people were not willing to tell it,” said Kapadia. In an effort to get to the heart of the story, they conducted more than 100 interviews with 80 people in a difficult process that took more than a year.
“She had her old friends, her famous friends, her new friends and not so famous friends and she would present different versions of herself to all these different people so they all had completely different reflections and experiences of her,” Gay-Rees said.
It’s left to the viewer to sort out the divergent remembrances from people including girlhood friends Juliette Ashby and Lauren Gilbert, her first manager Nick Shymansky and the great love of her life, Blake Fielder-Civil, whom she married and divorced. Their up-and-down relationship paused her great agony that is reflected in her lyrics, particularly in her first huge hit album, “Back to Black.” Later, the couple was dogged by media everywhere they went as their drug use together spiraled out of control.
Another key person in Winehouse’s life, her father Mitch, is also shown to be someone who caused her both huge distress and great pleasure. He has since distanced himself from the film, saying he does not approve of the way it characterizes his daughter or their relationship.
Despite the fact that he left Winehouse’s mother Janis for another woman when she was 9 years old and that she grew up in a broken home, Amy later made him her manager and is shown at her essence to be a daddy’s girl who sought his love and attention.
Yet as she struggled with drug addiction, bulimia and constant harassment by the media as her fame exploded, her father is portrayed as seeming mainly interested in keeping her working– and the huge amount of money flowing in.
“Amy was just a suburban, Jewish kid from North London who became this phenomenon,” Gay-Rees sums up. “Amy was not a Justin Bieber. She wasn’t a Disney kid.”
–Hillary Atkin
