Filmmaker Andrew Dominik has spoken about the vocal backlash his Marilyn Monroe biopic “Blonde” received earlier this Fall.
The movie became controversial right from its world premiere in Venice all the way through its Netflix release, with much of the criticism levelled at the amount of sexual violence and how it gave Monroe essentially no agency – she’s entirely a victim from start to finish.
Speaking at the Red Sea International Film Festival in Saudi Arabia, Dominik says U.S. audiences had the strongest adverse reaction to the film, saying “they hated the movie” and expected biopics about iconic Americans to only be celebrations:
“Now we’re living in a time where it’s important to present women as empowered, and they want to reinvent Marilyn Monroe as an empowered woman. That’s what they want to see, and if you’re not showing them that, it upsets them.”
He also responded to accusations that he was exploiting Monroe to make his film:
“Which is kind of strange, because she’s dead. The movie doesn’t make any difference in one way or another. What they really mean is that the film exploited their memory of her, their image of her, which is fair enough.
But that’s the whole idea of the movie. It’s trying to take the iconography of her life and put it into service of something else, it’s trying to take things that you’re familiar with, and turning the meaning inside out. But that’s what they don’t want to see.”
Despite the backlash, Dominik says “tens of millions of people” watched the film on Netflix and he was “really pleased” the film “outraged so many people” as he says part of being a filmmaker is to offend the audience: “[it’s] a solemn duty, to wrench them out of a complacency about things.”
He adds that American films are getting ‘more conservative’ and akin to a bedtime story, adding “I don’t want to make bedtime stories.”
Source: THR
