Chatting with Jennifer Rudick & Amanda Benchley on Pretty Dirty

• Phoebe Roberts: What initially drew you to telling Marilyn’s story? Was there a particular work or encounter that made you feel, “This needs to be a film”?

• Jennifer Rudick:  Marilyn’s an icon, and she’s an artist’s artist. Everyone in the art world knows her, but she’s not as known outside the art world, even though she’s everywhere. Once you know her, you’re like, “Oh, she made all those MAC ads and Tom Ford ads.” She influenced the way we look at advertising and she was in the zeitgeist, but people didn’t necessarily know it. She’s a leading lady for sure. I had done this documentary on Iris Apfel and I saw similar qualities in Marilyn. She’s a glorious rebel; she’s very authentic and she moves the needle on culture without meaning to. She just does her thing.

Amanda Benchley: Well, I think she is meaning to. She’ll often say, “I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m just doing it, I can’t help myself,” but there’s a real intentionality behind her work. She sees an injustice and she wants to address it, and she does. The “Bush” paintings are a perfect example: she didn’t like how young people were lasering off all their hair, and so she decided to make these oversized, gorgeous paintings celebrating pubic hair. So I think what Jennifer’s saying–and what I’m adding–is that Marilyn shifts culture almost without announcing that she’s doing it.

• PR: The film touches on difficult parts of Marilyn’s past–her addiction, her relationship with her mother–but never dwells in trauma. How did you decide how much of that history to reveal and what role it should play in the narrative? 

• AB: At one point after Porn Grid (1989), Marilyn was shunned by the art world, and her comeback was driven by exhibiting portraits of her mother. We didn’t include it in the film, but she said several times that once the art world saw that she had a fucked up childhood, they took her more seriously. Her mother plays two roles in this film: she sets up the dichotomy of “Pretty Dirty”, because on one level her mother was all about appearances and would be in bed with her lipstick on, but if you looked really closely, she had fungus under her fingernails. Marilyn’s constantly playing with that tension between the pretty and the dirty. And then her mother’s struggles with addiction also provides a sort of explanation for Marilyn’s addiction as well.

JR: There are some things we didn’t use because of time, but also, you don’t want to be manipulative. You want to be a fly on the wall and look at her life without sensationalizing it and ask, how much did this really mean to her? Is her story complete without this? And it’s not complete without her mother. The more we got to know her, the more we realized that Marilyn’s mother had so much of an influence on her, perhaps more than she would even like to say. Obviously, she’s come to terms with it, but that influence is essential, I think, to understanding Marilyn and her art.

PR: It’s interesting because decades later she continues to make portraits of complicated women–Miley Cyrus, Jane Fonda, Monica Lewinsky, etc. Do you see the early works with her mother and these later portraits of famous women as speaking to each other?

JR: Totally. It wasn’t intentional on my part, and I don’t think on Amanda’s part either, but it’s there. Her mother was an addict, and in the film, Marilyn says “You know, I forgave her. She did the best she could.” Her mother was left by her father, became an addict, and was ostracized from her community, and Marilyn saw it through a daughter’s eyes, and–I’m assuming–felt shame. Now, through her work, Marilyn’s reevaluating all these women who have also been shamed. These aren’t her exact words, but she wants to bring dignity back to women who have been marginalized or have been made fun of, like Monica Lewinsky, Pamela Anderson, and Jane Fonda too, to a certain extent.

AB: The porn series was a long time ago, but it wasn’t that long ago. She was essentially shut down for this and cancelled. What feels especially relevant now is the censorship we’re seeing under our current government. We’re also in a moment where cultural institutions are being defunded. None of this is new, but I’ll admit I didn’t know much about that chapter of history before we started digging into it. That’s part of why it felt so important to show it–to show what happened to Marilyn in contrast to what happened to someone like Jeff Koons. It’s such a fascinating moment in art and political history, and Minter’s work was very much intertwined with it all.

PR: The film also beautifully captures Marilyn’s physical presence, whether she’s crouching to shoot or just moving through her studio. Why was it important for you to emphasize her physicality and labor, not just the finished images?

JR: Originally, we wanted to do all vérité, but it would’ve been just too much for her, and it’s so rare to make a film like that these days anyways. But it’s super important to show her process because it’s so unique. At first, she said she didn’t want us to shoot her working because she didn’t want to be disturbed. So it would only be the two of us, sometimes only one of us and the cameraman, and sometimes sound, depending upon what was going on. At the absolute most, it was four people. She got used to it and it didn’t distract her, and we were able to really see her in the zone. Showing the physicality was also really important as she’s aging; we need to see older role models and older people doing things and engaging.

AB:I think it’s part of the process, right? Before they see the film, so many people are confused by her work because the photorealists can be confused for photography. There’s also the fact that these paintings take a year to make and are just layers and layers and layers of paint. So, physicality is inherently part of the process.

PR: In the film, Marilyn jokes that she’ll be “more successful after she’s dead,” like Louise Bourgeois or Alice Neel, then later says she doesn’t think about legacy at all. How do you interpret her ambivalence about legacy? And as documentarians, did you feel a responsibility to shape or preserve that legacy?

JR: I think all artists think about their legacy, right? They want their work to end up in museums, understandably so. But I also think there’s truth in what Marilyn says when she claims she doesn’t think about it at all. My guess is that when she’s painting, when she’s really in the act of making the work, legacy isn’t on her mind. She’s following the thing that compels her. But Marilyn is also a businesswoman; she knows she’ll have a legacy. So there’s a kind of duality there that I think she’s very aware of.

In terms of the documentary, she had to trust us, because that’s a huge thing to hand over. And for me, and I think for Amanda too, we approached the film the way Marilyn approaches her art: we focused on the process. We wanted to make the best, most truthful film we could. If we constantly thought, “We’re defining Marilyn’s legacy,” that would’ve been an impossible burden. And, honestly, we’re not. Marilyn had this long, extraordinary career before we ever came along. We just hoped to treat her story with care and honesty. And she never gave us any rules or guidelines–no input on how to make the film, no parameters from her or from her dealer. When we finally showed it to her, right before showing it to everyone else, she basically said, “I have to accept it.” She just wanted to screen it for a few friends to make sure they were seeing what she was seeing. And I think she felt we got it right.

AB: I also think we were making a case that she deserves to be in the art history books. She deserves to be famous after she’s gone–or preferably before she’s gone–for all the ways she’s impacted culture and influenced other artists. And that was intentional on our part, especially because of the hypocrisy you see when you trace her trajectory alongside Jeff Koons. They came up at the same time, and then his career went this way while hers went that way. We wanted to show that contrast, because it says so much about who gets elevated, who doesn’t, and why.

PR: What do you hope this film adds to the cultural conversation about Marilyn that hasn’t been said yet?

JR:  I keep coming back to the “Bush” paintings as an example, because it really speaks to sex positivity and to the way Marilyn’s work has helped people feel more comfortable with their own bodies. Whether it’s body hair, sexuality, weight–whatever it is–she’s put these images into the world in a way that normalizes and even celebrates them. And if her work has contributed to someone feeling less shame, or more at ease with themselves, that matters. For me, that’s what the film adds: a deeper sense of self-acceptance. It’s an invitation to look beyond the surface, to look a little closer and a little deeper. If viewers can see what Marilyn is doing in her art, it can be a kind of practice for how they look at themselves and the world.

AB: And it also shows how cultural change actually happens. It starts with one person putting something new into the world, and then it slowly trickles into advertising, into television, into the broader visual landscape. Five, six, seven years later, our collective perception has shifted, but it begins with that one person. In this case, that person is Marilyn.