'Blonde' Director Says His Movie Didn't Exploit Marilyn Monroe: 'She's Dead'

Andrew Dominik has no regrets about creating one of many 12 months’s most polarizing movies.

Throughout an look at Saudi Arabia’s Purple Sea Worldwide Movie Competition over the weekend, the Australian filmmaker addressed the heated backlash that ensued following the autumn launch of “Blonde,” his Marilyn Monroe biopic.

Noting that American viewers had principally “hated” the movie, Dominik mentioned he was “actually happy” that the movie’s remedy of Monroe had “outraged so many individuals.”

“Now we’re dwelling in a time the place it’s necessary to current girls as empowered, they usually wish to reinvent Marilyn Monroe as an empowered girl,” he mentioned, based on The Hollywood Reporter. “That’s what they wish to see, and if you happen to’re not displaying them that, it upsets them.”

Primarily based on Joyce Carol Oates’ 2000 novel, “Blonde” has an NC-17 score and is, by accounts, a graphic interpretation of Monroe’s life, together with scenes of miscarriages, sexual assault and substance abuse.

Director Andrew Dominik (left) and actor Ana de Armas, who performs Marilyn Monroe in "Blonde."

Michael Buckner through Getty Pictures

Oates has described the ebook model of “Blonde” as a fictionalized retelling of Monroe’s life that shouldn't be learn as a biography. To viewers accustomed to extra celebratory biopics like “Bohemian Rhapsody,” nevertheless, Dominik’s movie adaptation felt gratuitous and woefully out-of-step. Although critics praised actor Ana de Armas’ portrayal of Monroe, the film as an entire was extensively panned.

“What’s lacking is any sense of what made Monroe extra than simply one other lovely girl in Hollywood: her genius,” The New York Instances wrote, whereas Leisure Weekly deemed the movie a “jumbled, misogynistic melodrama.”

Later in his Purple Sea Worldwide Movie Competition chat, nevertheless, Dominik famous that the final consensus amongst “conservative” U.S. audiences was that “Blonde” had “exploited” Monroe, who died in 1962.

“Which is form of unusual, as a result of she’s lifeless. The film doesn’t make any distinction in a technique or one other,” he mentioned. “What they actually imply is that the movie exploited their reminiscence of her, their picture of her, which is truthful sufficient. However that’s the entire concept of the film. It’s making an attempt to take the iconography of her life and put it into service of one thing else, it’s making an attempt to take issues that you just’re aware of, and turning the which means inside out.”

“However I don’t wish to make bedtime tales,” he added.