‘NOT WHAT I WANTED’

Best-Selling Author Sounds Off on ‘Awful’ Adaptation of Her Hit Book

E.L. James unpacked the “traumatic” experience on the set of her first book-to-film adaptation.

This piece was originally published on Substack. Get book reviews, recaps, and deep dives sent straight to your inbox by subscribing to On the Same Page on Substack.

The Fifty Shades of Grey film may have shattered box-office records, put Dakota Johnson on the map, and spawned multiple sequels, but the mastermind behind the original books says she was not a fan.

“The first one was awful,” E.L. James, who wrote the legendary BDSM series, told On The Same Page, the Daily Beast’s book-focused Substack.

“I didn’t sign on for the film that was Fifty Shades of Grey. That’s not what I wanted to do. It was unfortunate,” James explained, citing that it was “very hard” because the final version of the film was not the story she had created, which iconically began as a Twilight fan fiction.

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“I think if I ever do it again, I’ll make sure that whoever’s involved wants to make an adaptation of the book and not something completely different,” she said.

Sam Taylor-Johnson, the director of the first Fifty Shades film, told The Hollywood Reporter in 2017 that she and James had “two different creative visions.”

“Her vision versus mine, and they were polar opposite,” Taylor-Johnson said at the time. “Every scene was fought over. It was tough. It was like wading uphill through sticky tar. Her thing was, ‘This is what the fans expect.’ I’d be like, ‘Well, let’s try and hit those marks but create a new universe at the same time.’”

“The other two were better,” James told On The Same Page, referring to the follow-up films that adapted her novels, Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed. James Foley replaced Taylor-Johnson as director for the two sequels.

James recalled an interaction with Michael De Luca, the recently fired co-chair of Warner Bros. Entertainment, who was then a producer on James’ films.

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De Luca told her, “You wanted to make a better film.”

“And we got a better cinema score on the next two movies than we did on Fifty Shades of Grey,” she explained, adding that she would dish all her Hollywood secrets over a drink but not on the record. “He said, ‘You have succeeded.’ I was very pleased about that. So yeah, it was weird.”

From the first film, the only scene James felt faithfully adapted her writing was when Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) flies Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) from Portland to Seattle on a beautiful nighttime excursion.

“When I saw the helicopter on the roof of the thing, I was like, ‘Whoa, that was really exciting.’ It was all from my head,” James said. “That was fun.”

Even though it’s been over a decade since the first film was released in theaters as a massive success, with the first film alone earning nearly $570 million worldwide, James still has sour memories of the experience.

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“It was such a traumatic experience,” she said. So much so that James is hesitant to even think about adapting her new novel, Land of Ghosts, into a film. If she were to go back to Hollywood for a new adaptation, she says she would “like to work with a bunch of sympathetic people who really want to be there and really want to do it.”

But that poor experience led to something good: a new trilogy. In 2015, James released Grey, which kicked off a spin-off series depicting the events of the Fifty Shades trilogy from Christian’s perspective.

“I think I was so unhappy with my experience in Hollywood that I managed to pour it all into a book,” she said, revealing that Grey was her favorite book to write as it was so “fun,” while Darker, the second book from Christian’s perspective, is her favorite overall.

As for the future of the Fifty Shades franchise, James is satisfied with the six in-universe novels she’s created, although she has another novel ready to go, which would occur after the original trilogy.

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“I have a whole fourth novel mapped out in my head,” James said. “I haven’t written anything down, and the reason I don’t is that I’ve left them in a good place. They’ve got their happily ever after. Let’s leave them to that. They’ve been through everything. Because if I have to write another book, I’ll have to do something awful to them. And I don’t really want to do that.”

“Maybe one day,” she added. “I always say, ‘Never say never,’ but not at the moment.”

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