Andrew Dominik, director of Blonde, on Netflix: "Marilyn is a little figurine lost in a hostile world!"

Screened at the Venice Film Festival, then in Deauville,

LE FIGARO.

- How did you go about revealing the dark side of Marilyn Monroe?

Andrew DOMINIK.

- I have wanted to adapt Joyce Carol Oates' book, which is a cobblestone of more than a thousand pages, for fifteen years.

Above all, I wanted to detail the drama of Marilyn's childhood.

Explore the origin of her personality, the fact of having been an unwanted child.

Marilyn was a little girl raised by a completely crazy mother, with a non-existent father.

This trauma will create in her the fierce desire

to permanently seduce, even if it means living in a kind of dream... or a waking nightmare.

Is that why you cut your heroine in two, on one side Norma Jeane, on the other Marilyn?

Yes.

To make up for being unwanted, Norma Jeane created an idealized self, dubbed "Marilyn Monroe."

This ideal self works like armor.

It is also his prison.

With

Exactly.

I conceived

as a puff of pain, a cry of rage.

But it is also an emotional experience.

My film follows the same impulse as Joyce Carol Oates' book.

He tries to understand and show this little figurine lost in a hostile world.

That's why I designed the film by borrowing the codes of horror cinema.

Do you think Norma Jeane created a monster of sensuality that eluded her, like Frankenstein's creature?

It's a good description of the Marilyn phenomenon.

Hidden child, she managed to become the most visible woman in the world so that we can find her!

I think Norma Jeane made Marilyn Monroe a shining beacon.

But the light she projected wasn't really her.

It was a fantasy.

Could Marilyn's impossible motherhood be the secret heart of the film?

Absolutely.

For Marilyn, the experience of motherhood comes down to a mother in ruins.

Marilyn is aware that her birth destroyed her mother.

On the one hand, she wants to become a mother.

On the other, she fears him.

This is what I show when she dialogues with these giant fetuses that seem to have come out of

.

Basically, I think the real bad guy is her mother.

As Gladys wished she were dead, there will always have been a part in Marilyn which will want to fulfill her mother's ambition.

This self-destructive will goes through an exacerbated sensuality, the affirmation of a free sexuality.

Marilyn was a sex symbol in an incredibly puritanical country...

How did you choose actress Ana de Armas for the role?

The first time I saw her was in the movie

in 2015. I was like,

When she arrived at the casting in her red dress, for me, it was clear: she was going to be able to embody Marilyn.

And I was lucky to find her.

When she appears on the screen, we only see her.

Ana has, like Marilyn, this beautiful sensual aura that would almost make the screen blush.

But she don't use it in

since the film is totally asexual.

Ana is a very funny person.

She was a precious ally during the shooting of this film which had to be completed in 45 days, which was very short!

It was difficult, but nothing seemed insurmountable to her.

From the first scene, where she had to explode with anger in front of her mother, Ana gave everything on the set.

She never went back down below that level of play!