Back to Black Screenwriter on Amy Winehouse, Handling Criticism, and Blake Baggage

When Back to Black screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh was first approached about making an Amy Winehouse biopic, he knew a movie about the late icon would be a magnet for critics and controversy. But Greenhalgh had previously written films about other ill-fated English musicians—Joy Division front man Ian Curtis (2007’s Control) and John Lennon (2009’s Nowhere Boy)—and felt he could find his way into her headspace.

“With Amy, I just thought, ‘I can do that,’” Greenhalgh says. “It’s great to have that kind of confidence going into something so massive about someone so iconic…something that’s probably going to piss a few people off. You need to be confident.”

Back to Black director Sam Taylor-Johnson, who worked with Greenhalgh on Nowhere Boy, felt similarly. Two years ago in LA, they hashed out a storyline for their two-hour film in about three days, liberated by the understanding that they would be greeted by “harsh” sentiment regardless of what they made. “I think that momentum just kicked us into, ‘What do we want to see? How do we want to feel?’”

Made with the full support of the Winehouse estate, their finished product is a gauzy retelling of Winehouse’s tumultuous romance with Blake Fielder-Civil, which inspired the Grammy-winning album the movie is named after. “We wanted to stay pretty much faithful to a celebratory film about her,” says the screenwriter, who met Winehouse’s father, Mitch, the administrator of the singer’s estate, for dinner before writing the script.

“Rightly he wanted to meet this guy that was going to put words into everyone’s mouths in a movie,” says the screenwriter.

Mitch had previously signed off on a film made about his daughter: the 2015 Oscar-winning documentary Amy from filmmaker Asif Kapadia. But that critically acclaimed film depicted Mitch as being one of many opportunists (including us, the sensation-starved public) who accelerated Amy’s self-destruction. Mitch has previously been villainized for decisions such as showing up in St. Lucia where his daughter was recovering with a film crew in tow, and promoting his own album in an interview that ran in The New York Times less than two weeks before Amy’s death.

“We made many mistakes,” Mitch has admitted, “but not loving our daughter was not one of them.” Ultimately, he regretted his participation in Amy: “I told [the filmmakers] that they were a disgrace,” he said to The Guardian in 2015. “I said: ‘You should be ashamed of yourselves. You had the opportunity to make a wonderful film and you’ve made this.’”

During the dinner with Greenhalgh, Mitch brought up being burned by Amy. “He told me a story where he went to New York and everyone was watching the documentary on a flight, and he basically had a panic attack,” says the screenwriter.

Though the Back to Black filmmakers say Winehouse’s estate had no artistic control over the film, Greenhalgh felt sympathy for Mitch. “I didn’t want to compound any problem on a father that had lost his daughter,” he says, explaining that he had no interest in “repeat[ing] what the documentary had insinuated…The toxicity that surrounded Amy was something that we were very much aware of, but we didn’t want to replicate. Going down the dark path just wasn’t for us.”

As such, viewers of the biopic aren’t as subjected to the ugly indignities of addiction or the toxic influences around Winehouse as they are in Amy. Instead, Back to Black focuses on happier memories of Winehouse—like her relationship with her beloved paternal grandmother Cynthia (Lesley Manville), her triumphant performances, her quick wit, and her searing honesty. The film also features stylized montages set to the artist’s hits—like a PG “Back to Black” sequence showing Winehouse exploring New York City and adjusting to the isolation of fame.

There is no mention of several salacious storylines that accompanied the singer’s spirals, like a disastrous concert in Belgrade where Winehouse elicited audience boos by refusing to perform, or images of Winehouse smoking crack that was sold to tabloids. “We had 10 years of Amy making wonderful music, and the effect that she’s had globally, and the honesty that she brought to young people” to focus on, says Greenhalgh.

Most controversially, Back to Black largely absolves the two male gravitational forces in Winehouse’s life, Mitch and Fielder-Civil—even though both men have admitted to making mistakes with Amy. Taylor-Johnson has discounted the Blake and Mitch narratives as tabloid finger-pointing.

Greenhalgh tells me, “We felt that it was very important that Amy was in charge of her own destiny. Even though we go to dark places, there was no point pummeling an audience with Belgrade and a side of Blake and Mitch…that would make it a really dark experience. We didn’t want that…At the end of the day, we had a duty to entertain people as well.”

Back to Black does not just clear Fielder-Civil and Mitch’s names—it also depicts them as being aboveboard influences. In the film, Blake finds complete clarity in prison. It’s while incarcerated that he tells Amy their relationship is toxically codependent, says they need to be apart, and claims that his greatest nightmare is her dying.

In both Amy and Mitch Winehouse’s 2012 book Amy My Daughter, Fielder-Civil is depicted as a parasitic hanger-on trying to destabilize the singer for his own benefit. In real life, Fielder-Civil has admitted to introducing Winehouse to heroin. “Of course I regret it, not just because of the damage it’s caused Amy and the loss of life, but the damage to her family—but also to my family and also to me,” he said in a 2013 interview on the Jeremy Kyle Show. A decade later, speaking on Good Morning Britain, Fielder-Civil said he takes “full accountability” for introducing her to the drug, but said he had to stop carrying the burden of her death. “I feel, to be honest, that I’m the only person within the story that’s ever held accountability, that’s ever tried to say, ‘Yeah, I made mistakes.’” Asked what he would change if he could go back, he said, “Almost everything.”

So why, in Back to Black, does Amy discover hard drugs on her own?

