Marilyn Monroe would have turned 100 this year. So when Maggie Gyllenhaal was approached to make a movie about her, she asked for a weekend to daydream about what that milestone might look like. What came back was “Flesh Impact,” a 17-minute short that hands the most consumed movie star of the 20th century something she was rarely granted in life — the floor to speak her mind.
The film premieres at the Venice Film Festival, where Gyllenhaal is also serving as president of this year’s competition jury. Variety is exclusively debuting a clip from the short below.
Gyllenhaal didn’t arrive at Monroe on her own. Genesis, which commissioned the short to mark the centennial, came to her with a deceptively simple brief. “They came to me and said, ‘Could you make a movie about Marilyn Monroe where Marilyn Monroe is given the opportunity to express something, to articulate herself as an artist in a way that she was not given when she was alive?’” Gyllenhaal recalls. “I said, ‘Let me daydream about it for a weekend and if I can, I will and if I can’t, I won’t waste your time.’ And what came to me was this idea of her at 100. I thought, there’s no way they’re going to want that. But they did.”
The conceit — Monroe imagined at the century mark, walking into an audition and finally allowed to speak her mind — arrived nearly whole. So did its length. Conceived from the start as a film of five to 20 minutes, the project suited a director who has never been drawn to sprawl. “I actually have quite a few little stories in my mind that should be shorts,” she says. “The ones in my head are not five minutes; they’re usually like 20 minutes. This was always the right length for this.”
She builds the story around an audition, an engine she chose for its raw exposure. “Auditioning is very vulnerable, because in order to do it well, you have to risk everything — your whole heart and body — and yet you know you could be told no at any moment.”
“Flesh Impact” is, in part, a film about Gyllenhaal’s first vocation. A two-time Oscar nominee who has spent the past several years behind the camera, she treats performance itself as the subject. “Acting, and maybe particularly being an actress, when seen very deeply and from a compassionate place, is an unusual job,” she says.
The title comes from Billy Wilder, who once described a quality Monroe had on-screen — the sense that you could reach out and touch her. Gyllenhaal both honors the observation and interrogates it. In the passage that gives the film its name, Dakota Johnson moves through the frame as the younger Monroe in a sheer nightgown and Gyllenhaal wants the audience to feel the pull before it feels the ache. “I’m hoping that it’s appealing, compelling, sexy,” she says. “And then, once you know what Billy Wilder was talking about, feel it from the perspective of the person whose body we’re talking about. It’s just a more complicated thing than you might think at first.”
Casting Johnson was, by Gyllenhaal’s own admission, a provocation. Johnson doesn’t look like Monroe — and that turned out to be the point. “At first I was slightly unsure about it,” she says. “And then I thought, I don’t actually know what Marilyn Monroe looks like, because she’s been so dehumanized. There’s the snow globe. There’s the poster on Hollywood Boulevard. Her real face almost feels a little blurry to me, and I think that’s probably true for a lot of people. I’m much more interested in where the cracks are and humanity can seep through.”
Sharing the role, as the centenarian Monroe of the audition, is Academy Award winner Ellen Burstyn, who will collect the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at this year’s festival — a coronation Gyllenhaal gets to savor from the jury table.
Peter Sarsgaard, Gyllenhaal’s husband and constant collaborator, anchors the audition room. The ensemble extends to a former “Deuce” castmate, Sepideh Moafi — a current Emmy nominee for “The Pitt” — in a nearly wordless role Gyllenhaal insists lingers. “She doesn’t speak a lot, but we’re going to be in your mind as much as anyone else’s,” she says.
For a director who works fast, the shorthand mattered more than the schedule. Gyllenhaal reassembled much of the crew from her feature “The Bride!” — reuniting with cinematographer Lawrence Sher and cutting the film with her “Lost Daughter” editor, Affonso Gonçalves. “It was so nice to already have a shorthand,” she says. “If I’m going to make a movie super quickly, I want to work with people I already have a language with.”
Speed had its costs. The production planned to grab exterior footage outside Broadway’s Music Box Theatre — the film’s principal location — before a New York City blizzard intervened. “So we got absolutely fucked,” she says, chuckling. The team decamped for a single day on the Paramount lot in Los Angeles. “It was January,” she says, “so there was no way we could ask Dakota to walk in a negligee just anywhere.”
Though the story is set now, Gyllenhaal reached for the texture of another era. “I felt it had almost an early-’80s quality, or late-’70s — like when Broadway theater was really alive,” she says, citing the backstage worlds of “All That Jazz” and “A Chorus Line.” (She also nods to “Tootsie.”) “There’s so much great stuff on stage now, but there’s a much more corporate aspect to things. I wanted that feeling.”
Gyllenhaal holds a special place in her heart for Venice. She premiered “The Lost Daughter” there during the pandemic, having never screened it in any room before. “That is where I felt I was born as a director,” she says.
This year she returns wearing two hats and keeping them deliberately apart. As for acting, it remains on the shelf. “It’s just not where my head is,” she says. “I’m much more interested at the moment in writing and directing. It feels like an opportunity for a much more complete kind of expression.”
Two projects have stayed with her — one an adaptation, one not — and she plans to start writing once the festival is behind her. “I’m giving myself the next few weeks of Venice off,” she says.
For a filmmaker who built 17 minutes around the ache of being watched, there’s a quiet symmetry to it — a stretch on the Lido spent, for once, doing the looking herself.
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