“Blonde" director Andrew Dominik is reveling in the violently adverse reaction to his film's depiction of the late screen legend Marilyn Monroe.

The 55-year-old Australian filmmaker said he was "really pleased" that the fictionalized version of his life "outraged so many people" after its premiere on Netflix in September, when it appeared Sunday at the Red Sea International Film Festival in Saudi Arabia, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

"They hated the movie!" he said of the response of the American audience towards his film.

"We now live in an age 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 don't show them that, it bothers them," explained Dominik.

"Which is a little strange because she's dead. The movie doesn't make any difference one way or the other," he continued. "What they really mean is that the movie exploited his memory of her, his image of her, which is fair enough. But that's the idea of the movie. It's trying to take the iconography of her life and put it in the service of something, otherwise, it's trying to take things that you're familiar with and turn the meaning upside down. But that's what they don't want to see."

Based on Joyce Carol Oates' 2000 novel, “Blonde” stars Ana de Armas as Monroe. The book tells the story of her life, including her rise to fame, some of her most tragic moments, and her death from a barbiturate overdose in 1962.

The film, which received an NC-17 rating "for some sexual content," was panned for exploiting Monroe's trauma with such fictionalized scenes as a graphic abortion in which her unborn baby begs her not to terminate the pregnancy.

Monroe was also depicted in a three-way sexual relationship with Charlie "Cass" Chaplin Jr. and Edward "Eddy" G. Robinson Jr., in addition to being forced to perform oral sex on President John F. Kennedy, neither of whose anecdotes have been corroborated.

One critic called the film "pretty dreadful" and described it as a "violent NC-17 fantasy about #MarilynMonroe that is presented as a biopic." Another said it "not only re-objectifies Monroe but revels in her victimization and self-denial."

Dominik, who previously warned that the film would "offend everyone," noted at the Red Sea Film Festival that "tens of millions of people" watched the film on Netflix, blaming the negative reaction on American films becoming "more conservative."

"But I don't want to do bedtime stories," Dominik said.