AT THE MOVIES
Sam Taylor-Johnson hadn’t even read Fifty Shades of Grey when she was given the daunting task of bringing it to life.
Sam Taylor-Johnson is knackered. The day before our interview, the 47-year-old film-maker finally finished the biggest job of her life, locking the last edit on her adaptation of 50 Shades of Grey, one of the most hotly, sweatily awaited films of 2015. The shoot was intense, the weight of expectation even more so: earlier in the day, it was announced that advance tickets have sold faster than for any other R-rated film in US box office history.
This morning, she said, she could barely lift her head off the pillow. But she managed to make it from her bed in the Hollywood Hills to the terrace of the Chateau Marmont hotel, where she is stoically chugging cups of hot water with honey, lemon and ginger. It’s 18 months since Taylor-Johnson, who had never directed a Hollywood movie, was hired for the film version of EL James’ mega-selling erotic novel. The news was announced the day after she made her pitch to executives at Focus Features and Universal, who had won a fierce bidding war for the rights to 50 Shades.
“I went in for the meeting, and I thought they liked my vision and approach,” she said. “But the call came at eight o’clock the next morning: ‘OK, you got the job — we’re announcing it at midday.’ It was like jumping onto a high-speed train and the doors locking behind me. And I’m only now about to get off … I’m not that seasoned a director, and I had a few moments when I thought, ‘This is way bigger than I can handle.’ But I’m also not a quitter.”
The security surrounding the film is such that no journalist could watch it before Wednesday’s premiere. It opens in Thailand on Thursday. For Taylor-Johnson, that secrecy is a source of frustration. “I haven’t been able to show it to anyone. It’s the most frustrating thing ever to not be able to get feedback.” One of the few people to have seen it is her husband, actor Aaron Taylor-Johnson: “Aaron has seen it a thousand times. He worked on it from the script right through. I needed someone that I could trust to bounce ideas off.”
Despite the studio’s cloak-and-dagger release strategy, the book’s many fans can rest assured that the 50 Shades plot remains intact. Jamie Dornan plays the titular Christian Grey, a business magnate with a BDSM habit, while Dakota Johnson is his unsuspecting love interest, Anastasia Steele. James, a regular presence on the set, was rigorously protective of her material.
That said, some of the novel’s graphic sexual details were necessarily omitted from the film. Dornan recently told an interviewer that his “todger” was contractually obliged to remain off-camera, while an infamous episode from the book, commonly referred to as “The Tampon Scene”, will not make it to the screen. “Those scenes had to be about sexuality and sensuality, but you can’t film it exactly the way it is on the page,” the director said. “Although, to their credit, Focus and Universal left me alone and said, ‘Shoot it exactly how you want it, and we’ll edit it if we need to.’ ”
Working within the Hollywood studio system was a new experience for someone who, by her own admission, has spent most of her career as an auteur. Taylor-Johnson (formerly Taylor-Wood) first achieved prominence as a photographer and video artist, one of the celebrated YBAs — Young British Artists — of the 1990s. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1998, shortly after undergoing treatment for colon cancer. She overcame a bout of breast cancer two years later.
The Londoner’s first foray into narrative film-making was the short Love You More, with Andrea Riseborough and Harry Treadaway as teenage lovers bonding over a mutual adoration for the Buzzcocks. It debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in 2008, the same year Taylor-Johnson’s YBA contemporary Steve McQueen was there to unveil his first feature,
Hunger. “Steve and I were both on the red carpet at Cannes,” she recalled, “and I said to him, over-excitedly, ‘God, look at us! Isn’t this so ridiculously exciting!’ Steve just looked at me like I was some stupid schoolgirl. He shamed me with his look! He was definitely born to be a great director.”
The following year, she directed another musical coming-of-age tale, the wonderful drama Nowhere Boy, starring Aaron TaylorJohnson (formerly Johnson) as the young John Lennon. The director and the actor, who was 50 SHADES OF STRESS