Instead, she read it as “a deep, dark, romantic adult fairy tale,” she said.
Taylor-Johnson read “Fifty Shades” for the first time, she did not see it as “mommy porn,” as some have called it, nor as an unlikely story full of clunky prose bogged down by a strangely chirpy narrator prone to referring to her “inner goddess,” as some reviewers have complained. “I was always looking for someone who could come in and, despite the hoopla about the S-and-M, would realize that it was an archetypal love story,” Mr. Taylor-Johnson, 47, was a natural choice because so much of her work has been “sexy without being gratuitous,” said Michael De Luca, a producer of the film. (Both took the last name Taylor-Johnson.) The couple live with their two daughters and two daughters from her previous marriage.ĭespite her lack of Hollywood experience, Ms. Taylor-Wood married the film’s star, the actor Aaron Johnson, now 24. After “Nowhere Boy,” about the adolescent years of John Lennon, Ms. Later she began working in video, filming the soccer star David Beckham sleeping (“ David”) for the National Portrait Gallery and making music videos, among other things. She was associated with the Young British Artists (Damien Hirst, Gavin Turk and the like), who upended the British art establishment in the 1990s. Taylor-Johnson, then Sam Taylor-Wood, was known for her beautifully conceived high-art photographs, often using herself as the model. Taylor-Johnson’s highbrow sensibility with the book’s populist tone.
Taylor-Johnson said.Īnother big challenge, though no one connected to the film put it quite this way, was how to reconcile Ms. “My understanding of that world is that a lot of it is about sensuality and playing with the senses, and so if you get too graphically explicit, you’re going too far,” Ms.
Taylor-Johnson had a so-called dominant - someone who likes to take charge during sex and order the other person around - on hand for consultations. At one point, there is mention of a butt plug. Johnson in various states of duress - blindfolded, tied up, being stroked with a riding crop and the like. Sipping water in the bar of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel on Columbus Circle the other day, she was a self-contained oasis of calm in the midst of the huge publicity operation - interviews at 10-minute intervals, publicists wielding clipboards and barking into their cellphones, suites filled with snacks for the flagging stars and functionaries - taking place around her. “It felt like a very tough job from the beginning, for many reasons,” Ms. “It’s been hard all the way through,” said the director, Sam Taylor-Johnson, a British artist who had made just one feature film, “Nowhere Boy” (2009), and one short before being hired for “Fifty Shades.” The film stars Dakota Johnson as Anastasia Steele, a clueless college student and hardware-store clerk, and Jamie Dornan as Christian Grey, her 27-year-old lover, a billionaire control freak whose exotic erotic tastes extend to whips, cable ties and other naughty accouterments not usually seen at the cineplex.
But adapting something so popular yet so derided, potentially X-rated and freighted with preconceptions was never going to be simple. Turning the book into the much-longed-for film, a romance replete with spicy sex released just in time for Valentine’s Day, was a fraught undertaking, made even more complicated by the high expectations of its legions of opinionated fans. (Salman Rushdie, for one, said that it “made ‘Twilight’ look like ‘War and Peace.’ ”) If ever a novel could be described as review-proof, it is “Fifty Shades of Grey,” which, with its two sequels, has sold more than 100 million copies worldwide despite being ridiculed by virtually every critic who has read it.