Sam Taylor-Johnson on taking on Amy Winehouse's legacy in Back To Black

Amy Winehouse's "Tears Dry On Their Own" has been something of an earworm for director Sam Taylor-Johnson over the last couple of years. It's a banging tune of course, infectious for its musicality, but for Taylor-Johnson, it's the song that led her to the famed singer's spirit and soul.

"When you listen to that song, from the beginning of it, you feel like you're being told something upbeat and joyous about love. But then you listen to the words, and everything about that song is actually about the torment of love," the director tells CBC Arts over Zoom from her home in England. "It was my entry point in understanding her brilliance [and] connecting with her through something very human and complex."

Taylor-Johnson used this juxtaposition of joy meeting devastation to guide and set the tone for her latest film, Back to Black, a biopic about Winehouse's life. The film, starring Marisa Abela in her first leading role, takes us through the singer's life focusing on her years just prior to signing a record deal with Island Records through to her untimely death in 2011. 

Winehouse was only 27 years of age when she passed away from alcohol poisoning, but with the success of her debut record, Frank, and the international sensation, Back to Black, she ushered in a mini-wave of female British blue-eyed soul singers like Duffy, Joss Stone, and Adele. Outside of her musical legacy, Winehouse's short life was marred by intense tabloid intrusion as her substance abuse issues, troubled relationships, and fluctuating weight became front-cover news around the world. 

While Back to Black doesn't ignore the personal demons Winehouse battled during her lifetime, Taylor-Johnson's hope was to refocus the narrative around the singer back to her musical genius.

"She was becoming the victim of her tragedy and the brilliance of her was being eclipsed by that. When they approached me to make the movie, I knew immediately what the job was and I knew that it came with enormous responsibility," recalls Taylor-Johnson. "I felt like the thing I had to do was to go back into her music and back into her perspective. And by doing that, it would almost gift people back the music again. Not wanting to further victimize her was really important."

In many ways, the roads Taylor-Johnson has travelled thus far as a filmmaker seem to all lead comfortably to her directing a film about a singer with a legacy like Winehouse's and a sensationalized personal life to boot. In her 2009 directorial debut, Nowhere Boy, she took on the challenge of depicting the early years of John Lennon, one of the most prolific British musicians in history (and his ardent fanbase). Her subsequent films had her at odds with the proprietor of the source material as to how the story should play out cinematically (Fifty Shades of Grey) and contending with the authenticity of a life told (A Million Little Pieces). 

The latter film in particular provided a "massive learning curve" to Taylor-Johnson, specifically the revelation that the memoir the film was based on had been fabricated in part by the author and subject of the movie, James Frey. "A lot of what I learned on [A Million Little Pieces] I did bring into [Back to Black]," the director explains. "How to talk about addiction without, in any way, minimizing the struggles or glorifying certain moments. How delicate that balance is."

In addition to her journey as a filmmaker to this point, some interesting parallels can be drawn between Winehouse and Taylor-Johnson's actual life as a young artist in the '90s whose rising star cemented her as a part of group of British artists who would become known as the Young British Artists, and as someone whose personal life has attracted its fair share of media attention. 

"People's judgments around your relationships, of course, I have that understanding," Taylor-Johnson says, acknowledging the tabloid and social media interest in her 12-year marriage to Aaron Taylor-Johnson, the Nowhere Boy actor who's 23 years her junior.

However, the filmmaker is quick to stop any suggestion that her experience with the media is anywhere near what Winehouse endured. 

"The good-bad thing about the internet is you can switch it off. If I read everything or listened to anyone's opinion, I'd have been deeply unhappy and living in a cave," she says with a laugh. "But I'm able to be blinkered. I'm able to not have to listen [and] just live my life."

She continues, "I don't think Amy could ever switch it off. She'd stepped onto the street and anything from five to ten big men are there just constantly stealing parts of her soul in real time. I can't even imagine what that must have felt like."

Back to Black highlights the critical and commercial acclaim Winehouse received for her music and depicts the challenges she faced, some of her own doing and others outside of her control. But at the heart of the film, Taylor-Johnson seeks to find the humanity in a person whose myth (both positive and negative) threatens to overshadow the individual. To understand that beyond the beehive, tattoos, and eyeliner was a girl with a God-given voice of gold who only desired a love that would wipe her tears away and never let the sun go down.