Guillermo del Toro isn’t the only filmmaker looking to reintroduce the “Frankenstein” characters to a modern audience as writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal‘s “The Bride” has Jessie Buckely and Christian Bale starring in a new mature revisionist spin on the horror world icons with the setting taking place in 1930s Chicago.
Speaking with the New York Times’ podcast The Interview (via Variety), Gyllenhaal talked about the film’s sexual violence, the R-rated movie going in more darker corners than most would have expected when the project was announced, becoming an issue during test screenings and some scenes even concerned Warner Bros. brass.
READ MORE: 13 March Films To Watch: ‘Project Hail Mary,’ ‘Peaky Blinders,’ ‘Hoppers’ & ’The Bride!’
“There’s sexual violence. There’s violence. Because it’s a big studio movie, we tested and tested it. 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’…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.”
“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.”
It wasn’t just audiences from those test screenings, something new to the filmmaker, that were being unevered by the mature nature of her material, as Gyllenhall mentions that Warner Bros. co-studio head Pam Abdy was also someone that was concerned by some of the seqeuences going over the top such as Frank licking black vomit off the Bride’s neck.
“Yeah, it was difficult, but not in a bad way. It was just very new for me,” Gyllenhaal said. “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.”
When you’re aiming to make an R-rated project designed for an adult viewers there is finding a balance of how dark to go and you have to expect challenging folks on that level with a studio release, you may notice that the mindset is thinking of a general audience reaction given the box office tends to be a factor on that scale of filmmaking. Gyllenhaal is still learning to navigate all that, which is totally understandable.
Feel free to watch/listen to that full exchange with Gyllenhaal and The Interview below, “The Bride!” will be gracing the big screen on March 6 (this Friday) and we’ll see if moviegoers ultimately embrace the new take.
- Christopher Marc
- Christopher Marc
- Christopher Marc
- Christopher Marc
- Christopher Marc
- Christopher Marc
