Back to Black: The making of the Amy Winehouse movie

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It’s early 2023 and, in a movie studio in west London, the manufacturing crew on Back to Black are trying to recreate a pivotal second in the profession of Amy Winehouse: the singer’s chaotic look on the Pyramid Stage at the 2008 Glastonbury Festival. She’s driving excessive from the long-tail success of her second album, 2006’s Back to Black, however up there on the foremost stage, she’s wobbly and wobbling, slugging booze as she shouts to the viewers about her fella, Blake, presently incarcerated at Her Majesty’s Pleasure.

It’s an important second in each Winehouse’s profession and the movie, directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson, about the 27-year-old who died an premature and horrible loss of life from alcohol poisoning in 2011, after a interval of sobriety. So for Polly Morgan, the director of pictures, the determination to shoot the world’s greatest competition inside the historic however small Ealing Studios was initially baffling. Not least as a result of Back to Black was going to nice pains to faithfully recreate different moments from Winehouse’s life and occasions. Her first assembly with future husband Blake Fielder-Civil in Camden pub The Good Mixer and a pair of key Winehouse gigs spherical the nook in one other north London boozer, The Dublin Castle – all have been 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 just lately shot historic epic The Woman King in South Africa – discovered the plan for Glastonbury, she recollects, “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 started on sixteenth January final 12 months, “was not fun”.

The manufacturing crew duly went to some effort to recreate a nook of Somerset’s Worthy Farm in London W5. “We had about 300 or 400 extras,” Marisa Abela, the big-screen newcomer tasked with enjoying Amy, tells me a 12 months 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,” provides 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 along with her position in Industry, the BBC/HBO drama about City of London finance hotshots – was ready. She’d studied the BBC footage of Winehouse’s efficiency, and he or she felt she had an perception into the singer’s mindset at the time, one month earlier than Fielder-Civil could be sentenced to 27 months for assaulting the proprietor 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 subsequent to her lead actor in a central London resort. “It’s one of my favourite moments.”

Cast and crew have been being ultra-careful, taking pictures largely in reverse-chronological order so Abela may start filming – having been below cautious dietary supervision earlier than manufacturing started – at Winehouse’s terrible, last 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].”

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And but: at the same time as they have been in the guts of taking pictures their movie, the makers of Back to Black have been already up towards it. A “first look” picture of Abela as Winehouse, launched final January earlier than filming had even begun, drew widespread ire on social media. Then, paparazzi photos of the actors on location in north London additionally began a firestorm of criticism. Then got here the trailer, launched two months in the past: 10 million views and 1000’s of hostile sizzling takes. The basic tenor of most of which may very well 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 clearly the work of the pitchfork-ready on-line mob. But no little half of it was additionally the heartfelt outpouring of followers of a beloved artist, gone inside (comparatively) current reminiscence, who didn’t need her reminiscence additional traduced in a media that many seen as being instrumental in her demise. They felt protecting of Winehouse.

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

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

The challenge had come to Taylor-Johnson through an skilled movie producer with greater than a passing information of what it was like to be a younger lady caught up in the vortex of early Noughties British pop and movie star tradition: Alison Owen is the mom 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 function, additionally written by Greenhalgh and one other portrait of a younger artist as a future legend: John Lennon. He was performed by Aaron Johnson, who would go on to change into the second husband of the lady then often called Sam Taylor-Wood, who had first achieved fame as a visible artist.

“I [hadn’t been] setting out to do anything like this,” continues the director. At the time of Owen’s method she was primarily based in Los Angeles with Aaron and their blended household of 4 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 challenge with the blessing of the Winehouse household. But she insisted that it got here 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 proper factor and met the household – Mitch 3 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 forged her personal Amy. She needed to achieve this on the power of her main woman’s performing, not her singing prowess (or in any other case), figuring they’d work out the music facet of issues later. Abela was equally upfront: whereas the different actors auditioning for Winehouse turned up in a cacophony of beehives and mascara, the RADA graduate (class of 2019) confirmed up as herself.

“It was probably the most honest I’ve ever been in an audition situation,” says Abela. “That also came down to not doing anything with my hair and makeup. [My thinking was]: if I can convince them that Amy is in here somewhere, just through my eyes and my spirit, then we have somewhere to go. There was no trickery involved. It was like: this is how I see her soul.”

Still, Abela was straight with Taylor-Johnson: “I’m not a singer.” The director was unfazed. She had entry to Winehouse’s music from her document label Universal, house owners of the rights, and permission to – ought to she need to – use the authentic vocals. On the 2022 Whitney Houston biopic I Wanna Dance with Somebody, producers had the identical freedom, enabling British star Naomi Ackie to mime to Houston’s powerhouse vocal – a call that led many observers to discern onscreen an enjoyment-skewering disconnect.

Casting the broadly unknown Abela, then, was one thing of a threat, albeit one lessened by what Taylor-Johnson characterises as “also knowing that we had Amy’s voice [as a fallback]. But I felt like Marisa should go and train to sing, even just to show how the mouth and jaw works, so it looks convincing to film, should we – most likely in my mind then – dub.”

Unbeknownst to Taylor-Johnson, Abela went deep on that coaching. She labored with Royal Academy singing instructor Anne-Marie Speed – “one of those women that very much believes anyone can sing,” says Abela. She sums up Speed’s view as: “If you can talk, you can sing.”

