Erstellt am: 6. 7. 2015 - 18:32 Uhr
Amy!
Mit nur 27 Jahren ist sie 2011 verstorben - an einem Herzinfarkt, wohl in Folge ihrer jahrelangen Suchterkrankung. Das sie zu den besten Jazz-Stimmen ihrer Generation zählt ist kein Geheimnis. Auch ihre privaten Eskapaden mag man zu genüge kennen. Weniger bekannt sind Videoaufnahmen aus ihrer Jugend oder Kindheit. Umwerfend auch die Demoaufnahmen und Auftritte aus der Zeit bevor Amy Winehouse fast die ganze Welt mit ihrer Stimme und ihrem Charisma bekehrt hat.
Thimfilm
Der aus Camden in London stammende Regisseur Asif Kapadia hat aus diesem ungewöhnlichen und außergewöhnlichen Material eine Doku namens „Amy“ geschnitzt.
Asif Kapadia scheint sich regelrecht auf biografische Dokumentarfilme spezialisiert zu haben. „Senna“ über den 1994 verunglückten Formel-Eins-Star Ayrton Senna war sein erster Bio-Picture-Hit.
Nun rekonstruiert er den Aufstieg und den (medialen) Fall von Amy Winehouse. „Amy“ ist eine intime visuelle Collage geworden. Im Hintergrund dazu sind sehr persönliche Stimmen von Amy Winehouse Vertrauten zu hören. Vater Mitch steigt genauso schlecht aus wie Amys Ex-Ehemann Blake Fiedler–Civil. Aber auch das sensationsgierige Publikum von Amy Winehouse kriegt dabei ein Fett ab. Warum? Das hat mir „Amy"-Regisseur Asif Kapadia in München beim Filmfest im Interview erzählt.
Addiction, depression, this is all predating her fame. This is all predating her relationship to Blake and people like that. She became somebody that all the newspapers and tabloids and paparazzi followed and so that became part of her story. So the film changes and by the ending I felt it bacame a film as much about the audience and about people in London. It is about how we were enjoying the comedians making fun of her, how we were seeing the clips of her on youtube being a desaster. Everybody is watching this stuff. Everybody is bying these newspapers, clicking on these websites, making them more and more popular. And somehow i think what happened is people cellectively lost the idea that there is a little girl in the middle of all of this. Part of that film is to rebalance that, and to remind you that there is this little girl who was great. Any maybe we should have looked a bit more after her.
How did you approach her friends and family? Was it easy to get all the material?
The whole film startet off with the audio interviews. That's where I built up the trust. We spent a lot of time talking to people, getting them to know me and trust me. Sometimes it took nine month, sometimes it took a year to meet with them. After we had done the audio interview and they could understand where we are coming from and what we were trying to achieve then people would say, I've got these photographs, I've got this diary, I've got this answerphone message, I got this video. So after I spoke to them all the people I wanna say trusted me, and then gave me these personal material.
Did you feel some responsibility reconstructing and deconstructing the life of Amy Whinehouse?
It is a huge responsibility when you are dealing with real people. For sure. With all kinds of emotions that are combined with that. It became like a mission. Our mission was to try to tell the story and to be as honest as we can. People kept saying, they never gonna let you make this film. Nick, her first manager, said to me many times: this film will never come out. I think everyone felt people would not let the truth come out. It got quite a pressure. I talked to onehundred people and had ninetynine were very nervous about speaking. Partly because they were in the music business and didn't want to upset anyone of their bosses, or they want a music carreer themselves and they don't want to ruin their chances. I am not in the music business, I don't know anyone there, I just wanted to tell the story and to try to correct what looked somehow wrong. Something wrong had happened and I felt like we needed to deal with it and talk about it. Because it had happened in my city and to someone nearby. I felt like everyone else was a bit too worried to speak out. Now I met all these people and they said 'I've had this feeling but it wasn't for me to talk.' That's where we came in as filmmakers to speak and hopefully there is a debate that will happen.
How and where starts the exploitation of a famous person and how do you try to avoid that?
What i am trying to do is to get deeper into a character to understand who Senna was, who Amy was, what drove them, what motivated them, what helped them become the person they became. Senna took five years, Amy took three years to make. They are quite detailed, there is a lot of homework. Nothing is in the film by accident. The idea was not to exploit them. The idea was to somehow get under their skin to understand their way of thinking, their lifes and their decisions. Why things turned out the way they did. The two are quite different, very different characters. Senna is very positive, he was very driven, very interesting. Almost like a man from another planet, he was a superhero. Amy is very ordinary, very down to earth, like a girl next door. Very insecure, very worried about her look. Both stories have a similar ending sadly, they both died young, but they have very different journeys. These films are about trying to understand their characters via their journey and via the people around them. I didn't meet them. I didn't see one of them alive. I am like in the audience learning about these people as i go along.
What was your personal interest? Why doing a film about Amy Whinehouse?
Partly it was because I knew she had a good voice. I didn't really know too much about her. I had a lot of questions about why her life did turn out the way it did. Why did it end like that? It didn't make any sense that in this day and age in London that could happen. So publicly. And also because I am a North Londoner I lived very close to where she lived. I always felt this was a story about London, a story about my city. I knew Camden very well. But I haven't made films in London for a long time. So that became the subject. I wanted to explore the city. There is this complex kind of contradiction of real creativity, you can be anything you wanna be, you can be different, you can be unusual, you can be funny, you can be dark. But there are also these drugs and these darker sides of life all mixed together and everyone living amongst each other. These kind of references of a jewish girl who sings black jazz music and ... you know all of that stuff is what we are living up with. It's a very mixed place. And I somehow wanted to deal with that.
Gewinn Tickets zu einem FM4 Kino unter Freunden
Wir verlosen noch 10x6 Tickets zum einem FM4 Kino unter Freunden von "Amy" (OmU, 128min) am Dienstag, 7. Juli 2015, 20 Uhr in der UCI KINOWELT Millennium City, Wien.
Dafür solltest du folgende Frage beantworten: In welchem Jahr gewann Amy Whinehouse einen Preis bei den Brit Awards
Die richtige Antwort und deinen Namen schickst du bitte per Mail an game.fm4@orf.at. Einsendeschluss ist Dienstag der 7.Juli.2015, 12 Uhr!