Photo by Georges Biard
Filmmaker Gus Van Sant has revealed that, a decade ago, he campaigned to direct Fifty Shades of Grey, an erotic drama that was based on a book by E. L. James. Van Sant said that he sent James a sample clip he shot in which actor Alex Pettyfer portrayed Christian Grey, but James was not convinced. Sam Taylor-Johnson eventually ended up as the director of the award-winning film, which starred Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson.
“It did not fit into her idea of what she wanted to do,” Van Sant said. “It’s a complete sex novel, but the author had this intention of not having a lot of sex in it. She wanted a movie that was a lot more chaste than the novel.”
However, according to Variety, a spokesperson for E. L. James disputed Van Sant’s assertion that the author “wanted the movie to have less sex than the books.”
Van Sant at one point was attached to direct Brokeback Mountain and Call Me By Your Name, but neither project materialized for him He directed two Oscar-winning films, Good Will Hunting and Milk, for which he received nominations for best director. His next film, Dead Man’s Wire, will be released next month, his first movie since 2018. It stars Dacre Montgomery and Bill Skarsgård in a dramatization of a real-life high-profile 1977 kidnapplng.
Dead Man’s Wire will premiere out of competition at the Venice Film Festival on September 2. An indie production, the film cost only $15 million to make. Van Sant bemoans the fact that “Studios are only really interested in huge tentpole movies that are designed to make a lot of money — they’ve sort of taken over the industry,” he says.
Most recently, Van Sant directed the 2024 FX series Feud: Capote vs. the Swans as well as a collection of short films for Gucci.
“I didn’t realize how much I missed [feature filmmaking] until I got to set and started working on this,” he was quoted as saying. “It’s just a different game. It’s for a different audience, and it’s a different business.”