Maggie Gyllenhaal, who helmed The Bride, is revealing why Warner Bros. asked her to cut some of the film’s sexual violence.
During a recent interview on The New York Times’ The Interview podcast, the actress-filmmaker opened up about her experience directing her first major studio film and the challenges that came with that, including The Bride undergoing test several test screenings.
“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,” she recalled. “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.’”
Following the feedback at the screenings, Gyllenhaal said Warner Bros. “asked to take some of” the violence out, which is why the final cut is “a little bit pulled back from what was originally in the movie.” She also remembered Pam Abdy, who runs Warner Bros. Pictures with Mike De Luca, once telling her, “‘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.”
However, the director had a specific reason for how she wanted the violence to be depicted in the film, even if it “is very hard to watch,” because that’s reality.
“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,” she explained. “There’s the storm-trooper 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, “But I 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, starring Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale, is a reimaginging of 1935’s The Bride of Frankenstein. The cast also includes Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard and Annette Bening.
Overall, Gyllenhaal said helming her first studio film “was difficult, but not in a bad way. It was just very new for me,” adding that she loved working with Abdy because “she understood me and understood what I was saying.” She made her feature directorial debut with the 2021 Oscar-nominated film The Lost Daughter.
The Bride hits theaters on March 6.
