Since helming one of the best films of the last decade in “The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford,” adopted-Australian auteur Andrew Dominik has pretty much been in hiding with next to no news of his happenings other than a gestating adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s “Cities Of The Plain” which has been kicking around for quite some time.
We were beginning to grow restless at the prospect of another seven year hiatus for the director, the gap between his Eric Bana-breakout film “Chopper” and ‘Jesse James.’ Color us shocked and overjoyed then with news now that Dominik is set to return with a quasi-biopic of actress-singer-model and all round icon Marilyn Monroe, with fellow Australian Naomi Watts attached to star.
The film was adapted for the screen by Dominik from Joyce Carol Oates’ imaginary Monroe memoirs,”Blonde,” and looks set to be in same vein as his two previous films in being semi-biographical or dramatized versions of real-life characters and events. It’s not known when the script was completed by the writer-director but it only came our attention late last year when it reportedly “hit a snag” due to the fact Dominik wrote it on spec before any life rights had been acquired from the Monroe estates.
Could it have been the involvement of Watts that steered the project in the right direction? The actress is a talented thespian who, more importantly, also has the on-screen appearance and presence that harks back to the days of glamorous blonde bombshells in the middle of the last century. It’s a notion not lost on Hollywood either who has cast her as that very archetype in Peter Jackson’s “King Kong” and the gestating remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds.”
The fact he wrote it on spec clearly illustrates Dominik’s passion for “Blonde,” something he took to discussing in greater in detail. “Why is Marilyn Monroe the great female icon of the 20th Century?” the director asks. “For men she is an object of sexual desire that is desperately in need of rescue. For women, she embodies all the injustices visited upon the feminine, a sister, a Cinderella, consigned to live among the ashes.”
“I want to tell the story of Norma Jean as a central figure in a fairytale; an orphan child lost in the woods of Hollywood, being consumed by that great icon of the twentieth century.”
International sales of “Blonde” are currently being taken care of at Cannes by Wild Bunch with representative Vincent Maraval expressing the company’s enthusiasm for the Dominik-Watts collaboration, adding that it “will not be a classic [biopic] but a modern ‘Raging Bull’ which will explore one of the most iconic figures of this century.”
Production on “Blonde” will begin next January on a $20 million dollar budget in what seems destined for a fall release and a 2011 award season tilt.
