There are many people who saw Fifty Shades of Grey this year. But there's one key figure in those millions who didn't join them in a nearby theater: Kelly Marcel, the movie's screenwriter. On Bret Easton Ellis' podcast, she revealed her frustrations with the movie, and how the studio promised her one thing with the adaptation and ultimately didn't deliver on their promises.
"My heart really was broken by that process, I really mean it," Marcel explained. "I don't see it out of any kind of bitterness or anger or anything like that. I just don't feel like I can watch it without feeling some pain about how different it is to what I initially wrote."
It's been no secret Marcel and director Sam Taylor-Johnson didn't get along with the production and post-production on the movie, with author E.L. James considered to extremely restrictive in the creative process. With James' husband Niall Leonard hired to write the sequel's script, it seems James has even more control with the new movie.
With that, Marcel, an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter behind Saving Mr. Banks and also the creator behind Terra Nova, explained she had a different approach than the initial book with her writing.
"I very much wanted to do something different with the screenplay, and when I spoke to the studio and the producers and made that quite clear, they were very enthusiastic about that and kind of loved the things I wanted to do," Marcel explained to Ellis during their talk, found via Vulture. "I didn't want the story to be linear; I wanted it to begin at the end of the film, and for us to meet in the middle."
From there, Marcel explained the intentions she had with the film's narrative.
"So you start with the spanking, and you have these sort of flashes that go throughout the film," she explained. "I wanted to take the inner goddess out, and all of Ana's inner monologue. ... I wanted to remove a lot of the dialogue. I felt it could be a really sexy film if there wasn't so much talking in it."
The problem, it seems, was Universal was double talking to Marcel when it comes to the initial film.
"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' — that was utter, utter bulls**t. Rightly so. Erika was like, 'This isn't what I want it to be, and I don't think this is the film the fans are looking for.' ... She ended up coming into my house for a week, and we kind of wrote side-by-side and put things back in," Marcel said. "She would always let me argue and fight for things that I felt passionate about. In the end, I think we ended up with a draft that was a halfway compromise, but she had still been very brave about what she had let go. Ultimately, Erika did have all of the control."
This is not the first time Ellis and Marcel discussed the project, though this is the first time they did so in person. Ellis, back in the movie's initial development, lobbed to get the screenwriter position. When Marcel got the job over the Less Than Zero, he got in an Twitter tiff with the movie's co-producer, Michael De Luca.
Image courtesy of INFphoto.com