Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe in Blonde. Photo / Netflix
If we had the measure of every film from a two-minute trailer, a festival premiere like the one awaiting Blonde at the Venice Film Festival would hardly be worth the bother.
Beyond being the most avidly anticipated of this year's crop, Andrew Dominik's biopic of Marilyn Monroe is already, in news that Marilyn herself might have found mordantly familiar, the most backlashed, pigeonholed and pre-judged attraction. This is based on a teaser dubbed "vaguely exploitative-looking!" in some Twitter hot-takes, and featuring, to further consternation, the sporadic Cuban twang of Ana de Armas' vocal stylings.
You know who has absorbed the full 165-minute cut of Blonde, and has plenty to say about it? Andrew Dominik. The 54-year-old Aussie director – he of Chopper, two excellent uses of Brad Pitt, and two immensely affecting Nick Cave concert films – has been waiting far longer to make and release his film than any of us have to see it.
Based on Joyce Carol Oates's hefty 2000 novel of the same name, or rather, "something I saw inside the novel", as Dominik puts it, the film has been mired in difficulty since its conception. It was 14 years ago that Dominik first started trying to get it off the ground, and found it impossible, even with a succession of actors from Naomi Watts to Jessica Chastain ready to do it.
"The biggest objection, since 2008, was the portrayal of Kennedy," the writer-director tells me over Zoom. "When we went out with it again the next time, when #MeToo happened ... it was this sort of magical moment when you couldn't defend the behaviour of any men. Including, you know, John F Kennedy. "Maybe there was about a six month/one year window before the sacred cows became sacred again. But without that, I don't think Blonde would ever have been made."
The next speed-bump was Cannes, where a hoped-for premiere was thwarted by the French government's rules about theatrical release windows – the reason being that Netflix was unwilling to wait the statutory 15 months before putting it out. And so, to Venice instead – where Dominik's doleful western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford bowed in 2007.
There's also been a kerfuffle about Blonde's rating in the US. Uniquely for a Netflix title, it's been stamped with an NC-17 – traditionally, a box-office kiss of death – because of one particular sequence Dominik is reluctant to describe. This is not, in fact, the hellish rape scene by "Mr Z" – a stand-in for Darryl F Zanuck – that Oates put in her book, and which the film will include. It's a different one.
De Armas was less reluctant in a recent interview with Empire. Dominik "pushed back", she said, over the inclusion of such scenes as a vaginal POV shot and a conversation with a talking fetus.
"I don't think it deserves an NC-17, personally, so I have mixed feelings about it," the director muses. "An NC-17 is not a good thing for a film to have, in a business sense. There's limits to how you can advertise it in America, there's limits to putting things on billboards, and all that kind of stuff. So there's a lot of pressure not to have one, and if you can avoid having an NC-17 rating, you'll do anything."
The scene in question sounds pivotal, if gruelling, and he was loathe to lose its impact. "I really tried to get the rating down. I just couldn't do it, without destroying the film. Even if I could have harmed it by like 2 per cent, or 3 per cent or something, I would have done it, but I couldn't. I feel like the operation would have been a success, but the patient would have died. For who, some community of housewives? Or a bunch of men sitting in a room, worrying what the women in the room think of them.
"That said, I don't know if it makes so much difference for a streaming service. And I think the whole idea of an NC-17 is ridiculous, anyway. Most kids" – he makes this point semi-seriously, scoffing – "are watching hardcore pornography from the age of eight! So I don't know what community standards they think they're reflecting.
"America's weird. On the one hand you have Doja Cat, singing about [unrepeatable], and on the other hand you have this 1950s morality going on at streaming services, which bears no resemblance to anything. From Netflix's point of view, they want to be like Walt Disney – they want everybody to be watching their service, and I guess they have to cater to, you know, grandma and grandpa's morality."
He's agitated about where his film sits amid all this. "It's got nothing to do with community standards. It's just this particular zeitgeist moment we're in, where people think certain things are offensive, you know. Which they won't in five years, 10 years. And they didn't 10 years ago."
As part of the tussle with Netflix over the film's shape, Dominik found himself finishing post-production with a new editor, Jennifer Lame – well-known for her work on Noah Baumbach's films, and also Christopher Nolan's Tenet. "I didn't trust her until I saw what she was doing," he admits. "She wasn't interested in what Netflix wanted, which was making a more 'palatable' movie – she just saw a few areas that could be made better. So I decided, 'OK, I'm going to help her, and see what happens'. I think it made the first three reels a lot better."
Despite the tortured gestation, Blonde has wound up being a "very lucky" film, in Dominik's opinion – "Everything that's happened to it has been for the film's benefit." He speaks about it with the kind of pride that only comes from weathering hard knocks along the road.
The way he looks at it, "Blonde is a film for all the unloved children of the world. [Marilyn] was an unwanted child that became the most wanted woman in the world, and then could not deal with all the desire being projected at her.
"I guess the film, while being – if you like – the story of a private unconscious, also uses images that are in the collective unconscious, because her life was so photographed. If you Google-searched Marilyn Monroe, when you see the film, it's going to be like being inside that Google search. Except the meaning of everything has changed, according to how she felt."
The score, by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, he describes as "incredible", even by the high benchmark of their previous collaborations, dating back to Jesse James. When Dominik needed someone to play a barroom singer at the end of that film, Cave stepped up and offered to write the entire score on the spot, along with his regular right-hand man, Ellis.
"I didn't know how to say no," Dominik admits. "So I said yes. It wasn't even a decision – it was just my own social embarrassment, that turned into one of the great scores ever. Those guys are so f__king talented, and they make it look so easy."
Cave and Dominik had history. It was in 1986 that they were first introduced. "We met at the drug dealer's, as we tended to meet everyone in those days.
"We were in love with the same girl. He was my girlfriend Deanna's ex-boyfriend. He was, like, the prince of darkness, and I was an innocent little private school boy."
Cave wrote a song about Deanna and named it after her: a churning garage-rock confessional which came out on his 1988 album Tender Prey. "He would call up to speak to her," Dominik remembers, "and she wouldn't be there. And he and I would start chatting. We got along."
When Cave's 15-year-old son Arthur died in 2015, after experimenting with LSD in Brighton, in the UK, it was Dominik who explored the aftermath on film, in his 2016 doc One More Time with Feeling. That black-and-white portrait of loss, and of Cave's musical response to the bereavement in his album Skeleton Tree, was overwhelmingly sad, and an essential thing for his fans to see and understand.
The sequel that came to MUBI this summer, This Much I Know to Be True, is altogether more uplifting, even if it was brutally overshadowed in mid-May by the further death of Jethro Lazenby, Arthur's half-brother.
The project had sprung from Cave's inactivity during lockdown, his restless urge to keep making things. Both he and Dominik saw the opportunity for a companion piece that would talk about time and healing and ghosts.
Dominik talks about the sense of "a trauma integrated" – and how much the very concept of this would have offended the Cave he interviewed six years ago. "Arthur's death was so fresh, the idea that you could recover from it in some way would have been offensive to him. But he has completely integrated the loss. And Nick, for the most part, is a happy guy."
• Blonde premieres at the Venice Film Festival before streaming globally on Netflix from September 28.
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