When the Fifty Shades film rights came up for sale, in 2012, they created an explosion in Hollywood. In a way, your daydreams come to life before your eyes, if not always in exactly the way you imagined.” I thought this would be my one opportunity, so I said yes.” She adds, “There’s all sorts of fun you can have in a darkened room … You can eat lots of popcorn, for example … But there’s a special thrill seeing what used to exist only in your head and on the page up there on a screen for an audience to experience together.
I used to work in TV, and I enjoyed it, but like a lot of TV people I’d always wondered how it would be to work on a movie. But when they went viral and started selling in millions, Hollywood came calling, and the demand for a movie, from studios and from fans, became almost overwhelming. James says, she wasn’t sure she even wanted to make a film, but then jokes, “Have you met my agent, ?” She adds, “When I started out writing Fifty Shades and sharing it with friends on the Internet, I had no idea this is where this would all lead. There are few book-to-film projects in recent memory that have been as anticipated, debated, and kept under wraps as Fifty Shades of Grey. “Life was all about parties and entertaining.” The couple lived in a Georgian home in Marylebone. Jopling, Taylor-Johnson’s first husband-an Eton-educated son of a Tory M.P.-became one of the most powerful art dealers in Europe and the primary salesman of the Y.B.A.’s, including Hirst and Tracey Emin. “In the art world, the more blue-collar you are, the more you get invited to dinners with ambassadors of whatever, because you’re presumed to be an interesting person,” she said, a bit dryly. We talked about her childhood in England, spent on welfare in a “strange, dark, gloomy house that still gives me nightmares,” before she made her way to Goldsmiths art school, where she befriended Damien Hirst and many of the young artists known as the Y.B.A.’s, or Young British Artists. It helps me clear my mind and helps me keep sane,” she explained. “I have had to every day because of the madness of Fifty Shades. Stepping lightly in her sneakers, Taylor-Johnson headed out of her home and began hiking up a steep path. “And we’ve also got two dogs who are girls, so Aaron is completely outnumbered: it’s seven to one in this household! There are crazy hormones here.” “Aaron takes care of the girls when I’m working and he’s not,” she said.
The kids went off to the playground with their father. “It was move the family to Los Angeles to finish Fifty Shades or commute from London,” said Taylor-Johnson, a slender, self-possessed blonde who had dressed in sporty blue shorts and a white T-shirt in expectation of taking a hike.
On a recent weekday at 8:30 A.M., those young girls, plus Taylor-Johnson’s two daughters from her previous marriage to art dealer Jay Jopling, a near tween and a teenager, were climbing around her Hollywood Hills villa like macaques on a Hindu temple. “No, it was amazing,” said Taylor-Johnson, adding that women shouldn’t listen to male doctors at hospitals who tell them to give birth in a certain way. The two were married in 2012, and together they have two daughters, whom Aaron delivered on his own at their home in London. She’s also futzed with her name of late, after falling in love with Aaron Johnson, the 24-year-old Godzilla and Avengers: Age of Ultron star, whom she cast as a young John Lennon in Nowhere Boy, her first feature film. Like James, Taylor-Johnson, 47, is British.
That is, few women except Sam Taylor-Johnson, director of the first film in the Fifty Shades trilogy (yes, there will be not one, not two, but three movies, provided that the first, which opens in theaters on Valentine’s Day, isn’t a colossal misfire). James, the 51-year-old, dark-tressed British author who created a compendium of her sexual fantasies, called the book Fifty Shades of Grey, and watched in shock as the book and its two sequels ( Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed) sold more than 100 million copies worldwide, making her more than $100 million. Few women in the world are more self-actualized than Erika Leonard, better known as E.