SHE’S THE MOST COMPLEX, TALKED-ABOUT, SPECTACULAR ICON OF OUR TIME. AND NOW MARILYN MONROE HAS THE FILM TO MATCH. STAR ANA DE ARMAS AND DIRECTOR ANDREW DOMINIK REVEAL HOW THEY RAMPED UP THEIR AMBITION FOR THE EXPLOSIVE BLONDE

WORDS HELEN O’HARA

Recreating Marilyn Monroe’s iconic ‘Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend’ scene from 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes;

FOR MORE THAN A DECADE, Andrew Dominik kept having ideas about Blonde. It was, frankly, inconvenient. He had first written the script for his adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ sprawling 2000 novel of the same name, an examination of celebrity, trauma and self-invention told through the story of Marilyn Monroe, in 2008. But fresh additions and tweaks occurred to him regularly.

“The book will take a chapter of her life and it’s like a broken mirror; there are these shards,” says Dominik. “The thing I liked about the book was the opportunity within it to detail the childhood drama and some mistaken ideas that she inherits from her mother, and then to show an adult life through the lens of those ideas. It’s this whirlwind of anxiety, trying to pull fragments and make meaning out of them. I wanted the film to keep that feeling that the past is always there. She’s never escaped it.”

Monroe’s life was almost too dramatic: she fought her way from an impoverished childhood, much of it in foster homes, past predators and studio hostility to Hollywood stardom and fame as one of the world’s great beauties, a platinum-blonde idol. But failed marriages and health problems that saw her popping pills led to her early death at 36, cementing a legend that became myth. All of which Dominik’s adaptation covers. But when it came to actually making the film, no-one would fund it. There was almost a Naomi Watts incarnation in 2011, but that came to nothing; another attempt with Jessica Chastain in 2014 failed to reach production. And while the money men baulked, still Dominik dreamed up new ideas, new moments, new visions.

“It’s the film I most wanted to make, of all of them,” says Dominik, who made his name with Chopper and The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, films which also focus on self-created, larger-than-life personalities. “And it broke my heart so many times. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it.”

One hold-up was the uncompromising way that he wanted to shoot it. There would be black-and-white and colour, changing aspect ratios, locked camera and handheld and even body cameras, swaying with the character wearing them. There would be shots of Monroe’s womb and conversations held with a foetus; even be a nightmarish vagina POV shot. This would not be another movie-star biopic; it would be a film examining the American Dream, the mythologies we all carry, life itself.