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. (Salman Rushdie, for one, said that it “made Twilight look like War and Peace”.)

Turning the book into the much-longed-for film, a romance replete with spicy sex, was a fraught undertaking, made even more complicated by the high expectations of its legions of opinionated fans. But adapting something so popular yet so derided, potentially X-rated and freighted with preconceptions was never going to be simple.

“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.

“It felt like a very tough job from the beginning, for many reasons,” Taylor-Johnson continued. 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.

“Taking such a beloved book to screen, figuring out what stays in and what goes, working so closely with the author, having such huge fan expectations — every single thing of it was challenging,” she added.

TOO LITTLE VS TOO MUCH
Negative rumours have been swirling about: Johnson and Dornan hate each other. Taylor-Johnson feuded endlessly with the book’s author, E.L. James. The sex is too graphic, not graphic enough or not sexy at all. The film is demeaning to women.
But the movie is enjoying tremendous advance sales — more, according to the ticket website Fandango, than for any other 
R-rated film in the site’s history.
How to handle the sex that consumes so much of the book was a puzzle. Leave too much out, and the fans would feel frustrated. Put too much in, and the movie would run afoul of the ratings system and potentially turn off conservative moviegoers. (It is rated R; in Britain, it has an “18 certificate,” which means no one under 18 is allowed to see it.)
There are a great many shots of Johnson’s breasts, a shot or two of Dornan’s rear end and scenes showing Johnson in various states of duress — blindfolded, tied up, being stroked with a riding crop and the like. At one point, there is mention of a butt plug.
Dornan said that 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.
“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,” Taylor-Johnson said.

DEEP DARK ADULT FAIRY TALE

Another big challenge, though no one connected to the film put it quite this way, was how to reconcile Taylor-Johnson’s highbrow sensibility with the book’s populist tone. Before she became a director, Taylor-Johnson, then Sam Taylor-Wood, was known for her beautifully conceived high-art photographs, often using herself as the model. She was associated with the Young British Artists (Damien Hirst, Gavin Turk and the like), who upended the British art establishment in the 1990s.

In 1997, she won the Illy Caffe prize for the most promising young artist at the Venice Biennale; in 1998, she was nominated for the Turner Prize, losing to the painter Chris Ofili.

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. After Nowhere Boy, about the adolescent years of John Lennon, Taylor-Wood married the film’s star, the actor Aaron Johnson, now 24. (Both took the last name Taylor-Johnson.) The couple live with their two daughters and two daughters from her previous marriage.

Despite her lack of Hollywood experience, 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.

“I was always looking for someone who could come in and, despite the hoopla about the S-and-M, would realise that it was an archetypal love story,” De Luca said in an interview.

Indeed, when 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. Instead, she read it as “a deep, dark, romantic adult fairy tale,” she said.

“I thought, I haven’t seen anything cinematically like what I was reading for a long time, if at all,” Taylor-Johnson continued. “It felt like a very deep romance and a love story the likes of which felt quite unique.”

AUTHOR VS DIRECTOR

Excited by the idea, she put together a “mood reel,” a three-minute “fake trailer for what I thought the film would look like”, consisting of scenes from movies whose sensibility she admired, like The Thomas Crown Affair and Last Tango in Paris.
She was hired. And then the hard part began — tussles over the script, over casting, over what to leave in and what to take out. James, the author of the trilogy and a woman whose great success has brought commensurate financial and creative power, was a producer of the film and intimately involved in every decision. Often she and Taylor-Johnson disagreed.

“Everything throughout the process was debated,” Taylor-Johnson said. Speaking of James, she added: “When you have someone who has incredible passion about and understanding of their material, it’s quite hard to hand over the reins. I understand and appreciate that, because I’m the same.”

“I thought, I haven’t seen anything cinematically like what I was reading for a long time, if at all. It felt like a very deep romance and a love story the likes of which felt quite unique. Taking such a beloved book to screen, figuring out what stays in and what goes, working so closely with the author, having such huge fan expectations — every single thing of it was challenging” 
— director Sam Taylor-Johnson

James insisted on retaining some details from the book — Anastasia’s habit of biting her lip, for instance, and Christian’s habit of saying “Laters, baby” as he leaves the room — because they were beloved by the fans. One thing that apparently no one insisted on keeping in was a much-discussed scene involving the couple and a tampon.

Dozens of actors auditioned for the two lead roles. Taylor-Johnson required the women to memorise a four-page monologue from the Ingmar Bergman film Persona, while the men had to perform various passages from the movie True Romance. Dornan, perhaps best known for his chillingly sexy turn as a serial killer in the BBC series The Fall, came late in the process, hired to replace the original Christian (Charlie Hunnam), who dropped out before filming began.

“Everyone has an opinion of this franchise, whether it’s a positive one or a heightened, rabid, crazy one or a very negative one,” Dornan said. His face now covered with a thick beard, in contrast with Christian’s clean-shaven look, he was sitting on a sofa in a Mandarin Oriental suite, looking a little dizzy from all the fuss going on.

“Sam had the ability to block out all that outside scrutiny and make us feel that we were just trying to make a good picture,” he said. Up to a point, Taylor-Johnson said.

“There’s a lot of people with many expectations,” she said. “There are times when I think, this is almost too much, and times where I have to pull it together and just get on with it. I think I’d be inhuman if I didn’t feel the stress of this.”

Fifty Shades of Grey will not release in India this Friday because the censor board has still not committed a date to watching the film. Subject to censorship, producer NBC Universal is now eyeing a February 27 release date 

Sarah Lyall
(The New York Times 
News Service)

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