Given its now legendary sex and bondage scenes, it’s rather ironic that some of the most passionate moments on the set of the much-anticipated film adaptation of Fifty Shades Of Grey took place when the cameras stopped rolling.
Stepping into the spotlight during these fiery spats were the film’s director Sam Taylor-Johnson and E.L. James herself, the 51-year-old Middlesex housewife who transformed her middle-aged bedroom fantasies into the phenomenally successful Fifty Shades trilogy of books.
While Taylor-Johnson argued in favour of a classier, more ‘artistic’ version of the bestselling erotic book, James demanded that the film should be rather more raunchy.
Hollywood sources say that the director and author even rowed about the final word in the film, with Taylor-Johnson favouring ‘red’, a ‘safe word’ used in the bedroom by the protagonists, and James insisting on ‘stop’.
It was, says one, ‘the most petty and ridiculous argument in the world’ and the climax of months of tension between the pair.
But James, apparently, ‘was given a lot of power and has used every opportunity to flex that power’.
Another source who spoke to the Mail this week claims she even threatened to tell her millions of fans across the world to boycott cinemas when the film is released on Valentine’s Day if she didn’t get her own way.
That Erika Leonard, E.L. James’s real name, was even present on set each day during filming in Vancouver is in itself extraordinary. Authors who sell the film rights to their books are usually expected to keep well away and have little control over the finished product.
But those who saw the feisty brunette’s spats with Taylor-Johnson were under no illusion about just how powerful the married mother-of-two has become in Hollywood.
‘It was difficult, I’m not going to lie,’ 47-year-old Taylor-Johnson revealed this week. ‘We would have proper on-set barneys and I’m not confrontational. But it was about finding a way between the two of us.’
Leonard’s exceptional influence was thanks to an unprecedented contract she negotiated with the aid of her London agent, Valerie Hoskins, who warned those bidding for the film rights that Leonard would be ‘all over it like a rash’ from the word go.
Only one studio acceded to all Leonard’s demands and the deal with Universal in 2012, for a reported $5million, included approval over choice of director, script and cast.
Leonard even emailed costume designer Mark Bridges to let him know which outfits her army of fans would be expecting to see in the film, and sent sketches of floorplans to set designers, outlining exactly how her wealthy hero Christian Grey’s penthouse apartment in Seattle would have looked.
This image of Leonard, the control freak, is a far cry from the overawed, rather ordinary mother-of-two I met in April 2012, when she gave her first ever interview to the Daily Mail, at her London agent’s Soho office.
Then, Leonard seemed like a rabbit caught in the headlights, a woman who couldn’t believe her luck after penning erotic tales initially intended for her own private titillation.
‘It’s surreal,’ she told me. ‘It’s completely and utterly overwhelming and it just hasn’t sunk in.’
But what began as an exercise in escapism on her long, dreary Underground commute into London five years ago has transformed Leonard into one of the richest and most influential authors in the world.
Having sold more than 100million of her steamy books, which tell of the sexual awakening of a virginal university student at the hands of a handsome, brooding billionaire, she is believed to have earned around £50million in the past year alone — a fortune predicted to grow once again with the release of the Fifty Shades Of Grey film next Saturday.
