There have been something like a dozen versions of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein introduced to new audiences, including Guillermo Del Toro’s acclaimed film last year. But this week Maggie Gyllenhaal gets her shot with The Bride!, which stars Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale as classic horror monsters on the run during the 1930s Jazz Age. In a new interview with the New York Times’ podcast, Gyllenhaal reveals that the film’s sexual violence and mature material proved problematic at test screenings, as well as some within Warner Bros.
“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.”
Gyllenhaal talked about how consent and sexual violence have been constant themes in her work, going back to the controversial workplace comedy Secretary back in 2002…
“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 test screening audiences who were taken aback by The Bride! Warner Bros. co-chair Pam Abdy was also hesitant about the film…
“Yeah, it was difficult, but not in a bad way. It was just very new for me. 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.”
The Bride! opens in theaters on March 6th, and without saying too much, I think people are going to love it if they give it a chance.
