Director Sam Taylor-Johnson made Back to Black because she wanted to give late singer ‘her agency back’

, her biopic of Amy Winehouse – the explosively talented but self-destructive English singer who died of alcohol poisoning in 2011 at the peak of her fame, age 27 – the director Sam Taylor-Johnson discovered something unsettling. If she Googled almost any day in Winehouse’s adult life, she would find a paparazzi photo. Then she’d find another photo of that day – of that moment – but from a different angle. Then another, and another – 10, 12, 20 angles of the same moment.

Now, Taylor-Johnson, 57, is nobody’s fool. Born and educated in London, she came to filmmaking after a career as a provocative fine art photographer and videographer. During our interview, she wears very cool aviator glasses and serenely snacks from a cup of nuts. “I wanted to give Amy her agency back,” Taylor-Johnson says. “I wanted to honour her creative brilliance, which was being lost, by going within her own writing, to tell the story of her life that she told in her songs. I knew if I stayed in her perspective as hard as possible, I would be able to look at her relationships and choices without judgment. If you can do that, you can see with compassion the mistakes being made, and you’re not further exploiting her.

“The scene was only one page – ‘They play pool’ – but I had to give it significant time,” Taylor-Johnson says. “We shot 56 locations in 45 days, but I took three days to shoot this. Their meeting, their journey of flirtation around the pool table, the slow push in as they get closer and closer and almost but don’t kiss. I didn’t want to shoot hairs rising again, but as he reaches under her arm to get the pool chalk, you can feel her pulse. The way she looks in his eyes, their playfulness.

Source: Entertainment Trends (entertainmenttrends.net)

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