Andrew Dominick, the director of the controversial Marilyn Monroe biopic Blonde, spoke about the film’s backlash. (Photo: Sylvain Lefevre/WireImage)
Andrew Dominik, the director of the controversial Marilyn Monroe biopic Blonde, opens up about the backlash against the Netflix film.
During an appearance at the Red Sea International Film Festival in Saudi Arabia, Dominik announced that American audiences “hated the film” starring Ana de Armas. The Australian director claimed this was because the public was keen to see Monroe appear “empowered” on screen.
“Now we live in a time where it’s important to portray women as confident, and they want to reinvent Marilyn Monroe as a confident woman. That’s what they want to see,” Dominik said of the beloved movie star, according to . “And if you don’t show them that, it annoys them.”
Dominik went on to say that those who criticized the film, which is based on Joyce Carol Oates’ 2000 novel of the same name, must have felt that it exploited their memories of the actress, who died in 1962 at the age of 36 died of a drug overdose.
“Which is kind of weird because she’s dead. The film doesn’t make a difference one way or the other,” said Dominik. “What they really mean is that the film exploited her memory of her, her image of her, which is fair enough. But that’s the whole idea of the film. It tries to take the iconography of your life and repurpose it for something else, it tries to take things you’re familiar with and flip the meaning inside out. But they don’t want to see that.”
Despite the negative feedback, Dominik clarified that he was actually “very pleased” that the film “outraged so many people” because he felt it was the artist’s responsibility to elicit passionate responses through their work. He wrote this into adulthood in the 1980s, when it was “a solemn duty to offend your audience, to rouse them from their complacency.”
Dominik, who claimed “tens of millions of people” saw the film on Netflix, concluded by stating that he believes American film is becoming “more conservative.” He compared the current state of cinema to bedtime stories and explained that people want a story with a predictable ending.
The story goes on
“I don’t want to do bedtime stories,” he concluded.
Blonde has generated significant controversy over his NC-17 rating and his handling of rape, abortion, and miscarriage. Back in October, model and author Emily Ratajkowski credited the film in a TikTok post, saying it was responsible for “fetishizing female pain,” Yahoo Entertainment previously reported.
“So I’ve heard a lot about this Marilyn Monroe film ‘Blonde’ that I haven’t seen, but I’m not surprised to hear that it’s another film that fetishizes female pain, even in death,” explained Ratajkowski the camera. “We love to fetishize female pain. Check out Amy Winehouse. Check out Britney Spears. Check out how obsessed we are with it [Princess] Diana’s death. Look how obsessed we are with dead girls and serial killers. Watch any CSI episode and it’s this crazy fetishization of female pain and death.”