'Blonde' Director Says Backlash Is Because People 'Want to Reinvent Marilyn Monroe as an Empowered Woman'

Andrew Dominik is speaking out about Blonde.

The 55-year-old director spoke out about his highly divisive Marilyn Monroe biopic, starring Ana De Armas, during his appearance at Red Sea International Film Festival in Saudi Arabia over the weekend.

During his appearance, he spoke about how American audiences had the strongest reactions to the film, and explained his belief as to why.

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“They hated the movie!” he said of U.S. audiences.

“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, via THR.

“And if you’re not showing them that, it upsets them.”

“Which is kind of strange, because she’s dead. The movie doesn’t make any difference in one way or another,” he continued.

“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.”

He added that growing up in the ’80s, it was a time when “offend[ing] your audience was a solemn duty, to wrench them out of a complacency about things,” and that he was “really pleased” that Blonde had “outraged so many people.”

He also claimed that American movies were getting “more conservative,” like a bedtime story where people already knew every word. “But I don’t want to make bedtime stories.”

Find out what Ana De Armas thinks of intimate clips from the movie going viral.