In many ways, Gyllenhaal is the ideal filmmaker to tell this story. She’s an actor who could empathize with Monroe’s journey in Hollywood. She also had experience with two actors playing the same character before, in her feature directorial debut, The Lost Daughter, with Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley. And she’s made two movies—The Lost Daughter and The Bride!—that are very much centered on rich, layered female characters. “When you look at how she treats women in some of her other films, she’s not passive with women. They’re very active,” says Amy Marentic, chief marketing officer of Genesis Motor America, who came to Gyllenhaal about making the short film. The luxury car brand wanted to make a project that would honor Monroe this year on what would have been her 100th birthday in June.
“Dakota was always on my mind,” says Gyllenhaal of casting Johnson. “When I’m writing, sometimes I’ll find an actor just keeps coming up and I almost have to actively push them out of my head so that I don’t limit what I’m doing at all.”
Courtesy of Genesis
Once she had the concept, Gyllenhaal wrote the script quickly, over one weekend. She then approached Burstyn to play the role of Monroe. “She’s 93 years old. I didn’t know if this was something that she could do. It’s basically a 15-page monologue, in some ways,” says Gyllenhaal. But Burstyn, who had met Monroe and traveled in the same circles as her, agreed to do it. “I think that this role met Ellen at a particular moment where what it was offering to talk about and to think about and to dream about are things that she was interested in thinking and dreaming and talking about,” says Gyllenhaal.
For the actor who would play the younger version of Monroe, Gyllenhaal turned to Johnson, whom she had previously worked with on The Lost Daughter. At first, Gyllenhaal was concerned that Johnson didn’t look enough like the movie star. “Then I thought, That’s ridiculous. Who cares?” she says. “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 and she’s very blurry in my mind.”
Burstyn delivers a tour-de-force performance as Monroe.
Courtesy of Genesis
