"Considering the world in which she grew up, Dakota has a very sweet, naive sensibility, but she has this inner strength and power which exudes on screen," Taylor-Johnson says of her leading lady. To cast Anastasia, somewhat improbably, she had actresses read an intense, four-page monologue from the 1966 Ingmar Bergman film Persona before settling on Johnson, the actress and model who is the daughter of Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith.
"And everyone goes to their panic stations." (Ultimately she won out, and the flowy dress is in the film.) "I said it's not right for this scene 'cause she wouldn't be able to dance in a dress that tight," Taylor-Johnson says. After directing short films - including one about a man masturbating in the desert - she made Nowhere Boy, which depicts how Lennon was shaped by two powerful women in his life, his mother and his aunt.įor one scene, the director wanted to modify a tight dress described specifically in the book. Commissioned by London's National Portrait Gallery to film a video portrait of David Beckham, she opted to photograph the football star sleeping.
#Fifty shades of grey director series#
She is perhaps best known as a photographer for Crying Men, a 2004 series of actors weeping, including Robin Williams, Laurence Fishburne and Dustin Hoffman. She projects a calm - perhaps it comes from her practice of transcendental meditation or perhaps it's that she's spent a lot of time in dark rooms recently taking executives' notes about thrusting.Ī visual artist before she became a filmmaker, Taylor-Johnson has a knack for capturing men at their most vulnerable. Petite, with a bit of punk-rock pink in her hair, Taylor-Johnson, 47, is soft-spoken but direct. Opposites attract: Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan as Christian Grey, the young billionaire with a taste for whips. So there must be some sense of needing a challenge that I throw upon myself." And it was a similar situation as soon as the casting began - everyone pitches in with, you have to do this and you can't do that.
#Fifty shades of grey director movie#
"I reminded him I did make a movie about one of the Beatles. "I remember one of the producers saying to me, 'Can you handle making a movie with such a big fan base?' " she says. But with just one independent feature under her belt, she isn't the most obvious candidate to helm a big commercial-studio film. Taylor-Johnson comes to the project with a distinct artistic vision, particularly about the film's sexual politics, and some valuable experience with devotees - her last movie was the 2009 John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy. Originally self-published as a piece of Twilight fan fiction, the book sprouted from the world of avid fandom, and, in a sign of how much those fans are hungering for the film, the trailer was the most watched of 2014, racking up 93 million views on YouTube since its debut in July. Like Star Wars and countless comic-book movies, the film has an ardent and particular audience to please. Taylor-Johnson is going to be sharing those scenes with a much larger audience when Fifty Shades of Grey arrives in cinemas on February 12.
Breakthrough: Sam Taylor-Johnson cast - and later married - Aaron Johnson as John Lennon in Nowhere Boy, her only other feature film.