WHEN SAM TAYLOR-JOHNSON STARTED WORKING ON HER AMY WINEHOUSE BIOPIC, BACK TO BLACK, she asked screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh to listen to one of Winehouse’s tracks, “Tears Dry on Their Own,” before he started writing. “I kept saying in those early days, ‘I feel like this song is our path to understanding her,’” Taylor-Johnson says.
In the deceptively upbeat single about Winehouse’s tumultuous relationship with her on-again, off-again love, Blake Fielder-Civil, she sings, “It’s my responsibility/And you don’t owe nothing to me.”
For Taylor-Johnson, 57, that line spoke to something largely misunderstood about Winehouse, the English singer who died of alcohol poisoning in 2011: Just 27, she left behind an outsize cultural impact. Winehouse’s defining album, Back to Black, sold more than 16 million copies worldwide, and her unique mix of…
