Photos from the Canadian premier of The Avengers. Richard with special guests Mark Ruffalo and Cobie Smulders at the Scotiabank Theatre in Toronto!

Simon Curtis knew something special was happening on the set of My Week with Marilyn. The movie, about the tumultuous days Marilyn Monroe spent in England making The Prince and the Showgirl with Laurence Olivier, has been generating considerable Oscar buzz for its star Michelle Williams.

“I did think, ‘My goodness, she’s doing something really wonderful,’” he says.

Academy handicappers are already predicting Williams—who has been nominated twice before for Brokeback Mountain and last year’s Blue Valentine—will give boldface names like Meryl Streep and Glen Close a run for the Oscar gold.

“Oscars do often go to actors playing real people,” Curtis adds.

The director, who is best known for his television adaptations of classics, says he was excited to meet his future star.

“I met Michelle a year before we started shooting and I remember going to meet her in upstate New York,” he says, “and I remember sitting on the bus coming back to the city just praying she would say yes. I really liked her as a person. I loved the way she thought about the script; talked about the script.”

He admits that her recent work has been “lower key, less exuberant than you would imagine Marilyn to have been,” but adds, “a great actor takes on challenges.”

The challenge here was to essentially play Monroe as a multifaceted character bundled into one body.

“What became very clear very quickly was that this was at last three Marilyns,” he explains. “It’s the Marilyn of the press conferences, the song-and-dance Marilyn if you like. The private Marilyn behind the curtain, which interested me and Michelle very much and the character she was playing in The Prince and the Showgirl, Elsie.”

Apparently even when the cameras weren’t rolling Williams was up to the challenge.

“[Early on] they told me Michelle was ready in her dressing room so I went to collect her,” he says, “to walk her back to the soundstage. She was in Marilyn’s old dressing room at Pinewood Studios, walking the same corridors that Marilyn herself would have walked to the soundstages to work with a great English cast and I saw jaws dropping when the crew saw Michelle as Marilyn. Michelle is a gorgeous woman and jaws are dropped aplenty just because of her presence but this was something extra. She became Marilyn.”