SO LONG FIFTY SHADES
The erotic blockbuster’s director, Sam Taylor-Johnson, suggests she won’t be back for the sequels,
Despite a record box office for the big-screen adaptation of E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey, director Sam Taylor-Johnson appears to be leaving the franchise-in-the-making.
U.K. daily the Sun has reported that, despite earlier comments to the contrary, she would not be returning for sequels to the cliffhanging erotic drama.
Speaking from New York with a week left in post-production, TaylorJohnson acknowledged the movie had taken a toll. “I’m ready to be done,” she said.
Despite averaging a lowly 4.2/10 at review aggregator RottenTomatoes.com, the racy film has proven as much a phenomenon as the book on which it is based.
It took in $103 million (U.S.) in North American ticket sales and $312 million worldwide in its first six days; its $85-million opening weekend in North America bests The Passion of the Christ’s 2004 February record of $83.8 million. Filming the literary trilogy’s remaining titles Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed seems a certainty, so why mess with success?
But the London- and Los Angelesbased director has acknowledged clashes with James, also one of the movie’s three producers. They reportedly disagreed over the level of explicitness in telling the story of virginal university student Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson), whom billionaire industrialist Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) lures into BDSM activity. James’ book leaves little to the imagination.
“It wasn’t in my interest to be too graphic. It’s a studio movie and can’t be like the book in that respect because of ratings and censors,” Taylor-Johnson said. The Vancouver-shot movie received an R rating in the U.S. and an 18A stamp in Ontario. Pushing the level of nudity and sexual content further could have brought a more restrictive, box-office-weakening rating.
“Also, it’s such a big book, so a lot of what readers might have hoped to see in the film might not be there. We couldn’t fit in everything. But having the author as a producer meant we couldn’t veer too far from it,” the director adds.
She had little time to plan the movie’s visuals with director of photography Seamus McGarvey as she was preoccupied with Kelly Marcel’s screenplay. “It took a long time to get the script to a place where everyone approved. Seamus and I were getting frustrated and wanted to move forward a lot quicker,” she recalls.
The movie’s biggest alteration from the book is dispensing with Anastasia’s narrative voice, in which she refers to her “inner goddess” and how “hot” Christian is ad nauseam.
“There was talk of doing some kind of voice-over, but I don’t like voiceovers in movies and didn’t feel that was going to enrich or enhance anything. That works best in a book. The approach was more about providing a sensual experience,” Taylor-Johnson says.
Several A-list directors were reportedly in the running for the coveted gig, including Angelina Jolie, Steven Soderbergh, Bennett Miller and Gus Van Sant. Bill Condon, who directed a pair of Twilight movies, was also mentioned, which seems appropriate given James began writing Fifty Shades of Grey as Twilight fan fiction.
The producers may have appreciated Taylor-Johnson’s female perspective on the story, but what makes her a particularly interesting choice to tackle the populist novel is her multidiscipline fine-arts background, which has encompassed sculpture, photography and art installations. In 1998, she was nominated for the U.K.’s Turner Prize for visual arts.
Fifty Shades of Grey marks only the second feature for the 47-year-old filmmaker, following 2009’s Nowhere Boy, a BAFTA Award-nominated drama about how John Lennon’s adolescence spent bouncing between his volatile mother and aloof aunt fuelled his rock ’n’ roll spirit. The director married her star, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, 24, who will be seen as mutant hero Quicksilver in Avengers: Age of Ultron.
Even if she walks away from the Fifty Shades machine, her movie’s boffo box office assures a bright future for Taylor-Johnson, whose resilience runs deep, as she has twice overcome cancer. Despite the movie’s creative pains, she insists, “I am happy with the results.”