Fifty Shades of Grey earned half a billion dollars, but fights with the writer meant Taylor-Johnson paid a high personal price. Now she just wants to direct something so good people will forget she ever made it

Sam Taylor-Johnson perches in a sun-dappled corner of a Los Angeles hotel terrace and asks the waiter for an oatmeal cookie. He brings a plate of chocolate ones – there’s no oatmeal. They look delicious, but she sends them back. “I just fancied oatmeal.” Taylor-Johnson clearly knows exactly what she wants.

The director was last in the headlines two years ago, when her film of EL James’s erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey ravished the global box office, raking in more than half a billion dollars for Universal Studios. A triumphant collaboration, you might think – except that director and author repeatedly clashed over how to transfer page to screen.

“I was in a supermarket a year ago and this guy in the car park shouted: ‘Congrats on the movie,’” Taylor-Johnson recalls. “I shouted back, ‘It was really difficult, it was really fucking difficult.’” She sighs, then laughs. “It doesn’t matter if it’s successful, the journey was hard. I don’t want to be defined by the success of it and I don’t want to be defined by the misery of it. I just want to leave it behind me.”

Taylor-Johnson is an affable, no-nonsense Londoner who made her name as a Turner-nominated photographer and visual artist before making films. A svelte figure in blue jeans and white blouse, she blends into the glam-casual crowd at Chateau Marmont, an old Hollywood haunt.

We are here to discuss her move into television – a psychological thriller for Netflix – but the welts left by Fifty Shades of Grey are hard to leave behind. James wanted linear, explicit adaptations of her book’s sadomasochistic bonkathons. Taylor-Johnson envisaged a dark fairytale.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson in Fifty Shades Of Grey. Photograph: Allstar/Focus Features

“It’s hard when you get two headstrong people with very powerful visions that are so different. That was pretty tough, on both of us. Erica had a powerful vision and she wrote and created it. So it’s difficult, when you hire someone else who is a creative visionary, too, to realise your vision when they have their own. I had a really strong creative idea that got chipped away. And that’s hard for any creative person to go through. I hate caving.”

Hindsight does not ease the pain, she says, but she stands by the result. “When I stand back and look at the movie, I can say I’m proud of it. I’m proud of the battles won and can see the battles I lost.”

The tone is reflective, not bitter, so I ask if she has been in touch with James recently, and maybe reconciled. Taylor-Johnson looks startled, then laughs. “No! Why would I?”

Has she seen the sequel, Fifty Shades Darker, directed by James Foley, which came out in February?

She shoots another look.

“No.”

No interest?

“None.”

What about when it streams on television? Maybe watch it then?

“No. I don’t want to see it. Ever.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Taylor-Johnson’s video portrait of David Beckham Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian

There is a steeliness to Taylor-Johnson, a sense of control and resilience and discipline have brought her far. Abandoned by both parents, she scraped into art school and, in the 1990s, became one of the Young British Artists, famously making a video portrait of David Beckham for the National Portrait Gallery, as well as a work called Crying Men, which featured 28 actors, including Paul Newman and Robin Williams, sobbing.

Battles with colon and breast cancer suffused her work with decay and death but, having recently turned 50, her focus now is on life. “I’m fucking grateful to turn 50. I’ve faced the alternative a couple of times, so turning 50 is a blessing. And I’d like to turn 60 and 70 and 80, too. As long as I can keep turning those decades, I’ll be fine.”

She no longer believes, as she did before, that her art requires her to straddle neurosis and psychosis. “I don’t believe I’m that same person now. I don’t necessarily feel I’m constantly weaving through madness and sadness. I’m calmer and happier, a little more self-assured.” She has reconciled with her mother, who recently visited, but “I think my grounded nature now and sense of stability come from my relationship with Aaron and family.”

