It's a tall order to inhabit the physical and emotional contours of Marilyn Monroe, but Michelle Williams makes a spellbinding go at it in the rueful, gossamer "My Week With Marilyn." The highly anticipated film, which received its world premiere at the New York Film Festival, provides a tightly framed and focused snapshot of a pivotal moment in the screen legend's career, and a dark window into her turbulent psyche. It's already drumming up awards talk for Williams' lithe and nubile performance.
"Marilyn" is set in England during the shooting of "The Prince and the Showgirl"—her 1956 film directed by and costarring Laurence Olivier—and based on two memoirs about that production. Both were written by Colin Clark, a then-23-year-old production assistant on the set who struck up a deep, flirtatious and fleeting connection with the actress. Rankled by self-doubt, needled by a frustrated Olivier and overwhelmed by her recent marriage to Arthur Miller, Monroe finds unlikely trust and comfort in Clark—her solace from an oppressive star machinery and a respite from the pulsing sexuality that both fueled and tormented her.
We chatted up director Simon Curtis, who makes his feature-film debut; before this, he'd mostly helmed TV series and TV movies in Britain. With "Marilyn," he takes a stab at the mystique of a singularly American icon. Just don't call it a biopic.
You've stressed that this isn't a biopic but more of a window into a particular time. How important was that to you as a framework?
It was very, very important. It was a very particular moment in Marilyn's life, because when she came to London she had such high hopes because she was now married to the great Miller. She was the producer of this film and she was coming to work with the legendary Olivier. And in some ways, the story of our film is all of those things going wrong.
Did this help make it easier to approach someone as iconic as her?
I suppose, but yes that's probably right. You didn't have to tell her from A to Z. And also, you could focus the research on what was her state of mind at that moment in her life.
Well, there are so many different interpretations of her…
And, she was a chameleon herself. She was someone different all the time, wasn't she? And as Michelle has said, [Marilyn] is an invention herself.
You can't escape that fact that it's virtually impossible these days to show an image of someone playing Marilyn without recalling drag impersonators. It's so embedded in the pop culture.
But there's also Madonna's Marilyn, and Lady Gaga's. I don't know we thought in those terms. "How can we create the Marilyn to the best ability" was the way we were thinking, I believe.
What was you impression of Marilyn before you took on this project, and did that shift?
I suppose this ditzy, rather shallow but sexy girl was my impression. And I came to take her very, very seriously through the work on our film. That Bogdanovich quote—that she was in bad trouble from the day she was born—and given the odds stacked against her, it's incredible how well she did. And I think she was a very intelligent woman who'd lacked an education, trying to make amends for that.
How'd you work with Michelle to find the character?
What's fantastic about Michelle is that she is equally keen to get the internal and the external things right. So, in some ways, it was a twin-track creation, learning about the body language of Marilyn, and learning about the interior life of Marilyn. That dance she does in "The Prince and the Showgirl" [Williams' Marilyn does a playful shuffle while filming the movie-within-the-movie ] was a way into learning about Marilyn's body language. She rehearsed it before we started shooting, with our choreographer.
You shot in the actual places Marilyn had been, including Eton, Windsor Castle, the soundstage where "The Prince and the Showgirl" filmed, and even the house where she stayed.
It was incredibly exciting. [We re-created] the images we had from a photo call, with the Oliviers and the Millers standing at the threshold of that house. You can't help but be touched by the poetry of that. It's very affecting.
Was it easy to secure the locations?
Eton and Windsor Palace, we got access to it for a limited time. So that's always intimidating. You've got to get out as soon as you get there. I think we shot Eton and Windsor in the same day, the externals.
Kenneth Branagh as Olivier is pretty tremendous in this movie.
Him playing that part is a big deal. I think there's something right about him playing the 50-year-old Olivier at this point. And Ken is such an amazing man who brought such insight into the script. In some ways, getting Olivier right is as big a task in making this film, as—more obvious—getting Marilyn right. He's an actor-director who's directed himself. He knows a great deal, certainly more than me, about the workings of a film set and the nuances of all that. And also, he and I are much the same age as Olivier in that film—you know, we're past our prime you could say [laughs]. We had an understanding of that, too.
