Sarah Churchwell praises ‘Love, Marilyn’ on Twitter
Sarah Churchwell – author of The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe, whom also appears (as herself) in Love, Marilyn - praised the new documentary on her Twitter account last night.
Meanwhile, Liz Garbus, director of Love, Marilyn - screened at the London Film Festival last weekend – has spoken about MM to FemaleFirst.
“Marilyn created a figure of female sexuality and femininity at a time in the U.S. of great repression…I think it is naive or simplistic to say that Marilyn was an early feminist but what she did do was discuss sexuality.
The approach that I took in the film was to get a cast of actresses but none of them were playing Marilyn what they doing was using their experiences as actresses today to bring to life Marilyn’s experiences. They had insights into them that even I, who had read the documents twenty times didn’t.
Stylistically it is very different to anything that I have done before and I haven’t seen a film like it. I felt that I was doing something that was risky as I had a whole bunch of different actors reading fragments of thoughts and ideas.
You had to edit them to become cohesive and yet still relish their fragmented nature as they are not meant to be a narrative – they were meant to illuminate moments in time and brief thoughts; some of them fleeting.
So I had to respect that and then provide the viewer with a cohesive narrative and that was a balancing act.
[MM] created a new type of American figure and that was quite brilliant. Maybe some of it was instinctive but you don’t create that by accident…In the movie we show a lot of her press conferences and you see the way that she talks to the press – she is so clever and she handles the press so well.”
