Andrew Dominik sat down for a wide-ranging interview with French producer Ronald Chammah at the Marrakech Film Festival, where the filmmaker discussed the long process of making “Blonde,” how Brad Pitt rescues him from “director jail” and what he wants to make next.
Dominik started by answering several questions about his 2022 Marilyn Monroe biopic starring Ana de Armas, saying he sought out to make a film about “how childhood trauma shapes an adult life,” which turned into an exploration of the “myth” of the blonde bombshell. The film captured the more tragic and extreme aspects of Monroe’s life, and it opened to mixed reviews.
The Aussie director said “I don’t understand” why some people didn’t take to the film, and he was “surprised by the reaction.” “It’s kind of a horror film, and I guess that’s what people didn’t expect,” he said. “But I like it.”
Dominik first began adapting the Joyce Carol Oates book “Blonde” in 2008 and didn’t roll cameras until more than a decade later. He said “there were a few actresses involved in ‘Blonde’ before Ana [de Armas]” — among them, Naomi Watts and Jessica Chastain — but the film stalled because Dominik failed to obtain funding until Netflix boarded the project in 2016. Dominik said he became “obsessed” with how Monroe looked, and it wasn’t until he saw de Armas in the crime thriller “Knock Knock” that he knew he had found the right actor for the part.
“She had a heavy Latino accent, but her face … she had these little jowls here and the wide-set eyes and the nose. I thought, ‘That girl could be Marilyn,’” Dominik said. He added that de Armas was “very worried about her accent,” but “she was amazing.” “There’s a certain magic to her,” he said.
Later in the conversation, Dominik was asked about how he discovers new talent. “You would always cast unknown actors if you could, right? It’s so great when you see a movie and you don’t know any of the actors, because you just accept them as the characters,” he said, qualifying that stars like Brad Pitt and de Armas can also bring a helpful, larger-than-life association to a protagonist.
“The reality of making films is, until you have an actor that is bankable, nobody’s going to pay for that movie,” Dominik said. “It’s not like you have a choice. Often you have to miscast a movie to get it made.”
He explained that casting is the reason so many films are “stillborn” for years. “‘Blonde’ did not come to life until Ana de Armas came along. Because when you saw a little screen test of her as Marilyn, you could see the whole film,” he said.
Dominik was also asked about his relationship with Pitt, who starred in his “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” and “Killing Them Softly,” as well as produced “Blonde.”
“Brad is the reason I’ve worked,” Dominik said. “It’s like, I make a film and then they put me in director jail. And then Brad comes down to the parole board and says, ‘Look, he’s learned his lesson. He’s going to make something a bit more user-friendly this time.’” The filmmaker added of Pitt, “He protects me … I’m really lucky to have a friendship like that.”
Looking ahead to his next project, Dominik said he’s interested in “two completely different things.” “One is, I’d like to make a religious film or a spiritual film, and the other is I’m completely fascinated by AI as a generative visual tool and what could be done with that. That has no limits to it. … One is a very raw film that’s not even in focus, and the other one is something completely stylized that cannibalizes other images.”
