Asif Kapadia thinks Amy Winehouse may have benefited from failure during her life.
The British filmmaker is behind new documentary movie Amy, which focuses on the life of the late singer. Amy, who died aged 27 from alcohol poisoning in July 2011, won five Grammy’s in 2008 as well as three Ivor Novello Awards and a Brit Award, but Asif thinks hitting a hurdle in her career could have helped her in the long term.
“I guess the fame is something you can’t control and it got so big at such a bad time for her,” he said to HeyUGuys.com. “So yeah I didn’t think it worked out best for her. I always felt that if she made another record quickly and it was a huge failure it might have helped her. Failure is a good thing for longevity sometimes in careers.”
Despite still being days away from its release, Amy has made a huge impact on critics, describing it as “heartbreaking” and “awe-inspiring”. For Asif, the whole experience of producing the documentary was healing for everyone involved and beyond.
“It’s definitely been cathartic for the people who knew her. Most of them have managed to speak and feel they have moved on in their lives a bit, and in a weird way...and this was not the intention, I would never say it was the intention, talking to us and helping to make the film almost gave them a way to grieve and got stuff off their chests that they had been carrying,” he explained. “And people I’ve spoken to who knew Amy, journalists, other kinds of press people, photographers, everyone has all felt slightly – [because] they met her, spoke to her, people who knew her – felt they got a slight release of something they didn’t even know they were carrying.”
