Sam Taylor-Johnson would have turned down the Amy Winehouse biopic if she had been forced to make concessions to the late star's family.
Sam Taylor-Johnson didn't want to give Amy Winehouse's family control of her biopic on the singer
The director has taken charge of 'Back to Black', based on the life of the troubled singer who died in 2011 aged 27, but she's admitted she didn't want to give "approvals" to Amy's relatives in case it hampered her filmmaking process.
Sam told The Independent newspaper: "From the outset, I said ... ‘I need full control. I can’t have anything that ties my hands in any situation. So if there are approvals with family and things like that, that won’t work for me. Because I really need to make the film instinctually. And obviously, they’ll find things that they may not be comfortable with'."
However, Sam did meet with Amy's mum Janis and dad Mitch and she resolved to make sure the film was respectful to their memory of their daughter.
She added: "Each time [I met them] I was confronted with deeply sad, grieving parents. So that responsibility was there.
"But at the same time, I had to try and stay focused on the film that I needed to make – but at the same time, out of respect, understand their position."
Amy is played by Marisa Abela while Jack O'Connell plays the late singer's ex-husband Blake Fielder-Civil.
Jack previously opened up about meeting Blake - who was married to Amy from 2007 to 2009 - in preparation for the role, telling the Sunday Times Culture magazine: "I spent an afternoon with him. He was quite open. He spoke so highly of Amy. There was something so genuine in how he spoke, it was unquestionable to me that he loved her. That informed how I wanted to portray him."
But Jack admitted Blake - who has previously admitted to introducing Amy to heroin - wasn't "overly keen" on the idea of the biopic.
He said: “He wasn’t overly keen, ’cos obviously it’s going into a phase of his life that is very personal and he harbours a mixed bag of emotions.
"But a part of my analysis is that we’re talking about [being in your] mid-twenties. God knows what we were getting up to in our mid-twenties. You wouldn’t want to be doing that under a microscope and still be held accountable for it today.
"And to understand that relationship, the fame that was a by-product of her success, all the negativity that came with that … We’re all fallible. And drugs were rife then. Heavy drugs were so heavily done and glamorised."
Tagged in Amy Winehouse Jack O'Connell Sam Taylor-Johnson