‘Jesse James’ duo has ‘Blonde’ in its sights
Brad Pitt and Andrew Dominik want to adapt the Joyce Carol Oates novel about Marilyn Monroe.
Marilyn Monroe has been everywhere lately, from the fictitious musical on “Smash” to the 2011Michelle Williams movie to a new exhibition at the Hollywood Museum.
But she could be getting another treatment if Brad Pitt and Andrew Dominik have anything to say about it.
The A-list actor has come aboard to produce the filmmaker’s long-gestating drama about the blond bombshell. “We’re going to get this one done,” Pitt said in a joint interview with Dominik.
Pitt said it’s unclear whether he would take a role in the movie too or simply produce. Pitt’s been on a bit of a producing hot streak lately: His company, Plan B, was behind two best picture nominees in 2012 (“The Tree of Life” and “Moneyball”).
Pitt and Dominik collaborated on “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” and the upcoming hit-man movie “Killing Them Softly.” “Blonde” would mark a shift from those hard-boiled genres; it would look at an imagined inner life of the iconic actress, an inner life first imagined by Joyce Carol Oates, who wrote an acclaimed 2000 novel on which the film would be based.
Oates’ “Blonde,” which also got the TV miniseries treatment a decade ago, has been in feature development since at least 2009, when Dominik began writing a script based on the book.
But now it’s on the front burner thanks to Pitt’s interest and to some new financing possibilities. Dominik wouldn’t comment on the specific progress of the project, but said that shooting it in January or February of 2013 was a possibility.
When it was first incarnated with Wild Bunch, Naomi Watts was slated to play Monroe. But that was a long time ago, and it’s unclear at this point if the filmmakers would continue in that direction.
“My Week With Marilyn,” which earned Williams an Oscar nomination, was hardly a blockbuster: It grossed $14 million and garnered mediocre reviews. But that film covered only a small slice of the actress’ life. And, in any event, expect a different kind of film from the Australia-based Dominik, who departed from convention with both “Jesse James” (a non-western western) and “Killing Them Softly” (which turns the hitman movie into a meditation on capitalism).
Meanwhile, interest in Monroe is growing with the 50th anniversary of her death approaching Aug. 5.
Since coming on the scene with his cult hit “Chopper” in 2000, Dominik hasn’t exactly worked at a feverish pace. He took seven years to make “Jesse James” and five for “Killing.”
“He’s got a terrible habit for writing things on spec,” Pitt said with a good-natured smile, implying that the rights issues on “Blonde” may have bogged it down too. (Dominik wrote his first draft on spec, that is, without locking down rights.)
But Pitt’s brand of surferboy intellectual and Dominik’s auteur intensity clearly combine for a kind of chemistry, with both of their collaborations yielding solid reviews. “I think ‘Jesse [James]’ is going to be the film I’m most proud of when I’m done with this [acting] thing,” Pitt said.
Frustrated by the meager box office for “Jesse James,” Dominik hopes that “Killing,” which hits theaters in September as a Weinstein Co. release, rekindles the industry’s interest in the pair’s work.
“I wanted to make a $15million movie. I wanted to make a movie that was cheap and could make its money back, because I’d like to keep working with Brad and I’d like us to have more expensive playdates than the last one,” he said. “I would like to make someone some money.”
Generally, he said, he struggles with the balance between passion and pragmatism, which he said may be why he’s made just two movies since “Chopper.”
“I’d like to make movies, man,” he said. “But I don’t want to just make movies. I want to make the movies I want to make.”