Marilyn Monroe was not an empowered woman, and she never will be.

Three months into the release of “Blonde” the Marilyn Monroe biopic starring Ana De Armas, director Andrew Dominik talks about how most if not all people who have seen the movie hate it. And he says it’s because of one simple reason. During an appearance at the Red Sea International Film Festival in Saudi Arabia over the weekend he spoke about it saying “They hated the movie!” adding that “Now we’re living in a time where it’s important to present women as empowered, and they want to reinvent Marilyn Monroe as an empowered woman. That’s what they want to see, and if you’re not showing them that, it upsets them.”

He talks about how the movie is gruesome and tends to exploit the memories and stories of Marilyn and about how the movie might be a bit too raw for most, but that his idea for the movie was keeping it as real as possible and telling Marilyn’s truth.

“What they really mean is that the film exploited their memory of her, their image of her, which is fair enough. But that’s the whole idea of the movie. It’s trying to take the iconography of her life and put it into service of something else, it’s trying to take things that you’re familiar with, and turning the meaning inside out. But that’s what they don’t want to see.”

He also added (perhaps unnecessarily) how it wouldn’t really make a difference given that Marilyn is no longer with us. “…she’s dead. The movie doesn’t make any difference in one way or another,”

He also touched on the subject of how movies and movie making has changed over the years, stating “…growing up in the ’80s, it was a time when “offend[ing] your audience was a solemn duty, to wrench them out of a complacency about things,” and that he was “really pleased” that Blonde had “outraged so many people.”