Maggie Gyllenhaal joined The New York Times’ “The Interview” podcast to discuss her latest directorial effort, “The Bride” and revealed how the studio test screening process took her to task over the movie’s depiction of violence and sexual violence. Gyllenhaal wrote and directed “The Bride,” a revisionist look at “The Bride of Frankenstein” that stars Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale.
“There’s sexual violence. There’s violence. Because it’s a big studio movie, we tested and tested it,” Gyllenhaal said. “We had big screenings in malls, where people came to see it, which I had never been a part of as an actress or a director before. So fascinating. And one of the things that they brought up was the violence: Is it too violent? And I was talking about it with a girlfriend of mine, who said — and she wasn’t being reductive — ‘I wonder if you had been a man making this movie, if you would have had the same response.’”
Gyllenhaal said Warner Bros “asked to take some” of the violence out of the movie during test screenings, “so what you’re seeing is even a little bit pulled back from what was originally in the movie.” She made it a priority during the movie’s production not to desensitize any of the violence depicted in the movie.
“One of the things that was important to me is that everybody who is killed, is hurt — we, at least for a moment, get to know them,” Gyllenhaal said. “There’s the Stormtrooper version of killing people, where they have white masks on and you don’t know who they are. And then there’s the version where every single death has a consequence and a cost — every single one.”
Gyllenhaal continued: “I [also] want to talk about the sexual violence, because that’s another thing that I have been taken to task for… in the test screenings. I had a couple of women say, ‘I don’t want to see a woman being violated.’ And I think, I also don’t want to see that. And yet that is a major reality in the culture that we’re living in — just in the time I was cutting this movie, how much wildly disturbing brutality against women there has been in the world. And so if we’re going to see it, we need to see it in a way that is very hard to watch, because it is very awful. And if you know anything about me, if you looked at any of my work, even starting with ‘Secretary’ when I was 22, this is something that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about. I am sure that I have been thoughtful about this particular subject, and yet it will be hard to watch. I think we can take it.”
“The Bride” is Gyllenhaal’s second feature directorial effort. Her debut was 2021’s “The Lost Daughter,” which earned her an Oscar nomination for best adapted screenplay, plus acting noms for Olivia Colman (best actress) and Jessie Buckley (best supporting actress). With “The Bride,” Gyllenhaal entered the world of studio filmmaking for the first time.
“Yeah, it was difficult, but not in a bad way. It was just very new for me,” Gyllenhaal told The Times. “I loved working with Pam Abdy, who runs Warner Bros. with Mike De Luca. She understood me and understood what I was saying. And there would be times where she would be like: ‘Maggie, you cannot have Frankenstein lick black vomit off the Bride’s neck. It’s just too much. You can’t do it.’ But she understood why I wanted it.”
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“The Bride” opens in theaters March 6. Head over to The New York Times’ website to read her full “The Interview” discussion.
From Variety US