Amy Winehouse’s father, Mitch, has announced that work will soon start on an alternative biopic film about his daughter’s life. A collaboration with her former fiancé Reg Traviss, the film aims to broadcast a different perspective to that of Asif Kapadia’s Amy. The smash hit biopic depicted the iconic singer’s troubled life, and was released in July to rave reviews.
Amy may have pleased fans and critics alike, but, even before it was released, Amy’s father Mitch branded the film “misleading” and “tainted,” saying it contained “basic untruths”. An official statement from the Winehouse family in April claimed that, “By misunderstanding [addiction] and its treatment, the film suggests, for instance, that not enough was done for Amy, that her family and management pushed her into performing or did not do enough to help her.” Mitch later added in an interview with Newsbeat: “I was there every day, and if I wasn’t there — because I was working or I was away somewhere or she was away somewhere — she’d phone seven times a day. And there’s no sense of that in the film and that’s what’s disappointing”.
Mitch announced his intention to make a film documenting a different version of events at the end of Amy’s life from the one put across by Kapadia earlier this year. Speaking on TV program Loose Women in July, he said, “This nonsense about Amy being left on her own for the last three years of her life is incredibly insulting and it’s insulting to families who are struggling with addiction, up and down the country. She had a lovely boyfriend, she had wonderful friends, she had her PAs, they’re not in the film. They don’t have a voice… Reg did six, seven hours of interviews, not in the film. I did dozens of hours of interviews and you hear my voice three times and what I say is misrepresented.”
This weekend, Winehouse told Bang Showbiz that work will soon start on his alternative film about Amy: “We hope to start work fairly shortly on it. But it’s going to be more than just a film,” he says, explaining that, “All of the people who weren’t in the film are hopping mad. They want their voices to be heard. We don’t want to be like Asif, we’ll let people say what they want, but we don’t want it to be negative”.
“We meet at least every month, Amy’s dearest friends, Reg and me, and we sit there, and the stories that we tell are brilliant,” he explains, adding, “People don’t realize everybody’s got 100 stories about Amy, and that’s the kind of thing that we’re going to try and do”.
Earlier this month, Mitch told the celebrity news agency that he was talking to director Phil Griffin, who directed the videos for Rehab and Back to Black, about collaborating on the film.
Credits
Photography Bryan Adams and George Harvey