Seeking to capture truth of talented tragic Amy

Arts Week with Judy Murphy

For Oscar nominee, Asif Kapadia, a good documentary is all “about the emotion”.

The director of Amy, about the late singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse, and of Senna, about the late Formula One racing driver, Ayrton Senna, wants to attract audiences “who have no interest in motor-racing or who have no interest in Amy”.

He has succeeded spectacularly. Amy, which was released in cinemas last July, became the highest grossing documentary of all times in the UK, surpassing 2010’s Senna, which had held that position previously.  To date, according to Asif, it has earned some £25 million.

Asif’s film about Amy Winehouse, the troubled prodigy and multiple addict, who died in 2011 aged 27, received its Oscar nomination last Thursday, just two days before its director visited Galway to take part in ‘Talking Documentary’, a two-day seminar on documentary-making, organised by Galway Film Centre.

London-born Asif explained that when he started the film about Winehouse, he’d had his own opinions of her based on what he’d seen of her in her later years. Then people began telling him about the young Amy, and his view changed. As the film tracked her story and the choices she made, it also captured the paparazzi which pursued her for five years.

“Amy is about how we live now – about an artist and the paparazzi,” Asif explained. “She became famous when newspapers were going digital and had to feed their websites. She was having her breakdown in public and was an easy subject. “I want people to be angry when they see it. This is the world we live in.”

Even people who don’t buy the Mail or similar tabloids become complicit by sharing or commenting on Facebook, he said.

“We all have an opinion on people we don’t know.”

And, so while Amy is about “art, creativity, songwriting f**ked-up parents”, it also about how she lived in that spotlight.

By using footage of Winehouse, alongside her songs and interviews with friends, family and colleagues, the documentary brings the viewer on an emotional rollercoaster.

“At the beginning of the film, she is happy and alive and has those great eyes and you want to hang out with her,” Asif mused. “And then when it goes black, you feel for her. It was important to have her voice. It’s not me saying those things, it’s her.”

Asif described her songs as being like “pages from her diary”, and said that with a song such as Rehab, “you realise that word for word, she put what happened into the song”.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.