Director James Foley is a man directing the last two films in the Fifty Shades trilogy, an erotic romance based on the novels embraced mainly by women.

The 64-year-old did not have to go around asking women what they wanted to see, especially in the sex scenes. They told him.

"Ever since people found out I was going to be doing it, I heard from every woman. Women driving taxis and Ubers told me," he tells The Straits Times on the telephone from Los Angeles.

He directed last year's Fifty Shades Darker. The closing chapter, Fifty Shades Freed, opens today.

"It was fascinating... I felt I was learning," he says of the range of opinions that came forth.

His sister-in-law, for example, told him she would never watch the movies, while others had a much more positive reaction to the books and films.

When Darker was released last year, he saw first-hand the intensity of the fan support during the film's opening.

"They waited hours and hours in the rain to get into the screening. That was a beautiful phenomenon," says Foley, who made his name directing videos for pop star Madonna (including the controversial and award-winning Papa Don't Preach video in 1986), before working on films such as the thriller Perfect Stranger (2007) and episodes of television shows, including the real estate drama Billions (2016).

But is there a difference between women and men in the way they want to see sex portrayed on screen? The director says that it is a "complicated" question.

Darker and Freed were filmed at the same time and the sex scenes were based on scenes described by E.L. James in her novels, he says.

"The book's descriptions made sense to me. It wasn't a case of, 'I don't understand what's going on, but I'll just shoot it.' I trusted that it would make sense from a feminine point of view because the concept and characters sprung from a feminine mind," he says.

Foley knows very well that Darker and Freed are mass-market products aimed at the more than 120 million who have bought the books and, as such, have been dismissed by critics who view it as mainstream smut.

The films have been the target of the Razzies, an award given to bad movies.

He says he took note of these reactions when the first film, Fifty Shades Of Grey, directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson, was released in 2015.

"It's funny because, going into it, I knew that no matter what I did, it was almost certain to be reviewed negatively. When Darker got the reaction I predicted, I didn't love it. Everyone wants to be liked," he says with a laugh.

"But this time around, I feel liberated because I know what's coming."

He remembers that when the books were released in the early 2010s, they elicited controversy because many were aghast at the idea of a woman who submits to a man's domination fantasies, while others took the book's popularity as proof that deep down, women yearned to be under the thumb of controlling men.

"The books were seen as bad and horrible and people were quite political about it," he says of the misunderstanding over what is really a story about a woman seeking empowerment.

"It's the opposite of being submissive to a male. By the end of the story, nobody is going to call her submissive."

• Fifty Shades Freed opens in Singapore today.