Fifty Shades of Grey movie has a lot to live up to

Director Sam Taylor-Johnson had been working in secrecy for months when she finally got an opportunity to play footage of her new film for a fresh-eyed viewer, Beyoncé.

The London-born director is making one of the most anticipated movies of 2015, an adaptation of E.L. James' bestselling novel Fifty Shades of Grey, the first in a trilogy that ignited a guilty-pleasure publishing phenomenon in 2011 and exposed its mostly female audience of more than 100 million readers to an eyebrow-raising erotic storyline.

Last year, Taylor-Johnson brought scenes from the film to Beyoncé's home in Los Angeles so the singer-songwriter-actress could see how her music would underpin the steamy drama about a mousy college university graduate, Anastasia Steele (played by Dakota Johnson), who enters into a sexually submissive relationship with an enigmatic young billionaire, Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan).

"As the scene opened there was no context," Taylor-Johnson says, recalling the footage she shared with Beyoncé. "There wasn't the slow meeting and the interview and the coffee shop, it was just, 'Here's a hardcore sex scene, hey, nice to meet you' ... I suddenly felt myself recoil. I suddenly thought, 'This is really explicit, and I don't even know this woman!'"

Taylor-Johnson is going to be sharing those scenes with a much larger audience soon, when Fifty Shades of Grey arrives in cinemas this week.

As with Star Wars and countless comic book movies, the film has an ardent and particular audience to please. Originally self-published as a piece of Twilight fan fiction, the book sprouted from the world of avid fandom and, in a sign of how much those fans are hungering for the film, the trailer was the most watched of 2014, racking up 93 million YouTube views since its debut in July.