Maggie Gyllenhaal’s ‘The Bride’ Is the Embodiment of Female Rage. And Warner Bros. Wanted Her to Tone It Back
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! has certainly made a splash in theaters. The revisionist take on the classic Bride of Frankenstein tale has had audiences talking, and while reviews are mixed, there is one thing that viewers can agree on: Rage is a focal point of the film, especially amongst women.
Arguably, that is also one of the strongest aspects of the film. It’s an ambitious, bloody, monstrous nightmare of a film that’s successful in some ways, less so in others. Stars Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale are the beating dead hearts of the film in a shockingly tender revised look at the iconic relationship. The Bride is the woman we all are inside, the one fed up with men thinking they have ownership, tired of being forced to play their little games.
One thing that was not shied away from was the film’s violence, particularly the sexual violence. In an interview with The New York Times, Gyllenhaal said that test screenings took issue with it, with one Warner Bros. boss telling her “You cannot have Frankenstein lick black vomit off the Bride’s neck. It’s just too much. You can’t do it.”
“I wonder if you had been a man making this movie, if you would have had the same response.”
One thing Gyllenhaal made sure to do was not desensitizing any of the violence depicted in the film. Every kill had a purpose and a consequence, with no one person being a random unnamed victim.
“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 said. Which is true–the film goes to great lengths to justify, in a way, every killing. The same goes for the sexual violence.
“Because it’s a big studio movie, we tested and tested it,” Gyllenhaal added. “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 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.”
Ultimately, some of the violence was removed from the final cut, said Gyllenhaal, “So what you’re seeing is even a little bit pulled back from what was originally in the movie.”
The Bride! is out in theaters now.
(featured image: Warner Bros.)
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