![Andrew Dominik Says Brad Pitt Saved Him From “Director Jail,” & His Polarizing Marilyn Monroe Portrait [Marrakech]](https://cdn.theplaylist.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/05153248/Conversation-Andrew-Dominik-12_04_%C2%A9Z.latouri_FIFM2025-3236.jpg "Andrew Dominik Says Brad Pitt Saved Him From “Director Jail,” & His Polarizing Marilyn Monroe Portrait [Marrakech]")
Andrew Dominik arrived at the Marrakech International Film Festival this week, unburdened by promotional duties and free to speak candidly about a career marked by critical acclaim and commercial challenges in equal measure.
The Australian director, whose 2022 Marilyn Monroe biopic “Blonde” became one of the most divisive films of recent years, sat down for an In Conversation that covered everything from the peculiar economics of auteur filmmaking to his musings on potential future projects involving spirituality or artificial intelligence.
The 58-year-old filmmaker has established a reputation for uncompromising visions that rarely adhere to Hollywood’s rules. His theatrical features include “Chopper,” “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” “Killing Them Softly,” and “Blonde.”
Beyond his narrative features, Dominik has also directed documentaries about his longtime friend and collaborator, Nick Cave, including “One More Time with Feeling” in 2016, which chronicled Cave’s grief following the death of his son, and “This Much I Know to Be True” in 2022. He also helmed “Bono: Stories of Surrender” for Apple TV+ in 2025, and directed two episodes of David Fincher’s Netflix series “Mindhunter” in 2019.
His films have earned him devoted admirers while leaving financiers perpetually nervous about his next move. It’s a pattern Dominik described with characteristically dark humor at the festival.
“Brad is the reason I’ve worked,” Dominik acknowledged, referring to his longtime collaborator Brad Pitt. “It’s like, I make a film, and then they put me in director jail. And then Brad comes down to the parole board and says, ‘Look, he’s learned his lesson. He’s going to make something a bit more user-friendly this time.’” He added with evident appreciation, “He protects me. I’m really lucky to have a friendship like that.”
That friendship began when Pitt became enamored with Dominik’s brutal 2000 debut “Chopper,” about Australian criminal Mark “Chopper” Read. The actor’s enthusiasm led to their first collaboration on “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” a contemplative 2007 Western that Warner Bros. struggled to market but which has since been recognized as a masterpiece of the genre. Pitt’s involvement wasn’t just artistic—his participation as both star and producer helped Dominik secure financing that would have been impossible otherwise.
They reunited for 2012’s “Killing Them Softly,” a crime thriller that competed at Cannes, and Pitt later served as producer on “Blonde,” the Netflix-released Monroe portrait that earned Ana de Armas an Academy Award nomination while becoming one of 2022’s most hotly debated films. For Dominik, the polarized response remains puzzling.
“I don’t understand why some people didn’t take to the film, he confessed at Marrakech. “I was surprised by the reaction. It’s kind of a horror film, and I guess that’s what people didn’t expect. But I like it.”
The director conceived “Blonde” as an exploration of “how childhood trauma shapes an adult life,” which evolved into an unflinching examination of the mythology surrounding Monroe. His adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’s novel captured the actress’s suffering in graphic detail, earning an NC-17 rating and accusations from some critics of exploiting rather than honoring its subject. Yet Dominik maintains the work represents exactly what he set out to achieve.
The road to completing “Blonde” exemplified the challenges facing directors with distinctive visions. Dominik first began adapting the Oates book in 2008, but the project stalled repeatedly as he searched for the right actress and financial backing. “There were a few actresses involved in ‘Blonde’ before Ana [de Armas],” he noted—including Naomi Watts and Jessica Chastain—but financing remained elusive until Netflix committed in 2016.
His discovery of de Armas came through an unlikely source: the 2015 crime thriller “Knock Knock.” Despite the Cuban actress’s heavy accent, Dominik saw Monroe immediately. “She had a heavy Latino accent, but her face … she had these little jowls here and the wide-set eyes and the nose. I thought, ‘That girl could be Marilyn,’” he recalled. De Armas worried about her accent, “but she was amazing. There’s a certain magic to her.”
The conversation turned to broader questions about casting in contemporary cinema, where Dominik articulated frustrations familiar to many auteur filmmakers. “You would always cast unknown actors if you could, right?” he observed. “It’s so great when you see a movie, and you don’t know any of the actors, because you just accept them as the characters.” He acknowledged that stars like Pitt and de Armas can bring valuable associations to roles, but the fundamental problem remains unchanged.
“The reality of making films is, until you have an actor that is bankable, nobody’s going to pay for that movie,” Dominik stated bluntly. “It’s not like you have a choice. Often you have to miscast a movie to get it made.”
This dynamic explains why so many of Dominik’s passion projects have remained unrealized. Over the years, he’s seen adaptations of Alfred Bester’s “The Demolished Man,” Cormac McCarthy’s “Cities of the Plain,” and multiple Jim Thompson novels disappear into what he calls “director jail”—the limbo where uncommercial filmmakers wait between projects, hoping the right star or financial arrangement will materialize.
The casting challenge directly affected “Blonde,” which Dominik characterized as remaining “stillborn” for years. “It did not come to life until Ana de Armas came along,” he explained. “Because when you saw a little screen test of her as Marilyn, you could see the whole film.”
Looking ahead, Dominik revealed he’s contemplating “two completely different things” for his next project. “One is, I’d like to make a religious film or a spiritual film,” he said, before pivoting to something far more contemporary: “The other is I’m completely fascinated by AI as a generative visual tool and what could be done with that. That has no limits to it. … One is a very raw film that’s not even in focus, and the other one is something completely stylized that cannibalizes other images.”
For now, Dominik seems at peace with his position as cinema’s consummate outsider-insider, making exactly the films he wants while relying on friends like Pitt to help navigate an industry that remains skeptical of uncompromising voices. His appearance at Marrakech, alongside luminaries like Guillermo del Toro and Jafar Panahi, confirms his status among that select group of filmmakers whose visions command respect even when they provoke controversy.
