High-profile female directors are few and far between. Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar win for The Hurt Locker marked the first time a female director took home the Academy’s Best Director award, and female directors as a whole in Hollywood are a seriously under-represented minority. So, it’s rather distressing and depressing when a director like Sam Taylor-Johnson, who helmed Fifty Shades of Grey, feels like she never wants to make a film again.
One can hardly blame her, though. Although Fifty Shades of Grey has been a mammoth box office success, it has also received a (well-deserved) critical drubbing. But that’s not the foundation of Taylor-Johnson’s feelings about filmmaking. Rather, it was her constant on-set conflicts with author E.L. James, and the fact that she has not been invited back to make the two Fifty Shades sequels. “I feel like I never want to make a movie again. Maybe that will possibly change soon,” she said.
Taylor-Johnson also had some praise for actress Dakota Johnson (one of the few performances in Fifty Shades to earn some begrudging critical praise). Here’s what she said to Vogue (via The Playlist) about the actress and her Persona monologue that got her the part:
She blew us out of the water. She understood the nuance of that passage and how to play something delicately. Dakota has the ability to play so fragile and vulnerable, but with this underlying strength that makes you feel she is going to triumph.
So, despite a general sense that Fifty Shades of Grey is nothing to write home about, Johnson might very well have a strong career ahead of her. At least someone is getting something good out of this, right?
We will have to wait and see what the future holds for Taylor-Johnson. After all, she was the director behind the John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy, which is not a half-bad film. Maybe she was just saddled with some pretty awful source material and the difficult task of translating bad literary pornography to something that America will watch on the big screen. I don’t know about you, but I definitely think that she can do better.
Fifty Shades of Grey is currently in theaters nationwide. Have you seen it yet? If so, what did you think of the film? Sound off below!