For the past four years, the Fifty Shades of Grey film franchise has made Valentine’s Day a bit kinkier and brought eroticism into the mainstream, with some high-profile musicians helping to set the mood.
As much as main characters Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey’s love affair has steamed up the silver screen (the series’ final installment, Freed, topped the domestic box office with a $38.8 million debut last weekend), some of the movies’ A-list musical performances have been just as head-turning and career-defining. Among the hits that the franchise has produced are The Weeknd‘s “Earned It” (Fifty Shades of Grey), which peaked at No. 3 on the Hot 100 in 2015; Taylor Swift and Zayn Malik‘s “I Don’t Want to Live Forever” (Fifty Shades Darker), which hit No. 2 on the Hot 100 in 2017; and, most recently, Liam Payne and Rita Ora‘s “For You” (Fifty Shades Freed), which has so far reached No. 82 on the Hot 100 this year. Meanwhile, on the Billboard 200 albums chart, the Fifty Shades of Grey soundtrack peaked at No. 2, the Darker soundtrack hit No. 1 and the Freed soundtrack will debut on the chart this Sunday.
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Throughout, music supervisor Dana Sano has been at the helm of the film’s soundtracks, working closely with directors Sam Taylor-Johnson (Fifty Shades of Grey) and James Foley (Fifty Shades Darker, Fifty Shades Freed), as well as Universal Pictures’ film music president and senior vice president Mike Knobloch and Rachel Levy, respectively, creating what Sano calls a “tight knit film-music family.” From the outset, the group’s approach to the Fifty Shades franchise was to create a “music-centric” trilogy, says Sano, explaining she and Taylor-Johnson had a pinky promise on the first film that they “weren’t going to allow cheesy music.” She adds, “We really wanted to aim high and raise the bar.”
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Since music was part of the conversation early on in the series, Sano and her team regularly welcomed musicians and songwriters such as The Weeknd, Max Martin and others into the cutting rooms to watch the editing process take place so they could write to the actual material rather than prompts (film was not allowed to be sent out). Likewise, by allotting extra time and budget for the music, they were able to “seamlessly build music into the films,” as Sano puts it, working with song stems and instrumentals to weave tracks in and out of composer Danny Elfman‘s score.
By the time Darker and Freed were in production, the success of the first film and its soundtrack brought more musicians to the franchise and, from there, Sano says they let the narratives dictate what direction the music would go. That just so happened to include some of the biggest male-female duets of the past few years.
“Because [the series] is about a relationship, in thinking about something like ‘I Don’t Want to Live Forever,’ or the latest film with ‘For You,’ it’s about, ‘How do we represent the relationship of these two people and also eventize a song?'” she says. “If you have a song where it is eventized with two artists vs. one and if it comes together organically, then it’s a win.”
Sano — who joined Republic Records last year in a newly-created role as executive vp, film & television — says they also had to consider the Fifty Shades franchise’s multi-generational audience when casting artists for the soundtracks. (“What would women in their 40s want to listen to, as well as teenagers and girls in their 20s?”) Another challenge: how she and the music team might keep from repeating themselves throughout the series.
“With each film it gets more difficult, because you start running out of artists and it’s trickier because of what’s happening in the stories,” she says. “That’s something that, if you look back, I don’t think any other group of people could have prevailed in that way. They just really stepped up every single time. We were really conscientious of trying from beginning to end to make the music great. And hopefully it will be timeless, classy and appeal to a lot of generations.”
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