Andrew Dominik had been making an attempt to make a film about Marilyn Monroe for over a decade.
The movie wouldn’t be a biopic, however an experiential portrait delving into the psyche of Marilyn Monroe and Norma Jeane. It stored falling aside, however the New Zealand native couldn’t let it go. Then he discovered Ana de Armas, and, he stated, the film got here alive.
“It was like love at first sight,” Dominik stated Thursday, earlier than the world premiere of the movie on the Venice Worldwide Movie Competition. “When the proper individual walks by way of the door, you realize it.”
The practically three-hour epic relies on a piece of biographical fiction by Joyce Carol Oates and examines the private and non-private lifetime of the Hollywood icon from her troubled childhood as Norma Jeane to her international stardom as Marilyn Monroe and varied relationships alongside the best way, from her mom (Julianne Nicholson) to her marriages to Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale) and Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody).
“I wasn’t very conscious of Marilyn. I used to be aware of a few of her motion pictures, however for me it was an enormous discovery and studying course of,” de Armas stated. “We wished to honor her within the recreations the place she was Marilyn, however I additionally had a variety of room to create the true lady beneath that character. It was about understanding and empathizing and connecting together with her and her ache and her trauma.”
She added: “In the event you put apart the film star she is, she’s only a lady, identical to me. Similar age. It was a challenge I knew I needed to let myself open and go to locations I knew have been going to be uncomfortable and darkish and weak.”
Filming started on Aug. 4, the day Monroe died in 1962 at her house in Los Angeles at age 36. It was an accident and simply the results of some delays. But it surely additionally was certainly one of many instances the filmmaker and his solid felt a considerably mystical connection to the topic of their movie. Although the story takes many liberties with the information of her life with the intent of attending to the reality of her life, the manufacturing did use actual areas just like the house she and her mom lived in when she was a baby and the home she died in.
“It took on components of being like a séance,” Dominik stated.
De Armas agreed that “there was one thing within the air” being in the identical locations Monroe had lived.
“I wasn’t in character on a regular basis. However I felt that. I used to be residing that. I felt that heaviness and that weight in my shoulders. And I felt that disappointment,” de Armas stated. “She was all I thought of. She was all I dreamed about. She was all I talked about… It was stunning. “
“Blonde” has been hotly anticipated for a while: For taking up a determine like Monroe in an experimental method, for its score, the primary ever NC-17 film that Netflix has made, a designation set by the Movement Image Affiliation that forbids these youthful than 17 from watching the movie within the theater. There’s additionally curiosity round de Armas’s efficiency. The Cuba-born actor labored with a dialect coach for a yr to arrange.
“Storytelling that’s as courageous as that is important,” her co-star Brody stated.
And for him, de Armas did extra than simply play the position. She channeled the individual.
“The primary day of filming, I went house with this sense of awe that I had the privilege of really working with Marilyn Monroe,” Brody stated. “It’s very uncommon that I can say that somebody transported me to a different time and place.”
For de Armas, it was concerning the problem.
“I did this film to push myself… to make different folks change their opinion about me,” she stated, by way of some tears. “This film modified my life.”
“Blonde” opens in choose theaters beginning Sept. 16 earlier than changing into out there on Netflix on Sept. 23. It’s certainly one of many Oscar hopefuls launching in Venice, the place additionally it is among the many movies up for the pageant’s awards on Saturday.
