A life in music

Opening today in Rochester, filmmaker
Asif Kapadia’s powerful new documentary, “Amy,” chronicles the tragically short
life of singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse. Since its premiere at the Cannes Film
Festival in May, “Amy” has received wide acclaim (including in the pages of City Newspaper),
but has also comes with its share of controversy, as members of Amy Winehouse’s
family have spoken out against their portrayal in the film.

Told entirely through archival and home
video footage, as well as audio interviews with those closest to the singer,
the film is a devastating and strikingly intimate portrait of a troubled young
woman whose enormous talent wasn’t enough to shield her against the harsh glare
of the media spotlight.

City recently spoke with the film’s
producer, James Gay-Rees, by phone for a brief interview. An edited transcript
of that conversation follows.

How did you come to be involved in
producing “Amy”? Were you a fan of Amy Winehouse’s music going in?

I kind of was a fan, but I slightly
missed the boat. I think I was living in the States when she first popped up,
so I sort of appreciated her from afar. But I was approached by her label and
her management and her family to make this movie, because they’d seen a
previous movie we’d made called “Senna,” about the Brazilian racing driver.

The label is run by a guy called David
Joseph, in the U.K. He’s a friend of mine and he was very supportive of
“Senna,” and he texted me out of the blue one day about three or four years
ago, just saying, “Would you ever consider making a movie of the vein of ‘Senna’
about Amy Winehouse?” And I instantaneously — I don’t even know why I did it — said
“Yup, I’m in,” and so we sat down with everybody and got the ball rolling.

You previously collaborated with Asif Kapadia on “Senna.” How did already being familiar with one another translate
to your working relationship during this film?

It was good. We pretty much pulled
through the entire team, from the same editor as “Senna,” the researcher’s the
same, the production manager’s the same. So really,
we’d all worked with each other before and obviously
had a great experience on it and so it was like getting the band back together
again, really.

“Senna” was the first documentary we
made, so it took us a long time, but we hit the ground running with this one
and we’ve all had a great time. It’s been a very, very, challenging, difficult
movie to make, but we’re all really pleased with the outcome.

“Amy” shares a similar style as “Senna,”
in that it forgoes traditional talking-head interviews to use only archival and
home video footage. Was there ever any discussion about doing this film any
other way?

No, not really. And the problem with
making talking-head movies about people who are dead is that they can’t be
interviewed. So we didn’t want to be in a situation where everybody was
interviewed apart from Amy, because that leaves a big hole in the middle of the
movie. So what we try and do is keep it real time almost, so you meet the
people at the beginning and they take you through the journey.

We try not to break the spell by
cutting to talking heads — or cutting to anything, really — or having it in
voiceover. It’s really her and the people who were on the journey telling you
the story as it unfolds. And so you’re sort of steered through it, at that
time.

How did you go about securing all the
footage used for the film?

It was difficult, actually, because
there’s lots of footage out there, but there’s lots of crap — paparazzi footage
or whatever. But what we wanted was home movies and behind-the-scenes stuff,
and the great stuff that no one’s ever seen before.

Her people were very reluctant to talk,
to be honest. A lot of people didn’t want to participate. And it was a
challenge getting them. It’s always a challenge with documentaries, because you
have to earn people’s trust. Because it’s such a leap of faith for them. They
have no idea how the movie’s going to turn out or if we’re gonna
say one thing and do another.

We had lots of people saying to us, you
know, “You have to make the right movie,” “You have to tell the truth.” And
we’d be, like, “Well, you have to help us tell the truth then.” And they’d say,
“Well, no, because I don’t want to be involved.” And it’d be this Catch-22:
Well, how can we tell the truth and get the right movie out there if you won’t
participate?

So it was a lot of cat-and-mouse, but
we did get pretty much everybody over the line, I’m happy to say. And they all
really like the movie, which is great.

I’d imagine combing through all of that
footage was a daunting task. Where do you even begin when starting that
process?

Well, you need a lot of time. We
researched for six months solidly with about three people before we ever
started to assemble stuff. The [editor Chris King] comes on once we’ve got a
big lump of material. Then he basically just cuts a big block within the
timeline, with everything we’ve got, and all the while we’re trying to work out
what the story really is and marry it to that timeline. And then interview the
right people in relation to the time.

Then it’s just a question of crunching
that, narrowing it down, or working out what your A strand is, your B strand
is, your C strand, and then trying to find material that will illustrate what you’re
trying to say — whether that’s through audio or a picture. So there’s a reason
these films take time. Because we have no talking heads, or voiceover, we have
no shortcuts.

If you’ve got voiceovers, you can just
write the voiceover to do whatever job you want it to do. But we don’t use
that, and I think that’s why these films work if you get them right: because
they’re so intimate. There are no movie shortcuts. You’re just in it. Somebody
described this movie as feeling like you’re her best friend, and you’re going
on this journey with her, but you’re powerless to stop it. And I think that’s a
result of the way we’ve constructed it.

[Amy’s father] Mitch Winehouse has been
vocal in the press about his objections to the film. Is that something you tend
to expect if you know a subject is going to be shown in a less than flattering
light?

Well, you know, it’s always a potential
outcome. But I think the reality here is we had no idea what movie we were gonna make, because we didn’t have a story. It was a great
leap of faith on our part. And I think Mitch had a very clear idea what he
wanted the movie to be. But at the end of the day, when you’re crunching 10
years into two hours it’s very hard to keep everybody happy. You have to make a
lot of very tough choices about what gets in the movie and what goes out.

It’s a crazy endeavor really, because
how can you ever really compress 10 years into two hours? But that’s what we
have to do. It means you’re not going to keep all of the people happy all of
the time. It’s an unfortunate reality. But we’re not doing it on purpose, and
we’re not trying to show anybody in the right light or the wrong light. The
film is just a simple reflection of the exhaustive research we did.

Jumping off of what you were saying
about condensing those years, what kind of discussions were had about how much
time to devote to each period in Amy’s life? Or was that largely dependent on
how much footage you had from a particular period?

Partly. But it’s kind of organic. I
mean, we could have made a movie about 2007 alone, which is the year it all
happened. She sort of meets Blake, splits up with Blake, “Back to Black” is a
huge success — I mean, you just kinda have to look at
where the narrative organically is taking you.

Some years are fallow. Some people have
said we didn’t give a fair representation to the last three years of her life.
But the movie can’t be five hours long, and we think what happened in other
years is more important. So it’s choices; it’s always choices. All movies are choices,
but these in particular because of the timeframe you’re trying to work with.

Obviously you use a lot of Amy’s music
throughout the film, and not all the renditions are the standard studio
recordings. How do you decide which version of a particular song to use? How
much is a discussion between the director, the rights holder, the editor, and
the sound mixer?

Yeah, in the movie there actually
aren’t that many of the record versions, actually. We tend to use demos and
live versions. Occasionally, like on “Back to Black,” we start with her in the
studio, then go through the demo, then we go to the actual published, recorded
version at the end. So we were very keen to present versions of the song that
nobody’s heard before.

There’s lots of music in there that are
completely fresh versions. And “Love is a Losing Game” is live. The great thing
about Amy’s music is that it’s so narrative. And so that’s why the music takes
such a central role in the film, because it really is driving the story
forward. We realized fairly early on that she was telling us the story through
her music and if we listened to the lyrics closely enough, the movie was right
there.

This article appears in Jul 8-14, 2015.