Sam Taylor - Johnson Is Ready To Throw Shade

One of Hollywood’s most successful female directors, now back with a sexy Netflix series, lets loose on Fifty Shades (‘Every scene was fought over’), surviving cancer (twice), her unconventional marriage and the plight of women filmmakers: It’s ‘ego-denting’

- Tatiana Siegel

Sam Taylor-Johnson is showing off some recent photography: bright, colorful pictures of old motels and other rural subjects that she shot in the Mojave Desert over the past year and that she has tacked on the walls of her new studio on a winding side street off of Mulholland Drive.

“I’m almost ready to start showing them to galleries, if that’s even a possibility again,” says the 50-year-old director, who before making history with the largest-ever opening for a female-directed feature (until Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman broke the record with its $103 million opening) was once one of Britain’s hottest visual artists, with solo exhibitions at the Tate Modern in London and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow. “The California light has affected my work in such a positive way,” she notes, pausing to peruse a photo of herself hanging upside down from a light pole in front of the Easy Rest Inn. “I lived in gray for such a long time.”