More than sixty years after Marilyn Monroe's death, filmmakers are still drawn back to her, and the latest is Maggie Gyllenhaal, whose short film Flesh Impact premieres at this year's Venice Film Festival to mark what would have been Monroe's 100th birthday. Dakota Johnson plays a younger Monroe opposite Oscar winner Ellen Burstyn as an older version of the same woman, in a 17-minute film that isn't interested in retelling a life so much as imagining the one Monroe never got the chance to live.
An invitation Gyllenhaal almost turned down
Gyllenhaal wasn't immediately sure she was the right person for the project when it was first pitched to her. "I thought, 'I don't know if I'm the woman for this job. Let me just take a minute and see what comes up,'" she told Vanity Fair. The deeper she got into Monroe's work, the less interested she became in a straightforward retelling. "I kind of wondered what would've happened if she'd had 60 years to herself," she said. "What might be different about the work that she would do now?"
A play, an old woman, and a secret
That question shaped the film's structure, centered on a mysterious old woman auditioning for a play at a small New York blackbox theatre, with secrets about her identity surfacing as she describes her career. For Gyllenhaal, Monroe also became a way to talk about acting itself. "This movie is about Marilyn and also about actresses in general and what it's like to have that strange, very vulnerable, and, at the same time, very powerful job," she said.
Why resemblance didn't matter
Johnson doesn't obviously resemble Monroe, something Gyllenhaal has said plainly doesn't bother her. "I don't know that anyone even really totally knows what Marilyn looks like because she's been so commodified and made into this myth," she said. Johnson, a natural blonde who has worn brown hair and bangs for years, isn't new to the platinum switch either, having gone lighter for 2023's Daddio. Gyllenhaal has said Johnson was on her mind throughout the writing process, less a casting decision made after the fact than a presence built into the film from the start.