Venice Film Festival jury president Maggie Gyllenhaal has revealed she tried using AI to digitally transform Dakota Johnson into Marilyn Monroe for her short film "Flesh Impact," which is screening at the festival, but ultimately abandoned the technology because it drained the humanity from Johnson's performance. Speaking at a symposium on the Lido alongside composer Alexandre Desplat and fellow filmmakers, she said the experiment undermined the very reasons the project was conceived, prompting her to scrap it entirely.

Gyllenhaal explained the short depicts a 100-year-old Marilyn Monroe with flashbacks to her 30s, played by Johnson, and that the film's commissioners had asked her to use licensable AI trained on licensed Monroe footage to overlay Monroe's face onto Johnson's. She said the result "fundamentally did not work" compared with Johnson's own performance, and went on to raise wider concerns about AI in filmmaking, including environmental costs from data centres, warnings from "Godfather of AI" Geoffrey Hinton, and scepticism that AI would genuinely "democratise" filmmaking rather than simply enrich those who own the technology, potentially undercutting budgets for traditionally made films.