Fifty Shades Of Grey Screenwriter Kelly Marcel Brands Film ‘Painfully Bad’: EL James Was A Control Freak

Fifty Shades Of Grey screenwriter Kelly Marcel has revealed how heartbroken she is by the final film, saying she refuses to watch it because author EL James refused to cut any of her own notoriously bad clunky dialogue from the plot.

Appearing on Bret Easton Ellis’s podcast, Kelly Marcel described herself as a simple cog in the Fifty Shades of Grey machine and explained how her heart broke when she realized her “crazy and artistic” vision for the film would be rejected out of hand by EL James.

“My heart really was broken by that process, I really mean it. I don’t say it out of any kind of bitterness or anger or anything like that. I just don’t feel like I can watch it without feeling some pain about how different it is to what I initially wrote.”

Production of Fifty Shades of Grey was rife with reports that the book’s author El James was at loggerheads with director Sam-Taylor Johnson. The self-published novelist was adamant that the film followed her book to the letter, but Marcel confessed she had hoped for a more non-linear reading of Fifty Shades of Grey following Universal Studios initial enthusiasm for such an idea.

“I didn’t want the story to be linear; I wanted it to begin at the end of the film, and for us to meet in the middle. So you start with the spanking, and you have these sort of flashes that go throughout the film … I wanted to take the inner goddess out, and all of Ana’s inner monologue … I wanted to remove a lot of the dialogue. I felt it could be a really sexy film if there wasn’t so much talking in it.

“When I delivered that script was when I realized that all of them saying, ‘Yeah, absolutely this is what we want!’, and, ‘You can write anything you like and get crazy and artistic with it’ – that was utter, utter b******t. Rightly so. Erika was like, ‘This isn’t what I want it to be, and I don’t think this is the film the fans are looking for …’ Ultimately, Erika did have all of the control.”

Prior to its February release, Fifty Shades of Grey was plagued by rumors that EL James insisted her original dialogue be retained otherwise she would walk.

Although Fifty Shades of Grey is not renowned as a literary masterpiece bursting at the seams with sparkling dialogue, it is a runaway bestseller, and as such EL James had her way.

The Guardian reports that James will follow on the Fifty Shades of Grey blockbuster, which took $569.6m at the global box office, by taking even tighter control over its sequel, Fifty Shades Darker.

EL James has hired her husband Niall Leonard to oversee the screenplay, proving perhaps that control is always the central theme in Fifty Shades of Grey.

(Photo above of Kelly Marcel with Tom Hardy by Getty Images)