Fifty Shades Of Grey director Sam Taylor-Johnson to helm Amy Winehouse biopic

More than a decade after her death, Amy Winehouse will be brought to life onscreen in a new biopic, Back To Black, according to a Variety report. A Winehouse project has been in the works for years, but Studiocanal has officially given a greenlight to the film with Fifty Shades Of Grey’s Sam Taylor-Johnson attached as director.

Variety reports that “the film is believed to be very much a passion project for Taylor-Johnson, who was a close friend of Winehouse’s.” The director shared the news herself on Instagram, writing, “This is a dream movie to helm. I’m ready, let’s go…”

Matt Greenhalgh, the screenwriter behind Control (the biopic about late Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis) and Taylor-Johnson’s Nowhere Boy (about John Lennon’s early years), wrote the script, which has “begun circulating and is now in casting stages,” per Variety. The outlet reports that Taylor-Johnson “hopes to cast a relative newcomer for the part of Winehouse.”

Studiocanal is producing with Alison Owen, Debra Hayward, and Tracey Seaward. Owen and Hayward have been attached to the project since the Winehouse estate first signed off on the film back in 2018. Unlike the Oscar-winning 2015 documentary Amy, this biopic has the full blessing of the artist’s father Mitch Winehouse.

Last year, Winehouse slammed another biopic attempt from Halcyon Studios based on Daphne Barak’s 2010 book Saving Amy. He told TMZ that Halcyon had not been granted rights to his daughter’s image, though the film was reportedly comprised of “40 hours of footage, exclusive photos and notes… that Barak completed with Winehouse and her family in the last three years of her life.” It is unclear if the Halcyon project is still moving forward.

There have been a handful of other attempts to tell Winehouse’s story in the years since she died of alcohol poisoning in 2011. Noomi Rapace was at one time set to play the singer, and Kinky Boots writer Geoff Deane wrote a previous version of the script. Now that the film is moving forward with Taylor-Johnson at the helm, hopefully the project will give the appropriate care and respect to a beloved musical icon.