‘Approval from the family? That wouldn’t work for me’: Inside Back to Black, the Amy Winehouse movie
Marisa Abela as Amy Winehouse in Back To Black. Photo: Focus Features
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.”
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