That would be Aaron Taylor-Johnson, her husband. Her first marriage to art dealer Jay Jopling ended in 2008. A year later, she made her first feature film, Nowhere Boy, about John Lennon, and ended up marrying the lead actor. She was 42, he was 19.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sam and Aaron Taylor-Johnson at the premiere of Nocturnal Animals during the 2016 Venice film festival. Photograph: EPA/Claudio Onorati

Tabloids crowed and paparazzi swooped, but the fuss now feels distant. “I don’t think there’s much of an issue any more. We’ve been together eight years. I think it has outrun a lot of relationships that, on paper, were more acceptable to people.” The couple moved to LA three years ago and live there with four daughters – two from their union, two from her first marriage – plus three dogs and six chickens. “I like having fresh eggs and knowing where they come from.”

She misses England at Christmas but enjoys LA. It’s mellower, sunnier. “We just live our lives. We have more space. And you don’t have to spend half an hour wrapping the children up in welly boots and layers.”

She says she is chuffed her husband won a Golden Globe for his performance in the Tom Ford-directed thriller Nocturnal Animals even though, to prep for the role – a homicidal rapist – he spent months watching “seriously dark” documentaries and films. “The aura stays around a while. When it finally left, it was nice.”

Taylor-Johnson took a year off to recover from Fifty Shades before agreeing to direct and executive-produce the first two episodes of Gypsy. The 10-part Netflix drama, written by Lisa Rubin, stars Naomi Watts as a therapist who develops manipulative relationships with patients and the people in their lives.

“It’s so brilliantly written. And the protagonist is so multifaceted and complex and dark and mysterious and clever and twisted – it was exciting to be part of something so different.”

Filming a female writer’s story about a female character’s sexually charged odyssey does not sound so different from Fifty Shades, but Taylor-Johnson insists otherwise. There was no huge fanbase with preconceptions. The writer was more open to collaboration and Netflix was relatively hands-off. “They visited the set a couple of times but didn’t interfere.”

And the character, Jean Holloway, is no Anastasia Steele. “She’s a strong woman who is seeking independence and her own sense of power. She has been feeling consumed by suburban life and breaks free of that.” The characters did share one trait: “They are women who enjoy sex.”

Handing the ensuing eight episodes to other directors was a wrench – a loss of control. “It was sort of bizarre for me: OK, here’s my vision, I’m off now.” She has yet to watch the episodes she didn’t direct. “I know, I know, I should. I will.”

Another difference from doing a big studio movie was speed. “Film felt like a luxurious world for creating and ruminating. Television moves at the fastest of paces. By day two, I realised my skills were being honed, fast.” Part of her prep included watching more TV. “Like everyone, I loved The Crown. I suddenly became nostalgic for 1950s England.”

Three of Gypsy’s directors were women, a sign that perhaps Hollywood is becoming less sexist, but there’s a long way to go, says Taylor-Johnson. She attributes her own success to role models such as Jane Campion and Kathryn Bigelow, and dogged, bloody-minded persistence. “Every door that was slammed in my face, I’ve kicked down. Every obstacle I’ve stepped over and pushed through. That’s really how you have to be.”

Love, lust, a midlife crisis: Naomi Watts TV drama lays bare female desire Read more

Years ago, the producer of a film she wished to direct refused to see her. “Then, on the way to the airport with my suitcase, I went to his office and stayed until he would see me. There was no reason on earth for him not to give me the job, in my mind.” She got the film. It fell through – studio wrangling – but the producer subsequently tapped her for Fifty Shades of Grey.

Her next step in what sounds like Fifty Shades rehab is a small indie. She is writing the screenplay with her husband. She will direct and he will play the lead. “It’s important to me to do something where I feel more independent and retain as much creative freedom as possible.”

Taylor-Johnson is coy about details, saying only that it is based on a book she fell in love with 15 years ago and that the author is open to a cinematic version. “He wants it to flourish and grow and become something.”

The director says she has made peace with the likelihood that the first line of her obituary will cite Fifty Shades. Unless, of course, she kicks down more Hollywood doors. “I’ll have to somehow create something else, bigger.”

• Gypsy launches on Netflix on 30 June.