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 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. 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.
A preview of the film.
“It felt like a very tough job from the beginning, for many reasons,” Ms. 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.
–
“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, Ms. 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.”
A version of this article appears in print on February 15, 2015, on page AR10 of the New York edition with the headline: Seeing the Fairy-Tale Romance in Pain. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
