‘Approval from the family? That wouldn’t work for me’: cast and crew of Back to Black on their Amy Winehouse movie

It’s early 2023 and, in a film studio in west London, the production crew on Back to Black are attempting to recreate a pivotal moment in the career of Amy Winehouse: the singer’s chaotic appearance on the Pyramid Stage at the 2008 Glastonbury Festival. She’s riding high from the long-tail success of her second album, 2006’s Back to Black, but up there on the main stage, she’s wobbly and wobbling, slugging booze as she shouts to the audience about her fella, Blake, currently incarcerated at Her Majesty’s Pleasure.

It’s a crucial moment in both Winehouse’s career and the film, directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson, about the 27-year-old who died an untimely and horrible death from alcohol poisoning in 2011, after a period of sobriety. So for Polly Morgan, the director of photography, the decision to shoot the world’s biggest festival inside the historic but small Ealing Studios was initially baffling. Not least because Back to Black was going to great pains to faithfully recreate other moments from Winehouse’s life and times. Her first meeting with future husband Blake Fielder-Civil in Camden pub The Good Mixer and a pair of key Winehouse gigs round the corner in another north London boozer, The Dublin Castle – all were being shot in situ. By Taylor-Johnson’s later reckoning, “We shot in 56 locations in fortysomething days. I mean, we moved. We hotfooted our way around Camden.”

Accordingly, when Morgan – who’d recently shot historical epic The Woman King in South Africa – found out the plan for Glastonbury, she recalls, “I was horrified and thought it was a terrible idea! I was like: ‘Let’s just go outside at night-time!’ But actually working outside at night, during a very cold winter in London,” she says of a shoot that began on 16th January last year, “was not fun”.

The production team duly went to some effort to recreate a corner of Somerset’s Worthy Farm in London W5. “We had about 300 or 400 extras,” Marisa Abela, the big-screen newcomer tasked with playing Amy, tells me a year later. “There was grass laid out on the floor, and cranes. I remember walking out and being like: ‘F***ing hell, I never thought I’d be doing this!’

“That was a really fun challenge,” adds the 27-year-old. “Amy was constantly testing boundaries. And that performance is a big one. She’s just like: ‘How far can I go?’”

But Abela – who broke out with her role in Industry, the BBC/HBO drama about City of London finance hotshots – was prepared. She’d studied the BBC footage of Winehouse’s performance, and she felt she had an insight into the singer’s mindset at the time, one month before Fielder-Civil would be sentenced to 27 months for assaulting the owner of a bar. “I said to Sam when I got there on [set] that day: ‘I want it to feel like she’s trying to run away.’ It’s right after Blake is taken to prison in our film [and] hopefully it reads that it’s just too much for her. Like she’s trying to escape in that moment.

“I was saying to the [actors playing the] poor security guards – who were all stunt men – ‘I am going to be running. And I’m not gonna take it easy,’” she continues. “To the camera guy as well: ‘You’ve gotta keep up!’”

“There’s a great moment that we’ve built in there where you start to run as if you’re just going to keep running out of Glastonbury,” chips in Taylor-Johnson, sitting next to her lead actor in a central London hotel. “It’s one of my favourite moments.”

Cast and crew were being ultra-careful, shooting largely in reverse-chronological order so Abela could commence filming – having been under careful dietary supervision before production began – at Winehouse’s awful, final weight. Or, as Taylor-Johnson says: “We shot all the tough scenes [first], with Amy at that stage where she was painfully disappearing [before our eyes].”

And yet: even as they were in the guts of shooting their film, the makers of Back to Black were already up against it. A “first look” image of Abela as Winehouse, released last January before filming had even begun, drew widespread ire on social media. Then, paparazzi images of the actors on location in north London also started a firestorm of criticism. Then came the trailer, released two months ago: 10 million views and thousands of adverse hot takes. The general tenor of most of which could be boiled down to: “This looks fake.” And: “This is too soon.” And: “How could they do this to our Amy?” And: “Amy would have hated this.”

Some of this was obviously the work of the pitchfork-ready online mob. But no little part of it was also the heartfelt outpouring of fans of a beloved artist, gone within (relatively) recent memory, who didn’t want her memory further traduced in a media that many viewed as being instrumental in her demise. They felt protective of Winehouse.

But then, so did Taylor-Johnson. For the director of Back to Black, Winehouse’s artistry is at the heart of her portrayal in the film. When I ask the filmmaker what drew her to want to tell the story of a star who lived as she died, in the brutal glare of the spotlight, her reply is emphatic and direct: “The music, the music, the music.”

But that’s artistry filtered through the lens of emotion. As she’s been at pains to point out, not least in a pre-emptive director’s statement, Back to Black is not a biopic. As configured by herself and screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh, it’s a love story: that between Winehouse and Fielder-Civil, played in the film with bravura charisma by Jack O’Connell.

The project had come to Taylor-Johnson via an experienced movie producer with more than a passing knowledge of what it was like to be a young woman caught up in the vortex of early Noughties British pop and celebrity culture: Alison Owen is the mother of Lily Allen. “When Alison asked if I would be interested… it was the same feeling that I had with Nowhere Boy: it was a no-brainer.”

Nowhere Boy (2009) was the artist-turned-filmmaker’s first feature, also written by Greenhalgh and another portrait of a young artist as a future legend: John Lennon. He was played by Aaron Johnson, who would go on to become the second husband of the woman then known as Sam Taylor-Wood, who had first achieved fame as a visual artist.

“I [hadn’t been] setting out to do anything like this,” continues the director. At the time of Owen’s approach she was based in Los Angeles with Aaron and their blended family of four daughters. “But as soon as the idea came through, it was like: that would be so amazing. And the music was really the North Star through the whole idea and the production. Everything was all about her, the lyrics, and that sort of guided us through.”

Taylor-Johnson went into the project with the blessing of the Winehouse family. But she insisted that it came with no strings, or compromise. “From the outset, I said to Alison: ‘I need full control. I can’t have anything that ties my hands in any situation. So if there are approvals with family and things like that, that won’t work for me. Because I really need to make the film instinctually. And obviously, they’ll find things that they may not be comfortable with.’”

Nonetheless, she did the right thing and met the family – Mitch three times, mum Janis twice. “Each time I was confronted with deeply sad, grieving parents. So that responsibility was there. But at the same time, I had to try and stay focused on the film that I needed to make – but at the same time, out of respect, understand their position.”

First and foremost, Taylor-Johnson was free to cast her own Amy. She wanted to do so on the strength of her leading lady’s acting, not her singing prowess (or otherwise), figuring they’d work out the music side of things later. Abela was similarly upfront: while the other actors auditioning for Winehouse turned up in a cacophony of beehives and mascara, the RADA graduate (class of 2019) showed up as herself.

Xural.com