Netflix ‘Blonde’ director addresses movie backlash: 'really pleased'

Netflix Blonde had garnered a lot of criticism for its portrayal of the iconic Marilyn Monroe.

The director Andrew Dominik appeared at the Red Sea International Film Festival in Saudi Arabia, where he addressed the heavily divided public opinion of the movie, via The Hollywood Reporter.

Based on Joyce Carol Oates' 2000 novel, Blonde stars Ana de Armas as Monroe throughout her life, including her rise to fame, some of her most tragic moments and her death from a overdose in 1962, People.

The Australian filmmaker, 55, said he was "really pleased" that the fictional take on Marilyn’s life "outraged so many people" after premiering on Netflix in September, 2022. He also added that the U.S. audiences had the strongest adverse reaction to the film, “they hated the movie!”

“Now we’re living in a time where it’s important to present women as empowered, and they want to reinvent Marilyn Monroe as an empowered woman. That’s what they want to see,” he said. “And if you’re not showing them that, it upsets them,” Dominik explained.

“Which is kind of strange, because she’s dead. The movie doesn’t make any difference in one way or another,” he said. “What they really mean is that the film exploited their memory of her, their image of her, which is fair enough. But that’s the whole idea of the movie. It’s trying to take the iconography of her life and put it into service of something else, it’s trying to take things that you’re familiar with, and turning the meaning inside out. But that’s what they don’t want to see.”

The film received criticism "for some sexual content.” There were graphic scenes of an abortion in which her unborn baby begs her not to terminate the pregnancy. Monroe was also depicted as being in a three-way sexual relationship with Charlie "Cass" Chaplin Jr. and Edward "Eddy" G. Robinson Jr., as well as being forced to perform oral sex on President John F. Kennedy, neither of which anecdotes have been substantiated, via People.

Despite the backlash against Blonde, Dominik said that “tens of millions of people” watched the film on Netflix.