Watch an exclusive first clip from that will premiere at the Venice Film Festival 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. 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.
Conceived from the start as a film of five to 20 minutes, the project suited a director who has never been drawn to sprawl. This was always the right length for this.” She builds the story around an audition, an engine she chose for its raw exposure. A two-time Oscar nominee who has spent the past several years behind the camera, she treats performance itself as the subject.
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.
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. There’s the poster on Hollywood Boulevard.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
