Ana de Armas

Blonde director Andrew Dominik discusses the 14-year journey to get his Marilyn Monroe movie made and the many challenges along the way.

The advantage of Venice is that it’s close to the fall season. I was wary of her at first but I could see that the things she did made the movie better. It was incredibly lucky that there were these brief windows where the guy in charge at Fox and the guy in charge at MGM were sympathetic. The idea was to traffic in that. But that was the absolute cutoff. Ideas about that seem to change very quickly today and obviously if you’ve got a lot of money invested in something you want to err on the side of caution. There was a lot of noise about Netflix’s unease over the film’s darkness and some of the more disturbing scenes. You know, the film is very concerned with the type of acting that was fashionable at the time: things like using personal memories and experiences to help inhabit characters and how psychoanalysis cross-pollinates with acting to become method acting. Something that was different is the dialogue that goes on between her and the roles that she’s playing. I’m aware, for example, that in real life Marilyn Monroe was one of the people that broke the studio stranglehold over players under contract. I’ve read all the biographies of all the other people that were in her life too so I’m aware of what they think happened in most of the situations in her life. I had always wanted to do a story about childhood trauma and how that shapes an adult’s perception of the world; to make a film from within a person’s mythology.