At the Venice Film Festival, Maggie Gyllenhaal spoke at The Future of… Creativity summit hosted by Finch & Partners and CAA at Scuola Grande della Misericordia, discussed the making of her recent short film, Flesh Impact. In her discussion, the Venice Film Festival jury president spoke about how, before deciding to cast Dakota Johnson to play Marilyn Monroe, she was originally asked by producers to use an AI recreation of the Hollywood startlet. Here’s the full quote:

“The people who commissioned this project from me asked me to use AI. They weren’t using OpenAI; they were using licensable AI, training it off of Marilyn Monroe films that we had licensed. And I went for it. I was like, all right, I’m curious, I don’t know, let’s see. The idea was that we trained it on her; we then put her face on Dakota’s face. We worked hard at it, and in the end, I threw it away because what was coming through Dakota playing Marilyn Monroe was so much more moving, human, alive.”

Gyllenhaal, to accentuate the point, then went on to say: “It fundamentally did not work. All the reasons we decided to make this project to begin with were killed off in the AI version.”

The short film, in question, that Gyllenhaal is speaking about, Flesh Impact, stars both Dakota Johnson and Ellen Burstyn as different versions of Marilyn Monroe, one based on her real-life persona, the other an imagined version of the actress later in life. The short runs 17-minutes in length, was made “with the blessings”, of Monroes’s estate holders, and will be premering out of competion at the Venice Film Festival September 5.