Everything we know about Andrew Dominik’s Blonde
Nine years after his last feature film and five since his last documentary Andrew Dominik’s Blonde, produced by Brad Pitt’s Plan B production company, is expected to land on Netflix in 2021.
The film has long been in the pipeline with both Naomi Watts and Jessica Chastain attached to the main role of Norma Jeane (a thinly-veiled Marilyn Monroe) before Knives Out star Ana de Armas was cast.
The actress told Vanity Fair:
“I only had to audition for Marilyn once and Andrew said ‘It’s you,’ but I had to audition for everyone else.
“The producers. The money people. I always have people I needed to convince. But I knew I could do it. Playing Marilyn was groundbreaking. A Cuban playing Marilyn Monroe. I wanted it so badly. You see that famous photo of her and she is smiling in the moment, but that’s just a slice of what she was really going through at the time.”
Blonde is eagerly awaited by film fans due to Dominik’s outstanding output thus far (Chopper, The Assassination of Jesse James, Killing Them Softly) and in the past Dominik has been fairly boastful about his hopes for the adaptation.
Speaking to Collider he said: “I think that Blonde will be one of the ten best movies ever made. That’s why I want to do it.”
When asked to expand on that he said:
“It’s a film about the human condition. It tells the story of how a childhood trauma shapes an adult who’s split between a public and a private self. It’s basically the story of every human being, but it’s using a certain sense of association that we have with something very familiar, just through media exposure.
“It takes all of those things and turns the meanings of them inside out, according to how she feels, which is basically how we live. It’s how we all operate in the world. It just seems to me to be very resonant. I think the project has got a lot of really exciting possibilities, in terms of what can be done, cinematically.”
Speaking to PopMatters Dominik was asked if he would be writing/directing in the same way as his previous movies due to Blonde being female-centric. He replied:
“Blonde is really concerned with pregnancy and being violated, so I guess I have to imagine those things because I don’t have a vagina. But other than that as far as how she might feel or whatever, I feel like people have the same feelings whether they’re male or female.”
And speaking to ThePlaylist in November 2012, while in the press rounds for Killing Them Softly he said: “It’s about her whole life. It starts when she’s seven and it ends when she dies.”
“It’s sort of a Polanksi descent-into-madness-type movie. It’s about this orphan girl who gets lost in the woods.”
Joyce Carol Oates, author of Blonde which the film is based on, has seen a rough cut of the film.
She wrote on Twitter:
“I have seen the rough cut of Andrew Dominick’s [sic] adaptation and it is startling, brilliant, very disturbing and perhaps most surprisingly an utterly ‘feminist’ interpretation.
“Not sure that any male director has ever achieved anything [like] this.”
Blonde will also star Adrien Brody as Arthur Miller, Bobby Cannavale as Joe DiMaggio and Dominik film alumni Garret Dillahunt and Scoot McNairy have also picked up unknown roles.
Very little is known about Blonde in terms of release plans (there are some social media reports that indicate a 2nd half of 2021 release).
There has been no promotional images put out by Netflix (never mind a trailer) and although shooting wrapped before the pandemic in May of this year it was announced the release had been put back to 2021.
Dominik struggles in the editing suite on The Assassination of Jesse James are well known. Filming wrapped in 2005 but Warner Bros balked at the initial cut which did not feature enough action and was instead a meditative look at fame, infamy and the perils of hero worship.
Even Ridley Scott was roped in to try and deliver a product that was palatable to the studio but in the end Dominik got his way and the final 160 minute film was given a pitiful release by the irked studio (but earned critical acclaim nonetheless).
There has been no such rumours with Blonde. But so far Netflix are playing their cards very close to their chest.
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