As Maggie Gyllenhaal put her punk spin on The Bride of Frankenstein, she was met with studio pushback on the film’s depiction of sexual violence.
The writer/director of The Bride! noted that what is depicted in the movie, now in theaters, is “a little bit pulled back” from the original script after Warner Bros. “asked to take some” of the sexually violent scenes out following test screenings.
“There’s sexual violence. There’s violence,” acknowledged Gyllenhaal to The New York Times. “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.’”
The 2x Oscar nominee said she’s “been taken to task for” the original version’s depiction of sexual violence following 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,” she said.
Gyllenhaal continued, “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.”
(L-R) Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale and director Maggie Gyllenhaal on the set of Warner Bros. Pictures’ ‘The Bride!’
Warner Bros.
At last weekend’s London premiere, Gyllenhaal told Deadline that consent is “the major issue” of the story of The Bride of Frankenstein.
“I can’t make a movie about the bride of Frankenstein without consent being really on the table because she fundamentally has no say in it,” she explained. “You could say, on some level, we don’t have much say in being born either, but we’re not born as grown women. And we’re not told that we were made for someone else to marry. … I mean, what about her? And that’s what this movie takes on.”
Set in the 1930s, The Bride! sees a lonely Frank (Christian Bale) travel to Chicago to ask groundbreaking scientist Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening) to create a companion for him. The two revive a murdered young woman and The Bride (Jessie Buckley) is born. What ensues is beyond what either of them imagined: Murder! Possession! A wild and radical cultural movement! And outlaw lovers in a wild and combustible romance!
