Fifty Shades Of Grey Film Was Just A Cash-In, Says Writer

Millions of romance fans (and S&M looky-loos) saw Fifty Shades of Grey when it opened in February. One of the few not to catch the flick? Its credited screenwriter, Kelly Marcel. Though she received the main writing credit on the erotic drama (which has taken in more than $500 million worldwide since opening in February), Marcel can’t bear to watch it, because her vision for the film was very different from what played out onscreen. “A lot of what happened on Fifty Shades really broke my heart,” says the screenwriter. On Bret Easton Ellis’s podcast this week, Marcel talked about the Fifty Shades that might have been.

[Minor Fifty Shades of Grey spoilers ahead.]

In Marcel’s original draft, she explains, Fifty Shades of Grey was told as a non-linear story, beginning with the spanking at the end and flashing back to different points in Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele’s relationship. By moving back and forth through time, Marcel thought, she would solve the problem of the story’s slow third act. Marcel also removed the metaphoric “inner goddess” from Anastasia’s internal monologues, and stripped down much of the book’s dialogue. “I felt like it could be a really sexy film if there wasn’t so much talking in it,” she tells Ellis. Finally, her script went deep into Christian’s personal history, and the personal trauma that led him to S&M. “It was quite dark, I think, the first draft,” Marcel says. “It very much concentrated on Christian’s pain.”

The producers and novelist E.L. James (real name: Erika Mitchell) had been supportive when Marcel pitched her ideas. But as soon as she turned in the draft, their enthusiasm vanished. “When I delivered that script, was when I realized that all of them saying, ‘Yeah, absolutely! This is what we want and you can write anything you like and get crazy and artistic with it,’ was utter, utter bulls---,’” says Marcel. “Erika was like, ‘This isn’t what I want it to be, and I don’t think that this is the film that the fans are looking for.’”

Despite this, Marcel has nothing but good things to say about James, who collaborated with her on a rewrite. “She would always let me fight for things that I felt passionate about. And in the end, we ended up with a draft that was a halfway compromise,” says Marcel. “But she had still been very brave about what she had let go.”

However, things changed when director Sam Taylor-Johnson came on board. Marcel confirms the reports of tension between the director and James, who exercised an unusually large amount of creative control over the film. “It was clear that there was going to be a struggle,” Marcel says. “It’s very difficult to come on as a director and be handcuffed in that way, and not be able to fulfill your creative vision because there are certain restrictions on you. But at the same time, I would argue: It was very clear that that was the way it was going to be. So then don’t sign on to the movie.”

Marcel departed Fifty Shades after Charlie Hunnam was cast as Christian Grey. The actor, a screenwriter himself, had requested changes to the script. “I know that he felt that the character of Christian wasn’t there for him in the way he needed him to be,” says Marcel. Rather than addressing Hunnam’s notes with Marcel, producers brought on a new screenwriter, Patrick Marber. After a few weeks, Hunnam also left, and was replaced by Jamie Dornan. (Marcel says she and Hunnam finally met just two weeks ago, when she introduced herself to him at a London restaurant. “We hugged it out in a restaurant, and he was very lovely and very kind,” she says. “And he was saying actually at the dinner that he was so sad to leave the project, because he had really really bonded with Sam and really liked Sam a lot.”)

By the time she left, Marcel had come to the realization that the studio’s priority for Fifty Shades of Grey was not to make a great film: It was to profit from a hugely lucrative brand.

“There was a very definite moment where we were weeks away from shooting… I realized — oh my god — this isn’t about the movie. This is about the fact that there are Audi cars being lined up to be put out on this date,” she says. “There are toys, there’s merchandise, and there’s all this stuff that’s so much more financially rewarding than the film, and they all have to hit this date. So this movie is going to get shot no matter what is on the page, because it has to be out by a certain date in order to fulfill the huge massive conglomerate that is surrounding it. It actually isn’t even about the film anymore.”

In the end, Marcel says she’s not angry about the experience, but the idea of seeing the film is just too painful for her. “When I say my heart really was broken by that process, I really mean it,” she tells Ellis. “So I don’t [not] see it out of any kind of bitterness or anger or anything like that — it’s just, I don’t feel like I can watch it without feeling some pain about how different it is to what I initially wrote.”