Culture
Director AI-Swaps Actress Into Marilyn Monroe, Discovers Result Has No Soul, Files It Under 'Obviously'
By BSN Staff, . BSN Network. Satire.
VENICE, ITALY. Filmmaker and Venice jury president Maggie Gyllenhaal confirmed Tuesday that she spent a portion of her short film's production budget instructing artificial intelligence software to transform living actress Dakota Johnson into a woman who has been dead since 1962, before concluding that this approach had some drawbacks.
The film, titled Flesh Impact, centers on Johnson's performance. Gyllenhaal has described that performance as vulnerable, present, and searingly human, which is precisely what made it so confusing when she decided, mid-production, to replace the face delivering it with a digital reconstruction of Marilyn Monroe.
"It fundamentally did not work," Gyllenhaal told a press conference at the Lido, deploying the kind of sentence that sounds like an insight but is actually just a description of what happened.
Sources close to the production say the AI footage was reviewed once, in a darkened editing suite, and that the room went quiet in a specific way that required no further discussion.
Gyllenhaal stressed that the experiment ultimately deepened her appreciation for Johnson's performance, which is one way to describe learning something by briefly destroying it.
Industry observers noted that the episode raises important questions about the role of artificial intelligence in cinema, though most of those questions reduce to a single question, which is why.
Dakota Johnson, whose face remained her own face for the final cut, has not commented publicly. Her representatives issued a statement describing her as "thrilled with the finished film," a phrase that does the quiet work of several other phrases.
Dr. Leonard Foss, a media technology consultant who was not involved in the project and had not heard of it until this reporter called him, said the outcome was consistent with broader patterns in AI-assisted creative work.
"When you remove the person from the performance, you tend to remove the performance," Foss said. "We're seeing that a lot."
He was asked whether the industry would continue experimenting with AI in this way regardless. He said yes.
Gyllenhaal, for her part, framed the scrapped footage as a valuable part of her process, which is a thing people say about the parts of their process that did not work.
Flesh Impact screened to positive notices. Reviewers praised Johnson's performance as raw and unmistakably alive, an observation that landed somewhat differently given the week's other news.
The AI company whose software was used has not been identified. A spokesperson for the broader AI industry said the technology is "a tool, like any other tool," which is also what people said about the leaf blower the first time someone aimed one at a wasp nest.
Gyllenhaal is expected to deliver the Palme d'Or to a different film entirely.
The story we are making fun of: https://variety.com/2026/film/global/maggie-gyllenhaal-ai-dakota-johnson-marilyn-monroe-1236851468/