Andrew Dominik says “a bit of drama is a good thing” when it comes to his Marilyn Monroe movie Blonde being rated NC-17.
Of course, he didn’t anticipate getting the higher-than-R rating, and it’s the first Netflix movie to ever receive it.
“It wasn’t like I set out to get an NC-17 rating, and I don’t even think the rating is deserved,” Dominik tells MovieMaker in our latest cover story. “I think we color within the lines… I was kind of surprised that they would consider that to be worthy of an NC-17.”
Our full cover story interview with Andrew Dominik and Ana de Armas will run in the next issue of MovieMaker Magazine, on newsstands soon.
Blonde stars Ana de Armas in the role of Marilyn Monroe. Based on the novel by Joyce Carol Oates, it tells the story of the movie star’s often unpleasant life — and it’s peppered with quite a bit of nudity, multiple sex scenes, rape, and physical abuse. But Dominik wasn’t willing to omit any of it in order to scale the film’s rating back to an R. And he completely disagrees with the “less is more” approach.
“I kind of feel like more is more,” Andrew Dominik says. “It was also just the way that [Blonde] was written. Very much what I’m trying to do is, I’m trying to translate Joyce’s picture of the world, and it was pretty feverish and intense. It all just came from my feelings reading the book. I mean, I don’t really want to put stuff off-screen unless there’s a reason to do so.”
De Armas was “a little shocked” by the NC-17 rating.
“With all the content that we have nowadays, and everything on TV, all the access that we have to streaming and all of that, I can assure you, if you compare Blonde to other shows or films, it is not even close to the amount of nudity or sexual content or abuse,” she told MovieMaker.
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