Maggie Gyllenhaal scraps AI in Marilyn Monroe film

Maggie Gyllenhaal said Friday in Venice that she abandoned planned AI-generated video for her new Marilyn Monroe short film because the technology did not deliver the result she wanted.

Gyllenhaal, who is heading the jury at this year's Venice Film Festival, is also premiering “Flesh Impact”, a short film imagining Monroe as if she had lived to 100.

She told The Future of Creativity event that the people who commissioned the project asked her to use AI. She said the technology was trained on licensed Marilyn Monroe films and was meant to transform Dakota Johnson into an elderly version of Monroe.

“It fundamentally did not work,” Gyllenhaal said. She said she threw the AI material away because Dakota Johnson's performance as Marilyn Monroe was “so much more moving, human, alive”.

Gyllenhaal's comments came as AI video generation remained a major subject at Venice, where film figures discussed its possible uses and risks. Signal president Meredith Whittaker warned about AI being controlled by a small number of billionaires and urged the audience not to “buy the hype”.

George Clooney, who received a lifetime achievement award in Venice on Wednesday, said many film workers could be replaced, including actors, crew members and visual effects supervisors.

Gyllenhaal also said AI companies were seeking to license actors' likenesses to reproduce them digitally, an approach she described as completely different from how she works.