“Well, it is kind of ambiguous,” Greenhalgh says of the first scene in which Amy uses one of those substances. “We see her smoke crack, but we don’t know that Blake hadn’t been in there before and offered anything. Obviously she was around [hard drugs], because Camden is full of it and she knew that his friends would have whatever she wanted…It felt important that was the decision she made rather than just Blake.”

Greenhalgh questions the accuracy of my question: “And also he might have admitted that, but that sounds a bit clickbait to me. I think the world wanted him to say that. But in our story, it was like, to respect Amy, you have to respect her decisions—good or bad.”

It’s also puzzling to see a famously difficult relationship reimagined as a swept-away-romance storyline.

Asked about the depiction of Fielder-Civil, Greenhalgh defends Back to Black’s version: “When he was in prison, he decided he wanted to divorce her. I think Blake isn’t as dumb and stupid as the press made out. What I do respect him for is that he’s never written a book about [his experience with her]. I’m sure he could have, [like] a lot of other people. He’s not rich, so why hasn’t he? Also, him initiating the divorce probably says a lot about him.” The screenwriter notes that the separation happened “when she was at the height of her fame. A lot of men probably would’ve just come out of prison [and returned to that life], but he didn’t want that.” (Fielder-Civil, who is played in the film by Jack O’Connell, has called the film “almost therapeutic.”)

Mitch gets a similarly sanded-down storyline. Portrayed by actor Eddie Marsan, Back to Black’s Mitch is under his daughter’s spell. There is a Back to Black scene where Mitch determines his daughter does not need rehab—inspiring the chorus in the song “Rehab”—but only because Winehouse has ably convinced him that she does not have a problem. After Amy jumps on his lap to hug him, like a little girl might, the scene cuts to a tattoo parlor where the singer gets her famous “Daddy’s Girl” arm-ink.

There are no mentions of the darker elements of Winehouse’s relationship with her father, an aspiring jazz musician and taxi driver who left the family home to live with his mistress when Amy was a child. Mitch has copped to his behavior, talking about how his decision to conduct his affair “in the open” affected Amy. “I didn’t realize what effect my behavior had on her until I heard her song ‘What Is It About Men,’ with the line ‘All the shit my mother went through’ which obviously referred to me,” Mitch said in 2008. Amy blamed her father’s behavior for her own promiscuity, according to Fielder-Civil in the documentary Amy.

“The divorce really did hit to a certain extent, but he was very supportive,” Greenhalgh says. “She could wind him around her little finger and had the ability to do that with a lot of people. My opinion was that she was always wanting to please her dad, always trying to impress him. And I think he was probably a good person to push her in those early days, with his knowledge of jazz. He wanted to be a performer himself, so it was a very interesting dynamic.”

While answering the question, Greenhalgh notes, “It’s amazing how many times I do this, and people still can’t get their head ’round that [the film is] not a documentary or their vision of it.”

Back to Black divided critics when it premiered in Britain and Ireland last month and earned slightly harsher takes in the US, including from Vanity Fair. “The facts of the real Winehouse’s life and struggles are impossible to ignore. In Back to Black the omissions feel downright weird, as if something is being ignored,” wrote the New York Times’ Alissa Wilkinson in her review. Winehouse’s friend Tyler James has complained that the film “sugar coated” Winehouse’s life, and was “generalized” and “vague.”

But Greenhalgh says the only person’s opinion he cared about while writing the script was Amy’s. He didn’t interview anyone before writing—in part because most family and friends have already gone on record with their feelings, and because he was telling the story through Winehouse’s perspective. To channel her, he literally surrounded himself with Winehouse ephemera, including a life-size cutout of the beehived singer. “I just thought, ‘Let her stare at me whilst I do this.’ I always feel that I answer to her: ‘Will Amy like this? Will Amy be proud of this? How would she feel?’ I’ve got to admit that sort of visual presence really helped.”

Asked what from his research surprised him about Winehouse, Greenhalgh says, “She was really chaotic in a way. Not via the drugs, but the [messy] wigs and the clothes and everything is sort of pointing towards someone that maybe has a bit of bipolarism or ADHD. It seems to me there is a mental side to a lot of jazz aficionados—they’re constantly moving around in her head.” Though that chaos isn’t shown onscreen overtly, it is simmering beneath her drug use. “It seemed like she always needed to be occupied. So when that loneliness kicked in and she couldn’t go out of her house because she was going to get harassed by paparazzi, self-medication was, although not the right thing to do, a pretty obvious way to go for someone like Amy, unfortunately.”

Though plenty of people have weighed in on Back to Black and will continue to during the film’s opening weekend in the US, Greenhalgh says he’s mostly tuned out the noise. He and Taylor-Johnson were trying “to make a movie that stands the test of time,” he says. “Once the normal noise dies down, the true reaction will be 10 years from now. Are people still watching this the same way they watch Control?” Of the criticism, he says, “I don’t pay any attention to it. As you get older, you become more interested in your own opinions. It kind of insulates you.”

If Greenhalgh were to follow up Back to Black by writing about another musician, the screenwriter thinks Oasis, Sean Ryder of the Happy Mondays, and Mark Smith of the indie band The Fall could be intriguing subjects. And the next project would be “even more esoteric, more art house,” he assures me.

But at the moment, he’d like a break from biopics. Even with the noise turned down, he can’t entirely mute the reaction to a movie about a subject as beloved as Amy Winehouse. “I’m hoping the next thing isn’t about a true-life person,” he tells me. “Because sometimes people’s expectations are kind of difficult to negotiate.”