Addiction is arbitrary. It’s cruel, it’s random, and it’s chaotic...
AS AMY WINEHOUSE’S STORY IS TOLD IN BIOPIC BACK TO BLACK, RACHAEL DAVIS TALKS TO STARS MARISA ABELA, EDDIE MARSAN AND THE MOVIE’S DIRECTOR SAM TAYLOR-JOHNSON
BY THE time Amy Winehouse died aged just 27, she was one of the biggest names in music.
She released just two albums, 2003’s Frank and 2006’s Back To Black, but had earned a slew of awards – including five Grammys at the time of her passing, a Mobo and a Brit. Both her albums were nominated for the Mercury Prize and legions of fans flocked to hear her crooning contralto and innovative blend of R&B, soul, reggae and jazz.
But she was also a controversial figure. Her devil-may-care attitude, volatile relationship with Blake Fielder-Civil, and alcohol and substance abuse made her a target for tabloid newspapers which printed endless unflattering paparazzi pictures of her and documented all the ins-and-outs of her life.
Now, some 13 years after her tragic death from alcohol poisoning, her story is being dramatised on the big screen in Back to Black, a biopic told from Amy’s perspective.
Directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson, who was also at the helm for John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy and Fifty Shades of Grey, the film charts Amy’s meteoric rise to fame and confronts the realities of her relationships, mental illness and addiction.
Marisa Abela, known for starring in BBC finance drama Industry, portrays Amy from her teenage dreams at her grandmother’s kitchen table to her final days, including recreating some of her most memorable performances and TV appearances.
“You really have to take stock when you get a phone call like that...” says Marisa, 27, of taking on the role.
“’Is this something I could do? Is this a person that I understand?’ If the answer to that question is yes, it’s just about really throwing yourself in and trying to get as close to the essence of a person as you can.”
To try and truly understand Amy, Marisa moved to Camden, the star’s north London home, where a statue stands in her honour.
Marisa had around four months from landing the role to beginning filming, and wanted to immerse herself in Amy’s life.
“I decided to move to Camden – honestly, mostly because I have flatmates (and) I’m probably going to irritate the hell out of them,” she laughs.
“My days were a lot of physical training and vocal training and singing and movement and guitar, and then leaving space in between to just watch and learn, and try and soak in as much as I could of who she was as a person, what she liked and what she didn’t like.
“The essence of a person, that intangible thing, I think is the important thing that changes something from being an impersonation to an embodiment.”
With the movie being told from Amy’s perspective, it was important for the filmmakers to attempt to separate the stories we’ve been told about her – through tabloids, biographies, gossip and hearsay – from the way she discussed her own life in her oft-autobiographical songwriting.
“It was really about just studying the lyrics, and studying her, and looking at as much as possible, and then refining it...” says Sam, 57.
“Keeping it in her perspective, so that we’re giving her her agency back, so that she can tell her own story, in a way, so that we can feel that the music is the most important thing.
“That’s what she’s gifted to us.” As well as showing Amy’s relationship with Fielder-Civil, who she married in Florida in 2007 and is played in the film by Skins and Lady Chatterley’s Lover star Jack O’Connell, Back to Black also delves into her relationship with her father, Mitch, who is the administrator of his daughter’s estate.
Mitch – portrayed in the film by Eddie Marsan, known for Gangster No 1, Sherlock Holmes and Ray Donovan – has also been something of a maligned figure, particularly due to the unflattering portrayal of him and his relationship with his daughter in the 2015 documentary film Amy.
“Before they sent me the script, I said to myself: If this sanitises him, or demonises him, I won’t do it. Because I play human beings, I don’t play narratives. I don’t play a binary narrative that he’s a saint, or a binary narrative that he’s a sinner. I play human beings,” says Eddie, 55.
“Thankfully... They shot the film from Amy’s perspective. And one of the things of Amy’s perspective is her brilliance in her music, but [also] the fact that she loved her husband, Blake and she loved her dad, Mitch. It shows them all as human beings.”
Eddie praises how, instead of demonising any one person for the tragedy that befell Amy, it shows the cruelty of addiction.
“Addiction is arbitrary. It’s cruel and it’s random, and it’s chaotic,” he says. “It actually represents an aspect of reality that we can’t deal with, so what we do is we demonise Blake, or we demonise Mitch. And what I’m so proud [of] about this film is that it demonises addiction – the main villain of this thing is addiction.
“The second villain of this film is the paparazzi, because one of the reasons why recovery programmes are called Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous is because you need anonymity and privacy to recover, and Amy was never afforded that. She was hounded by the paparazzi and mocked and humiliated and taunted.”
Amy, Eddie notes, was so ubiquitous, her talent so profound, that “she’s almost like part of the family”.
“When you’re cooking the Sunday roast, you’ve got Amy Winehouse playing. She’s there all the time,” he says.
The way in which Amy touched so many lives and her struggles and death have been turned over and over in her lifetime and beyond, meant Sam and writer Matt Greenhalgh thought it pertinent not to sensationalise, or even depict, the details of her death in the biopic.
“I really just felt like we didn’t need to see that,” says the director. “We all know what happened. I didn’t feel like showing it was going to add anything; if anything, it was going to take away from the story that we’re telling, and I didn’t want to glorify that or feel like I was being insensitive or upsetting.”
“We need to just sort of be left with a poetic sense of understanding...” she adds.
“I wanted people to come out and be filled with the excitement of listening to her music again.”
Back to Black is in UK cinemas now
When you’re cooking the Sunday roast, you’ve got Amy Winehouse playing. She’s there all the time Eddie Marsan