When news broke out that there was a Fifty Shades of Grey movie in the works, fans who had read the novel that it was based on, quickly became excited, but the end product of the movie wasn’t entirely what fans were expecting and there were rumors that the cast and crew weren’t very satisfied with the movie as a whole.
Dakota Johnson has recently confirmed these rumors while speaking to Vanity Fair. Dakota has admitted that the movie-making process was very difficult and primarily because of the heavy disagreements between the studio, the directors, and the author of the books, Erika Leonard, who goes by the pen name E.L. James.
Dakota said that she has never been able to reveal the truth about all this because obviously, you cannot badmouth a franchise while it is in active promotion stages, but fans have historically noted Dakota’s discomfort in interviews regarding the movie.
Dakota revealed that the author of the book, James, was given a lot of creative power in the movie-making process and that she demanded a lot of things to be put in the movie which seasoned directors understood wouldn’t benefit the movie at all.
“There were parts of the books that just wouldn’t work in a movie, like the inner monologue, which was at times incredibly cheesy. It wouldn’t work to say out loud. It was always a battle. Always,” said Dakota.
Dakota also revealed that when Charlie Hunnam, who was originally cast to play Christian Grey dropped out due to scheduling conflicts, James was so distraught that she completely abandoned the original script of the movie and the movie that was eventually created with Jamie Dornan was a completely different version of the movie, in which Dakota and the rest of the crew desperately tried to keep some essence of the previous script.
“We’d do the takes of the movie that Erika wanted to make, and then we would do the takes of the movie that we wanted to make. The night before, I would rewrite scenes with the old dialogue so I could add a line here and there. It was like mayhem all the time,” said Johnson.
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Dakota said that if anyone knew what it was going to be like on set they would not want to be a part of the movie but still she has no regrets about joining the project.