Things had been quiet on the Fifty Shades of Grey movie front of late, as the hotly anticipated erotic fiction bestseller teased its way through development — that is, until screenwriter Kelly Marcel (Terra Nova, Saving Mr. Banks) spilled a tantalizing tidbit to The Sunday Times: "There is going to be a lot of sex in the film," she said. "It will be rated NC-17."
NC-17!? Be still, our BDSM-loving hearts! EL James's steamy erotic lit juggernaut, about demure college grad Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey, the emotionally tortured millionaire she enters into a kinky relationship with, has its fair share of sexy clinches. If you've read the series — or the Twilight fan fiction it started out as — you know it's pretty much a series of sexcapades tempered by interludes of soap operatic dramarama. (For a borderline NSFW idea of what happens in the first book, check out this fantastic fan-made animated trailer. Splash!)
A Fifty Shades movie without the deliciously racy sex would hardly be a Fifty Shades movie at all (seriously, we still have Skinemax to serve our softcore needs) but once Focus Features and Universal snapped up the property a proper envelope-pushing rating seemed out of reach. How can studio heads sell an erotic film franchise to the masses that nails Ana and Christian's heated psychosexual bond onscreen as vividly as it does on the page?
Common sense says be prepared for a gentler, more suggestive-rather-than-graphic Fifty Shades movie. And yet, Marcel (who "pored over" the book with James for ten days) insists that they're going all the way to NC-17 Town on the film:
"[There] is going to be a lot of sex in the film,” she says breezily. “It will be rated NC-17 [18 here]. It’s going to be raunchy." While they are not toning it down — “We are 100% going there” — some of the sex scenes have had to be edited out in order to get some plot in. “We did go through and decide which are our favourites and which are not,” she concedes. “Most of them are in there, but I can’t say more than that.”
It's a fine thought to have, and more power to Marcel if she and James manage to penetrate the MPAA's conservative sensibilities with Christian Grey's, to quote from James's tome, "kinky f***ery." It just sounds a bit too much like screenwriter fantasy at this point, but hey — if I'm wrong I'll send Marcel a pair of Ben Wa balls as a mea culpa and a thank you, on behalf of Fifty Shades fans everywhere.
[via The Sunday Times]
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