Asif Kapadia’s Amy Winehouse documentary explains her descent

Asif Kapadia pulls no punches in his portrait of Amy Winehouse.

Vodafone Summer Series, Somerset House, London, Britain - 20 Jul 2007

In 2011, Amy Winehouse’s first manager, Nick Shymansky, saw Senna, Asif Kapadia’s documentary about Formula One racing driver Ayrton Senna, and thought someone should tell the singer’s story, too. Within weeks the British soul-pop star was dead after a steady downward spiral of addiction enabled by family, friends and workmates.

The desire for a fitting visual document became more pressing. Winehouse’s record company, Universal, approached Kapadia to make a warts-and-all documentary, with full access to her back catalogue.

Universal sensed Kapadia would tell the story straight and with respect. But Kapadia couldn’t anticipate how difficult it would be to coax people to talk freely about Winehouse’s life. And Universal, as well as her friends and family, couldn’t imagine how coolly Amy would imply, without direct accusations, those around her contributed to Winehouse’s death.

“People who are in the film, 99 per cent of them say the film’s honest,” Kapadia says while driving around north London, Winehouse’s distinct milieu. “It’s kind of shaken up a bit of the industry, or at least got people talking, which is sort of what we hoped for.”

The 1 per cent is the singer’s father, Mitch Winehouse, a London cabbie who built a music career for himself piggybacking on his daughter’s success. He has disowned the film, saying it portrays him “in the worst possible light”.

Kapadia disagrees. “He’s saying what he’s saying but the film is honest, the film is straight.

“We’ve spoken to a lot of people (more than 100 were interviewed), we’ve done our research, we’ve used the archive to show what was going on, this all happened, we’re not making anything up,” he says.

“It might make people uncomfortable but this was all going on at the time when she wasn’t very well. And people, I suppose, need to at some point account for what they were doing.”

Kapadia has style on his side. In Amy he uses the same method he used to such great effect in Senna, what he calls a “true fiction”, in which archive footage — including home movies, news reports and paparazzi clips — is assembled and the story is told without any guiding voiceover.

It presents a tale while reducing the likelihood the filmmaker will be accused of manufacturing a narrative — and, as in the case of Senna, it does so in something resembling a thriller format.

The footage of Winehouse’s early career, provided by a camera-obsessed Shymansky, shows the wit, vivaciousness and normality of a talented young Londoner who eventually would find outrageous success — and in its wake would follow binge drinking, bulimia and, at its peak, a $US16,000-a-week drug habit.

All this was enabled and obsessed about by her ex-husband, management team, the music industry and the public and press, which revelled in her music and her humiliating downfall.

Kapadia doesn’t resile from the way the film points the finger. “One way or another, (they weren’t) stepping back and saying, ‘Hang on, is this right for her? Am I doing this for me or am I doing this for her?’ ” he says.

“I think a lot of people got confused. Sometimes people get away with it and a lot of execs and producers I’ve spoken to in the music business have said this happens all the time but generally you get away with it — and sometimes you don’t.

“But actually hers wasn’t a sudden thing. It was a long, slow, drawn-out death and there were lots of opportunities when people could have made different decisions and stopped things, stopped the machine and just made her better.”

Winehouse flamed so brightly in such a brief life that, at first glance, she appears to have followed the rock star narrative, with circumstances, success and sycophancy leading to her death from alcohol intoxication at 27.

Kapadia says he was aware of her life — who could ignore the multi-Grammy-winning artist behind the album Back to Black and the anthemic single Rehab? But he didn’t know the details.

He says the film ended up where he thought it was going once he started talking to people and hearing recurring themes.

“The issues started really early,” he says. “I didn’t realise she had so much baggage and stuff going on from a really young age, which makes perfect sense.

“And I didn’t realise how amazing the lyrics were and how all the clues are there.

“There’s a road map which is just her words, her lyrics, and you just follow them. That was a revelation, to read the lyrics: you realise it’s about a real person and a real incident and suddenly it gets much deeper and richer.”

The early vision of a mischievous teen led to the realisation that “she was so funny”, he adds. “There’s a lot of wit in her and black humour in the songs and lyrics — it really grabs you.”

Kapadia’s proximity to her life also intrigued him. He wanted to make a film about his city, London, and Winehouse’s life was very specifically related to the north London suburbs he inhabited. She wasn’t an other-worldly pop star; most people he knew had a personal tale about Winehouse or were one step removed.

That aligned with Kapadia’s ­realisation that she wasn’t a rock cliche with an appetite for destruction but, rather, a simple girl whose circumstances overwhelmed her.

“I just wanted to make her normal and human,” he says. “I don’t buy into the rock ’n’ roll thing that everyone is the same. Actually everyone’s different.

“It becomes a convenient marketing tool but she was like your kid, my sister, a friend of mine — she was just an ordinary person who was good at something.

“That’s why I was interested,” he adds.

“She was a girl from down the road, someone who I could have bumped into at a bus stop who happened to be carrying a guitar case.”

And if viewers see that, Kapadia hopes they may adopt a rather different attitude if they come across similarly struggling figures in the future. “That’s what quite interested me,” he says, “making a film about someone who was quite ordinary at heart.”