Maggie Gyllenhaal On Casting Ellen Burstyn & Dakota Johnson In ‘Flesh Impact’ – Busan

Following her Venice jury chief duty, Maggie Gyllenhaal is attending Busan film festival for the first time with her short film, Flesh Impact, which is showing in Special Screenings.

Starring Ellen Burstyn and Dakota Johnson, the film was commissioned by Korean luxury car brand Genesis to celebrate Marilyn Monroe’s centennial in June this year and had its world premiere in Venice. Burstyn plays an older version of the iconic star, auditioning at a small theatre in New York City, while Johnson plays her as a young woman.

Speaking to press on the first day of the festival, Gyllenhaal said she approached the two actresses despite the fact that neither of them looked like Monroe because she thought they’d appreciate being asked to do something different.

“Having been an actress myself for so many years, I was always fascinated when someone reaches out across the world and offers me something I haven’t done before. That doesn’t happen a lot. You do something then everyone offers you sexy secretaries for the next ten years,” Gyllenhaal said.

“But when someone sees you in a new way, and that new way happens for some kind of magical reason, to match up with what you’re curious about, or is on the edge of what you know about yourself; so that’s what I’m trying to do with actors.”

She added that working with Burstyn was awe-inspiring, as she was watching an actress with 50 years more experience than she had: “I mean, it was like a really expert level; expertise that comes with precision, but also includes something wild beyond what we can imagine, especially when we’re talking about an actress in her ‘90s.”

As for Johnson, who she’d also worked with in The Lost Daughter, Gyllenhaal said she kept pushing her out of mind while writing the project because “she doesn’t look anything like Marilyn” but in the end realised, “who cares?”

“The fact is Marilyn Monroe has been made into such an icon and such a kind of pretend fantasy person,” Gyllenhaal said. “But then I realized what she looks like is much less important than what’s happening inside her heart and her mind. And I wondered if Dakota might relate to some of the things that we touch on in the movie.”

Although she said she had talked enough about gender balance in Venice, where the lack of female directors in competition became a huge issue, Gyllenhaal spoke again on the topic in Busan when pressed by local journalists. Local press also noted that four of the 13 films in BIFF’s competition section this year are directed by women, while women make up four of the seven jury members.

“I think that when women are given an opportunity to express themselves freely, they make very different work,” Gyllenhaal said. “We make different films because we have a very different experience of being alive in this world.”

Noting that she’d seen exceptional films in Venice by male directors – and that some female directors choose to emulate movies made by men, which she couldn’t criticize – she added that there are other women who use it as an opportunity to speak in a new cinematic language.

“Movies made by men are a huge part of the reason why I’m here, but they’re from a male point of view and often require a bit of translation,” Gyllenhaal said. “You think, okay, this guy is interesting, I don’t have the same experience, but I know how to translate because I’ve had to learn how to translate in order to watch all these movies, because there’s really none that were about me..

“And so, if I present a film that is in a different language because I speak a different language, it’s an opportunity for people to make the effort and have the pleasure of learning that language.”

Gyllenhaal also teased that she has two ideas that she’s working on, but they’re not at script stage yet, and that she doesn’t usually know what a project is about until she starts “digging into it”.

Bus Stop (1956), starring Monroe and directed by Joshua Logan, is also playing in Special Screenings in Busan. The festival opened on October 6 and runs until October 15.