Blonde’s first trailer, Netflix’s controversial Marilyn Monroe biopic, has been released.
Directed by Andrew Dominik, best known for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, the film stars Ana de Armas as the tragic star and is based on the eponymous novel by Joyce Carol Oates, which be a Pulitzer Prize finalist.
“There’s something to offend everyone,” Dominik said of the film, which has earned a rare NC-17 rating for films with very graphic content, with previous examples such as Showgirls and A Serbian Film. “If the public doesn’t like it, that’s the public’s fucking problem. He is not running for public office. “
New Zealand-born Dominik, whose films also include Chopper and Nick Cave’s recent documentary This Much I Know to Be True, has expressed surprise at the rating. “It’s not like depictions of happy sexuality,” he said in May. “They’re representations of situations that are ambiguous. And Americans are really weird when it comes to sexual behavior, don’t you think? I don’t know why. They do more porn than anyone in the world.”
Dominik called it the story of “how a child’s trauma shapes an adult divided between a public self and a private self.”
When she shared her thoughts on a rough cut of the film, which is said to include a rape scene, Oates tweeted that it was “amazing, bright, very disturbing and perhaps most surprisingly a totally ‘feminist’ interpretation.” .
Dominik stressed that, like Oates’ novel, the film is a work of fiction but “wonders why he committed suicide, so of course it will be disturbing” while comparing it to Citizen Kane and Raging. Bull.
The role was to be played by Naomi Watts when the project began to develop in 2010 before Jessica Chastain took over and, finally, de Armas was elected. De Armas, whose other films include Knives Out and No Time to Die, has called it “the most intense work” he has ever done. The Cuban actor spoke about the difficulty of perfecting the accent with more than nine months of dialect training. “I won’t let anyone or anything tell me I can’t dream of playing Marilyn Monroe,” she said.
The film also stars Adrien Brody as Arthur Miller, Bobby Cannavale as Joe DiMaggio and Julianne Nicholson as Gladys Pearl Baker.
Blonde is rumored to be part of the lineup for this August’s Venice Film Festival, a tried and tested launch pad for many of Oscar’s high hopes. It will be released on Netflix on September 23rd.