Ana de Armas' take on Marilyn Monroe in Blonde is one of the year's most highly anticipated performances but the film's director has said that the biopic is based on fiction.
Andrew Dominik is helming the ambitious Netflix project, which is an adaptation of a book about one of Hollywood's most enduring icons but the Australian director has explained that he is "not interested in reality" but is "interested in the images."
Blonde is based on Joyce Carol Oates' 2000 novel of the same name and both the book and the movie contain fictionalized versions of events from Monroe's life.
"The book is like a shattered mirror—there are all these little shards and it circles around, returning to certain memories," Dominik said in an interview with the British Film Institute.
"It's the feeling of being inside somebody's anxious thought process."
The filmmaker—whose other directorial credits include The Assassination of Jesse James and Chopper—went on to say that basing his film on Oates' novel meant he had to "play fast and loose with the truth in order to have a certain narrative drive."
"Joyce is trying to understand how it expresses a certain female experience, or a certain human experience," he explained.
Dominik confirmed that in the film, Monroe's inner thoughts are portrayed on screen, and they of course are fictional.
"There are a lot of psychological processes that are dramatized in Blonde, a lot of Lacanian and Freudian ideas," he said, adding that no one can ever really know how Monroe felt about things.
"For me it was just the scenes I found compelling. I went with my instinct and wrote it pretty quick. And I didn't change it that much, even though it was sitting around for 14 years.
"I know the ways in which this is different from what people seem to agree happened. Not that everyone's sure. Nobody really knows what the f*** happened. So it's all fiction anyway, in my opinion."
The movie has now been given a release date of Friday, September 28, after nearly a decade of the project being stuck in development hell.
Ana de Armas leads a cast that also includes Adrien Brody, Bobby Cannavale and Julianne Nicholson.
Previously actors such as Jessica Chastain and Naomi Watts had been linked with playing the movie icon.
Earlier in 2022 de Armas revealed that she studied Oates' book in preparation for the role.
"I read Joyce's novel, studied hundreds of photographs, videos, audio recordings, films—anything I could get my hands on," de Armas told Netflix Queue.
"Every scene is inspired by an existing photograph. We'd pore over every detail in the photo and debate what was happening in it," she said. "The first question was always, 'What was Norma Jeane feeling here?' We wanted to tell the human side of her story."
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
