Now that Blonde has finally come out, it may be easy for some to forget that Andrew Dominik has been trying to get this movie made for some 15 years after he read Joyce Carol Oates’ novel of the same name. As Dominik started receiving praise for his 2007 feature film debut, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, he also began thinking about what his next project could be. “I was interested in making something that didn’t have a gun in it,” he recalls in an interview with Tudum. “I saw a story to tell about how a traumatic childhood origin becomes the lens through which the adult sees their life.”
Dominik worked very quickly on a Blonde screenplay. “I remember being in a very exciting place when I was writing the screenplay. I think I did it in about four weeks or something like that,” he says. The movie was slated to go into production as early as 2011 with very different actors and a different script before Dominik was sidelined by other projects including his 2013 film Killing Them Softly, his second collaboration with Pitt. “There were various versions of Blonde that would come together and fall apart, and come together and fall apart, and then it became one of those kind of stale projects that’s been around for a while that nobody wanted to make,” he remembers. “And then [producers] Brad and Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner got involved. And there were a couple of versions with them that sort of nearly got to the starting line but then fell apart.”
So what was the ultimate thing that got this project over the line? Ironically enough, it was a then relatively unknown Cuban actor, Ana de Armas, who brought everyone there — very fitting for a project about the singular and undefinable power of a star. “Ana has a certain luminance and an emotional forcefield around her that she can generate a feeling that’s compelling. Whatever’s going on with Ana is what’s going on. And I think that’s something similar to what Marilyn had. It’s a certain quality that a person has. I’m not sure that movie stars are made. I think they’re born.”
Dominik had seen de Armas in the 2015 Eli Roth erotic thriller Knock Knock, and he spent months trying to connect with her through her agent to see if she might meet with him to discuss his long-gestating Marilyn project. “I think I’d given up on Blonde by the time that I actually met Ana. It was really a Hail Mary, and I had a meeting with her and we decided, ‘OK, we’ll read a scene and see how it goes.’ And we did the scene, and it was like, ‘Wow, OK, this could work.’ ”
In the intervening time, de Armas broke out with roles in Blade Runner 2049 and Knives Out, and she auditioned once more for producers using a scene in the film in which Marilyn quietly seduces Joe DiMaggio on their first date. “There’s usually a kind of superstition that you don’t like to do an important scene in the audition because if the actor nails it in the audition then often the scene just dies when you shoot it for real. It’s like you’ve used up the emotional energy of that scene. But that didn’t happen with this. She was so good that it was even better when we shot it. And that’s unusual, that really is,” Dominik remembers.
But de Armas’ audition was nothing compared to her first screen test. She’d spent a year with a dialect coach to get the icon’s unmistakable voice just right, and when she teamed up with Blonde’s hair and makeup and costume departments, Dominik and his producers knew they had their Marilyn.
“We got a screen test where she came out wearing a version of the Seven Year Itch dress, and it was just, like, wow,” Dominik says. “I knew Ana looked like her. I knew Ana’s face, and there were a lot of similarities — she had the little jowly sort of thing around her mouth that Marilyn had, and the eyes were pretty good, and the nose was good. And when she smiled, I sort of thought that she was going to look like her. But once the makeup was done and the wig was on, it was incredible. It was way better than I was expecting. It was seeing a fantasy come to life, a fantasy I’ve been carrying around for a decade.”
After supporting actors, including Bobby Cannavale as DiMaggio, Adrien Brody as Arthur Miller and Julianne Nicholson as Marilyn’s mother fell into place, Blonde finally went into production in Los Angeles in August 2019 and concluded the following summer before it premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Sept. 16, 2022, where it received an 11-minute standing ovation. In a press conference following the screening, de Armas said, “She was all I thought about, she was all I dreamed about, she was all I could talk about. She was with me and it was beautiful. I think she was happy.” Or as Dominik said of the 15-year process of making the film, “Some things just have a kind of emotional creative energy to them. Some projects you get involved in and they can hold your attention for a year or two, but Blonde would never let me go.”
