How Fifty Shades of Grey Managed to Stay R-Rated

Erotic series promises a lot of sex and romance

Anyone who has read the Fifty Shades of Grey series is probably most excited to see one thing: how the h-o-t sex will play out on the big screen.

After it was announced that the movie managed to nab an R-rating instead of the super risqué NC-17, some might have wondered how the content, which is highly erotic, snuck by without getting the pornographic rating. Is this going to leave fans, who are itching to see Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele get it on, disappointed?

Sam Taylor-Johnson, the film's director, tells Vanity Fair in its upcoming February issue that to make it work, the sex had to be tastefully handled.

"It's details, flesh and fingers and skin and eyes and looks," she explains, saying that if you saw the actual sex, "the mystery would be gone. You see a lot, but you don't have to see anything graphic."

The explicit content of the pages, which left little to the imagination, might not make it to the big screen completely, but the sounds might! One of the movie's producers, Michael De Luca, weighs in on the Vanity Fair interview and explains that some of the team blushed when they heard the film.

"It was a closed set, and so we couldn't be there for those very intimate scenes…but so much of the movie turns on those intimate scenes," he says. "We'd be in our trailers, but [the actors] were miked, and we had cans—you know, headphones—but I actually got shy from listening. There was something about not being there and having the audio that made us feel like peeping listeners, and so we all put them down."

Should we watch this movie with our eyes closed? Now we're starting to consider it. 

A year ago screenwriter Kelly Marcel promised fans and London's Sunday Times that the movie would be raunchy, so much so that it would probably get the XXX rating!

"We are 100 percent going there," she said. "It will be rated NC-17."

The S&M-teasing trailers certainly have been titillating, but the movie's star, Jamie Dornan already burst our bubbles when he said he wouldn't be going full-frontal. 

(E! Online and Universal Pictures are both members of the NBCUniversal family.)