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. “They came to me and said, ‘Could you make a movie about Marilyn Monroe where Marilyn Monroe is given the opportunity to express something, to articulate herself as an artist in a way that she was not given when she was alive?’” Gyllenhaal recalls. “I said, ‘Let me daydream about it for a weekend and if I can, I will and if I can’t, I won’t waste your time.’ And what came to me was this idea of her at 100. 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. So did its length. Conceived from the start as a film of five to 20 minutes, the project suited a director who has never been drawn to sprawl. “I actually have quite a few little stories in my mind that should be shorts,” she says. “The ones in my head are not five minutes; they’re usually like 20 minutes. This was always the right length for this.”
