14 DAY TRIAL // One of the most graphic and admittedly gross scenes in E.L. James’ novel “Fifty Shades of Grey” will not make its way on the big screen, in next month’s highly mediated release of the film based on it, starring Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan and directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson.
The scene in question involves a tampon, as you may have guessed from the headline, and was deemed hard to stomach even by those who had read and loved the novel. The director tells Variety that we won’t have to suffer through it when the film comes out.
“It was never even discussed”
Sam Taylor-Johnson sat down for a chat with the trade publication, and as expected, the question of how many heart-racing scenes were left on the floor of the editing room to allow for the R rating from the MPAA came out.
As it turns out, there were a lot of them – but there were just as many that weren’t even considered for production, for a variety of reasons. The tampon one falls in the latter category.
“It didn't make it into the movie,” Sam Taylor-Johnson says. “It was never even discussed.”
One of the film’s producers, Michael De Luca, says that the scene made sense in the book because it helped to put the reader in Anastasia’s shoes, but in the film, that is no longer necessary. “A lot of it was very literal [in the book]. The movie didn't need to do that,” De Luca explains.
So the scenes that did make it in the movie will be “integral to the story,” the director adds: there will be no gratuitous nudity and no graphic content used just for the sake of satisfying a rather perverted sense of curiosity.
Not unexpected
If you think about it, that’s not at all unexpected: whenever a famous book is turned into a movie, fans tend to get up in arms about X or Y scene being left out, because they were convinced that it was vital to understanding the characters and their story.
Chances are the same will happen with this particular scene in “Fifty Shades,” but no matter how upset these fans will be, they have no other choice but to consider this: whenever a book is translated to the big screen, many scenes will be left out. And many of those will be among those they didn’t want to see cut.
That’s because a film and the book it’s based on are different products, and they may even take the story into a different direction – as it will happen, for instance, with “Fifty Shades,” where more focus will fall on the love story in the film adaptation, instead of on the graphic exploits in between the sheets of the two leads.