Abela duly “learnt to sing with my own voice first. Then I learnt to sing jazz – I mean, I wouldn’t say ‘learnt to sing jazz!’” she clarifies, hesitant to impute an excessive amount of achievement to vocal expertise she learnt from scratch. “It was like: ‘We have your voice now. But rather than going straight into an impersonation of Amy, let’s listen to who inspired her [and explore] why she sang the way that she sounded.’” Cue a deep dive into the data of jazz greats Dinah Washington and Ella Fitzgerald, hip-hop star Lauryn Hill, and Sixties girl-groups The Ronettes and The Shangri-Las.

Taylor-Johnson reunited with Abela a number of months later, at Abbey Road Studios, in the firm of Giles Martin, her movie’s music producer. “Marisa also learnt to play guitar, so she sat down and sang this one song… It was that moment where you thought: ‘Wow. We struck gold.’”

As for the songs she was singing: the writing of the Back to Black album was impressed by that intense Winehouse/Fielder-Civil love story – its drug-like highs and its precise druggy lows. That, in flip, gave Taylor-Johnson and Greenhalgh the framework for his or her telling of her story. So, whereas their movie does chart Winehouse’s rise from unknown, working-class, suburban north London jazz aficionado to Grammy-hauling world famous person, its gaze is concentrated.

That means no room on display screen for Winehouse’s sturdy coterie of feminine associates, or for Mark Ronson, her producer/collaborator on her second album – on this telling, Blake is her complete world. But, sure, lots of display screen time for her limelight-loving dad Mitch. He’s portrayed by Eddie Marsan, the actor making his fellow East Ender significantly cuddlier than the exploitative determine he appeared to be in Asif Kapadia’s Oscar-winning 2015 documentary, Amy.

“I never want to play two-dimensional characters,” replies the perennially busy Marsan after I ask whether or not he had any reservations about taking up the position. “So I didn’t want to play a demonised version of Mitch, or a sanitised version. I wanted to play a father. Anybody who raises kids,” continues this father of 4, “we’re full of love. And we make mistakes. That’s what being a parent is all about.

“That’s what I loved about the script that Matt wrote and that Sam wanted to direct: that it was an honest portrayal of a father full of love, whose daughter was suffering from addiction at the time when she was also the most famous woman in the world.”

That focus additionally means lots of display screen time for the parts that the director views as contributing considerably to Winehouse’s downfall. “I believe that paparazzi and addiction are the two villains of our movie,” says Taylor-Johnson. “When I started doing research, I realised I could look up almost any given moment in her career and life and find pictures of her. Breakfast, lunch, dinner; out and about; everywhere, every day, all the time. Which meant that Amy was always tracked and followed and stalked and hounded.

“For a young girl who is vulnerable and in the world, living [it] up, falling down, having that documented,” expands the director, “made me realise how damaging that can be on anyone, firstly. But for anyone who is in any way fragile and vulnerable, even more so. So it was important to portray it. And also to portray how, towards the tail end of her life, that she couldn’t even see the paparazzi any more. Because they were so much part of her day-to-day existence. That,” she concludes, “is no way to exist.”

Given that brutal public trauma, although – all too actual and all too current, nonetheless, for a lot of in the public eye – is all of it too quickly for a movie about Amy Winehouse, a quick-feeling 13 years after her loss of life? At time of writing, the first opinions have began to seem, and it’s honest to say they’re cut up. In The Independent’s two-star assessment, Charlotte O’Sullivan famous the movie’s unwillingness to criticise anybody however the paparazzi. Most applaud Abela’s efficiency, and the filmmakers’ intentions. To this reviewer, the crew have performed what they set out to do: rejoice a music and a love story that was vastly essential to Winehouse. And, I second O’Connell’s emotion: Abela is “f***ing flawless”. But quite a lot of really feel like the rehashing of Winehouse’s tragedy is a tragedy once more.

“Of course people might think it’s too soon,” acknowledges Greenhalgh. “But look at it another way: when John Lennon’s film and Ian Curtis’s film came out,” he says, referring to Control (2007), Anton Corbijn’s well-received biopic of the Joy Division singer, one other gone-too-soon star, which Greenhalgh additionally wrote, “there were probably a lot of people that would have wanted to see those films who had passed away … And Amy’s still vibrant and relevant, so you might as well make the movie for as big an audience as possible.”

But placing a extra, shall we embrace, soulful spin on the scriptwriter’s bluntly utilitarian view, is Jack O’Connell. The ubiquity of her music and freshness of her reminiscence aren’t any barrier to Winehouse being memorialised on movie, he says. Quite the opposite. “She’s massive,” says the 33-year-old. He’s conscious that Back to Black’s retro-in-2006 vibes imply that its songs are successfully date-proof – and, extra importantly, that the power of Winehouse’s songwriting means she’s as important to Generation Z as she stays to the ageing millennials (and each Twentieth-century cohort behind them) who fell for that generational expertise.

“People will be banging Amy Winehouse tunes in 50, 60, 100 years,” he says. “But also, we’re respecting that there is an element of sensitivity in this matter because we’re dealing with someone who’s no longer with us, and passed away untimely. There was no way I was going to get into anything that was scandal-based or disrespectful.”

“I hope we give Amy her agency back through this telling of this story,” echoes Taylor-Johnson. “So that when you come out of the cinema afterwards, you want to hear the music again. That’s her legacy. Not just the tragedy. Not just the sadness of a flame burning so bright and so fast.”

‘Back to Black’ is in cinemas