Think about somebody coming into your bed room, having a look round after which recreating it in meticulous element: they’d find yourself telling your story with out ever saying a phrase.
That was the intention of the set designers for the Amy Winehouse biopic Again to Black, the place her numerous properties really feel as integral as Marisa Abela’s detailed research of her vocals and actions. Again to Black is a wierd and sanitised telling of Amy Winehouse’s life – and lots of have criticised it – however the movie occurs in a really actual world. The Camden of the early 00s pulses and buzzes, however it’s Winehouse’s personal areas, recreated by set design group Katie Spencer (set decorator) and Sarah Greenwood (manufacturing designer), that flesh out the story past her voice and her addictions.
On a video name, Spencer and Greenwood – who’ve labored collectively for greater than 20 years on movies together with Barbie – converse in harmonious counterpoint. They did a whole lot of analysis, together with watching Asif Kapadia’s 2015 documentary Amy and poring over photographs and descriptions of Amy’s properties, however they didn’t really feel beholden to each tiny element. “We all the time go from character,” Spencer provides. “And character results in setting.”
Winehouse was usually charming, famously capricious and outwardly assured however inwardly fairly not sure of herself: you see these traits in her evolving properties in Again to Black. Her childhood bed room is portrayed as a barely unreal place of sanctuary the place Abela-as-Winehouse scribbles lyrics and improvises melodies sitting cross-legged on her mattress, the partitions behind her whitewashed brick. Her first Camden dwelling, a multitude of shoe containers and mugs, includes a large jukebox customised together with her personal information and handwritten tracklists, the reeded glass of her entrance door obscuring and distorting each customer suggesting the hazards that lurk exterior. And in her last dwelling, an enormous, ethereal house half-finished with ghostly furnishings coverings, she appears to be like as small as a mouse.
Typically the units are colored by a pleasant sort of chaos, cluttered and heat. “What I discovered actually fascinating was how analogue she was,” Spencer says. “She stored all these journals. She sketched and doodled; you by no means see her with a pc. I really like that she was this quaint woman.” This pen-and-paper strategy bled into Greenwood and Spencer’s work: regardless of solely getting fleeting appearances on display, in Amy’s teenage bed room they doodled on the partitions, meticulously recreated her diaries and stored the whole lot tech-free.
They amalgamated the flats from Amy’s early 20s, two totally different places in Camden into one set on Jeffrey’s Place. For those who bear in mind the period, you’ll recognise the skin from infinite paparazzi photographs. “We have been in a position to shoot the outside of that and it’s nonetheless precisely the identical,” Greenwood remembers. “It was such part of her – a really poignant reminder of who she was.”
They constructed the downstairs and the toilet of the Jeffrey’s Place flat in a studio. “The true flat is tiny, about 12 foot huge,” Spencer says. “The home was small, the life was huge – you possibly can really feel it reverberating in opposition to the partitions.”
There’s an enormous Smeg fridge, a mannequin Spencer says Winehouse purchased in a “first paycheck second – sure belongings you actually needed to honour”. One other is the jukebox within the movie, aptly named AMI: it was Amy’s personal, full with handwritten observe listings. They might play it as they dressed the units, the nice and cozy, crackling tones giving a way of being barely exterior linear time. “Typically after we have been on set and simply dressing a report would come on and also you’d be like, ‘Wow, it’s one in all her selections’. And it gave the whole lot a sort of ethereal glow,” Spencer remembers.
I say that these really feel like trustworthy recreations, however Greenwood objects. “It’s very a lot an interpretation of Amy’s locations – it’s the identical as with the Barbie Dream Home, for instance. Everybody was like, ‘Oh my god, I had a toy similar to that.’ And really you didn’t, as a result of, actually, it was nothing like that. What we did was take the essence of it, and make it into one thing that felt like it’s.”
That essence isn’t extra apparent in Again to Black than within the last scenes set in what was to be Amy’s last dwelling. There’s a smattering of character within the rose-pink partitions however it has an enormous and haunted really feel because it’s left mid-decoration. “The essence of that home was that it bought to date within the doing up however it wasn’t full. It was striving for one thing, a extra mature and complex model of the place she’s come from. However there’s one thing lacking,” Greenwood says. “There’s one thing a bit soulless about it. Simply the jukebox, an enormous ladder and a beautiful carpet.”
“It felt transferring,” Spencer says. “As a result of you already know what’s coming. Everyone knows what’s coming.”
“And you’re feeling agitated,” Greenwood says. “If no matter may have carried her by that second, she would have had a life in that home. It simply by no means flowered.”
