I felt it could be a really sexy film if there wasn’t so much talking in it. “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 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,” said Marcel. But she eventually came to realise that the British writer would only sanction a final cut that cleaved tightly to her own famously clunky dialogue. Marcel said her plans for a non-linear reading of James’ novel were initially received with enthusiasm by studio Universal. I just don’t feel like I can watch it without feeling some pain about how different it is to what I initially wrote.” “I don’t say it out of any kind of bitterness or anger or anything like that.

“My heart really was broken by that process, I really mean it,” she told Bret Easton Ellis’s podcast. Now Marcel has revealed she was left so disheartened by the experience of working on Fifty Shades of Grey that she has not been able to bring herself to see it. Production of Sam Taylor-Johnson’s film was plagued by reports that author EL James clashed heavily with the British director on set, with the novelist keen to ensure a more literal take on her bestselling book.

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