Back To Black filmmakers explain why Marisa Abela was picked to play Amy Winehouse

The first question you might ask about Back To Black, the new Amy Winehouse biopic, is who on earth could they cast that could possibly sing like Amy Winehouse, a talent hailed as having the best voice of a generation?

Back to Black opens in UK cinemas on 12 April.

Video transcript

KIM TAYLOR-FOSTER: How daunting was it to play Amy Winehouse? And did you know immediately that you'd nail it?

MARIA ABELA: Obviously, it's a long process, like the audition is a long process. So that sort of feeling of like, wow, that would be a huge responsibility and a huge task comes when you first hear about it. And then you take stock for a second, and you think like, OK, let's take a look at-- I really wanted to, even before I started auditioning, get to research Amy as a person as well as just the icon that we all know.

So I think it was really that work that took me down the path that I was like, yeah, OK, if they're going to make this film, I really think I could be someone that could do this. And I did not know that I was going to nail it. I was very determined to get as close as possible to an essence of her, this essence of her.

KIM TAYLOR-FOSTER: Could you already sing like that or did it take so much practice?

MARIA ABELA: It took a lot of practice, yeah. A lot of training. I trained for-- I mean, I got the job about four months before we started filming, and I trained every day for about two hours with my singing teacher. I mean, when I got the job, it wasn't that I was definitely going to sing. I think about a month and a half into my lessons, my singing teacher sort of rang Sam and was like, you should come and listen.

SAM TAYLOR-JOHNSON: We set out thinking you know Marissa should have lessons so that she could just feel how her voice and face could change and to match that and start to look at movements and things. And then it just slowly became apparent that the work that they were doing together that Marissa just started to just-- her voice transformed. And as it got closer and closer, I started to think this could be possible. This could be incredible if we could use Marissa's voice because then the storytelling within the film makes sense.

MARIA ABELA: Yeah.

SAM TAYLOR-JOHNSON: And so I did. I went to hear, and I went with Giles Martin who is our music producer, and I just stood there and we both were like, hmm, this could be quite incredible.