Sam Taylor-Johnson on art, age gaps and Amy Winehouse: ‘Filming sucked me to a place I didn’t know how to get out of’

The director’s new biopic about the troubled singer tells the story of a relationship scrutinised by the tabloids – something she knows all about. She talks about facing cancer, falling for a younger man and why she’ll always be drawn to ‘intense, deep subjects’

Director Sam Taylor-Johnson’s most famous image back when she was Sam Taylor-Wood, the talented Young British Artist, was a self-portrait standing in a black suit holding a rigid upwards-pointing hare. Hares appeared in her work elsewhere and it is a cornered hare, ready to dart any second, that comes to mind as I sit opposite her now. She’s 57, and has the clean beauty of someone who spends time in California, but uses London teenager slang, like “bare” to mean “very”. She is wearing a blue Sézane shirt that the eldest of her four daughters gave to her on Mother’s Day, embroidered with “Sam” – which was going to be “Mum” except her daughter feared she wouldn’t wear it – and eating seed crackers and a ­pistachio dip, which she insists I try.

She hopes I don’t mind that she’s sitting here in a London restaurant “with my zip and button undone. Because,” her voice rings with amusement, “why not wear jeans when you’ve got a tummy ache?” It’s been upset for days, a possible consequence of being “in a hole” for two years making Back to Black, her Amy Winehouse film. Anyway, she is glad to catch me fresh from a screening of it and is ready to hear what I think.

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