Venice 2022, Dominik: “In Blonde Marilyn’s Rescue Fantasy”

(Adnkronos / Cinematografo.it) – “We were chasing his ghost … His dust is everywhere in Los Angeles. We filmed in his house, we felt the grief, and when I lay down on his bed I meant absolute desperation. “Word of director Andrew Dominik, who brings the long-awaited biopic of Marilyn Monroe. To incarnate her the Cuban Ana de Armas, protagonist of a metamorphosis, obviously, not only physical: “I really believe that Marilyn was very close to us, she was with us … She was everything I thought about, she was everything that I dreamed of, it was all I could talk about. He was with me and it was beautiful. I think he was happy. “Based on Joyce Carol Oates’ novel of the same name (2000), which Dominik never met, Blonde had a very long gestation and then a complicated process, with filming started on 4 August 2019. Dominik defines book and film as “a rescue fantasy”, underlines how “women try sisterhood for Monroe”, in his opinion “the goddess of American love of the twentieth century. ”On the sc hermo, reimagined, the life of Marilyn / Norma Jeane, focusing on the gap between public and private of the Hollywood icon, investigated between films, such as Some Like It Hot, family members, that is the problematic mother (Julianne Nicholson) and the absent father, and couple relations, with Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale), Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody) and John Kennedy, to whom the diva practices oral sex while the US president is on the phone: “I had to understand, empathize and connect – observes De Armas – with his pain and his trauma … I knew I had to open up and go to places I knew would be uncomfortable, dark and vulnerable. That’s where I found the bond with Marilyn. “” The MeToo would have helped her, but it wasn’t there, “adds Dominik, who traces the identikit of the icon:” Beautiful, famous, with an excellent job and the most cool: everything you would like to be, but also vulnerable “and pronounces on his end:” An accident, an overdose, which is a form of suicide, I don’t believe in murder. Being an object of desire can be dangerous, many have been destroyed. Because your fame lies in the imagination, in the unconscious of people “. Marilyn, continues the director, is” the woman I carry inside “and Blonde, who in the US will also be released in theaters avieted to minors under seventeen,” a fiction from his point of view: he doesn’t care about the other characters, the relationship is between Marilyn and the viewer “. that exist, therefore black and white color depends on the momentum “. Then, he praises Brad Pitt, here only producer but in the past also interpreter for Dominik, for example in The assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford, presented in Venice in 2007 and earned Pitt the Volpi Cup: best friend a director could have, the ultimate reason Blonde exists. Brad has put more here than in my films he’s acting in. ”Chosen by Dominik to replace Naomi Watts after seeing her in Eli Roth’s Knock Knock (2015):“ At the audition it was a bit like love at first sight: the film came to life when we found it. He looks a lot like us: nose, eyes, smile “, De Armas concludes:” I didn’t make Blonde for other people to change their opinions about me. Whatever happens, it’s the experience I bring with me. This film changed my life, now it will be what it will be “.