Gyllenhaal: Best Directors Draw on Collaborators — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Maggie Gyllenhaal said at Busan that the best directors she's worked with draw on collaborators' minds, arguing that "the movie that includes all the minds of the people on my crew… is going to be exponentially better" than one she imagined alone
- Gyllenhaal is in Busan with "Flesh Impact," a short she wrote and directed starring Ellen Burstyn as Marilyn Monroe at age 100 and Dakota Johnson as Monroe in her youth, which world premiered out of competition at the Venice Film Festival
- Genesis, the luxury car brand, commissioned the film to mark what would have been Monroe's 100th birthday in June, and Gyllenhaal said she was surprised the brand approved her conceit of making Monroe literally 100 years old in the story
- "Flesh Impact" also features Peter Sarsgaard and Sepideh Moafi, and Gyllenhaal said the film is as much a "celebration and honoring" of Burstyn and Johnson's careers as it is of Monroe
- Gyllenhaal said her directing debut "The Lost Daughter" came eight years ago, and that she has felt "more at ease and more inspired behind the camera ever since" after earlier hitting "the edge of what I was able to do as an actress"
- Gyllenhaal is developing two new writing projects and will direct and produce an adaptation of Rachel Kushner's "Creation Lake" for Warner Bros., the same studio behind "The Bride"
Why it matters: Gyllenhaal's remarks carry weight because she made them as a recent first-time feature director who served as jury president at Venice, where she noted only one woman had a film in competition — making her defense of collaborative leadership a pointed statement from inside a director's chair still rarely occupied by women.
Ask SkimNews
