Following her Venice jury chief duty, Maggie Gyllenhaal is attending Busan film festival for the first time with her short film, Flesh Impact, which is showing in Special Screenings.

Starring Ellen Burstyn and Dakota Johnson, the film was commissioned by Korean luxury car brand Genesis to celebrate Marilyn Monroe’s centennial in June this year and had its world premiere in Venice. Burstyn plays an older version of the iconic star, auditioning at a small theatre in New York City, while Johnson plays her as a young woman.

Speaking to press on the first day of the festival, Gyllenhaal said she approached the two actresses despite the fact that neither of them looked like Monroe because she thought they’d appreciate being asked to do something different.

“Having been an actress myself for so many years, I was always fascinated when someone reaches out across the world and offers me something I haven’t done before. That doesn’t happen a lot. You do something then everyone offers you sexy secretaries for the next ten years,” Gyllenhaal said.

“But when someone sees you in a new way, and that new way happens for some kind of magical reason, to match up with what you’re curious about, or is on the edge of what you know about yourself, so that’s what I’m trying to do with actors.”

She added that working with Burstyn was awe-inspiring, as she was watching an actress with 50 years more experience than she had: “I mean, it was like a really expert level; expertise that comes with precision, but also includes something wild beyond what we can imagine, especially when we’re talking about an actress in her ‘90s.”

As for Johnson, who she’d also worked with in The Lost Daughter, Gyllenhaal said she kept pushing her out of mind while writing the project because “she doesn’t look anything like Marilyn” but in the end realised, “who cares?”

“The fact is Marilyn Monroe has been made into such an icon and such a kind of pretend fantasy person,” Gyllenhaal said. “But then I realized what she looks like is much less important than what’s happening inside her heart and her mind. And I wondered if Dakota might relate to some of the things that we touch on in the movie.”

Although she said she had talked enough about gender balance in Venice, where the lack of female directors in competition became a huge issue, Gyllenhaal spoke again on the topic in Busan when pressed by local journalists. Local press also noted that four of the 13 films in BIFF’s competition section this year are directed by women, while women make up four of the seven jury members.

“I think that when women are given an opportunity to express themselves freely, they make very different work,” Gyllenhaal said. “We make different films because we have a very different experience of being alive in this world.”

Noting that she’d seen exceptional films in Venice by male directors – and that some female directors choose to emulate movies made by men, which she couldn’t criticize – she added that there are other women who use it as an opportunity to speak in a new cinematic language.

“Movies made by men are a huge part of the reason why I’m here, but they’re from a male point of view and often require a bit of translation,” Gyllenhaal said. “You think, okay, this guy is interesting, I don’t have the same experience, but I know how to translate because I’ve had to learn how to translate in order to watch all these movies, because there’s really none that were about me..

“And so, if I present a film that is in a different language because I speak a different language, it’s an opportunity for people to make the effort and have the pleasure of learning that language.”

Gyllenhaal also teased that she has two ideas that she’s working on, but they’re not at script stage yet, and that she doesn’t usually know what a project is about until she starts “digging into it”.

Bus Stop (1956), starring Monroe and directed by Joshua Logan, is also playing in Special Screenings in Busan. The festival opened on October 6 and runs until October 15.

The tectonic plates of the international production world shifted forever on July 9, when the merger between indie giants Banijay Entertainment and All3Media closed. The result created an entity larger than the BBC with annual pro forma revenues of €7.4B ($8.5B) and a catalog including MasterChef, The Traitors, Peaky Blinders, Midsomer Murders and Big Brother.

Banijay boss Marco Bassetti was named CEO of the new-look company, which will be given its true unveiling at a swanky drinks bash on the eve of MIPCOM.

For market watchers, a standout element of the C-suite org chart was All3Media’s long-serving CEO, Jane Turton, who became Deputy CEO of the combined entity. After spending 11 years crafting All3 into a major revenue-generating business, one might assume she would have decided to exit the fray. Given she was widely mentioned as a leading candidate for Director General job at the BBC and retains a reputation among peers and former colleagues as a top strategic thinker, the options elsewhere would surely have been plentiful.

So, is Turton content now the dust has settled? “Of course, I wouldn’t have taken it otherwise,” she responds when she sits down with Deadline down in the lobby of an Edinburgh hotel. “Life is about making choices, and I’ve made a positive choice to stay.”

Turton becomes increasingly passionate as she provides context about her mission. She had spent a decade burnishing All3’s reputation as one of TV’s top players, and now wants to oversee its integration into the Banijay fold. She’s hoping to protect jobs where she can – though Deadline has revealed several exits in the distribution team, where duplication is heavy – and she likes the scale of a wealthy business backed by Jeff Zucker’s RedBird IMI and Stéphane Courbit’s Banijay Group that “isn’t just big for big’s sake.”

Turton is also a proponent of change and is up for the challenge. “It is exciting,” she says. “It’s a big adjustment and that’s fine. It won’t do me any harm.”

She’s also been inspired by Banijay’s ability to supercharge formats and produce them in-house, pointing to how Dutch murder mystery reality hit The Traitors might have rolled out internationally as an example. “If All3 had been in Banijay at the time, we’d have had that going out – bang! – across 25 territories in a week on Wednesday. But we were selling it piecemeal.”

Given how fresh this all is, the focus since July has been hitting the year-end target and integrating with management. Around €50 milliom ($57 million) in cost savings are planned. The long-serving All3 international sales chief Louise Pedersen exited in July, along with others such as All3 group COO Sara Geater. Last week, Deadline revealed Rachel Job was in line for an EVP of Content job Banijay Rights, and this was confirmed later in the week.

At MIPCOM, Banijay Rights will be in town with content from the former All3Media International catalog, with Cathy Payne leading the unit. “Cathy is working incredibly hard to get her team in place for MIPCOM,” says Turton. “She’s got a shiny new Banijay Rights team that hopefully can accommodate for people from both sides assembled in the roles in the right places.”

Buyers might find seeing The Traitors sitting next to Survivor branding on the Banijay stand as initially jarring, but they’ll need to adjust fast. Banijay Rights now has a catalog of more than 265,000 hours from a combined business that owns more than 170 production companies. For context, BBC Studios is around the 45,000-hour mark and ITV Studios comes in near 100,000 hours.

Federal future

Back on the production front, Banijay leadership teams have been set in the U.K., the U.S. and Germany. Collectively, the likes of Studio Lambert, Neal Street Productions, Endemol Shine North America, Filmpool, Initial and Two Brothers Pictures are all in the same house.

A key strategic question for the immediate future is how All3’s well-documented “federal” model, where producers remain siloed and independent of each other, can mesh with Banijay’s geographic approach. Turton says people “overstate” the difference and that both companies are led by the same underlying north star: Creative leadership. “Can they develop and pitch, sell and produce the best shows, yes or no?” she says. “That is the only criteria for success.”