In an interview with The New York Times’ “The Interview” podcast, Maggie Gyllenhaal talked about her most recent film, “The Bride,” and how she was criticized by the studio for the film’s portrayal of violence, particularly sexual violence.
Gyllenhaal is the author and director of “The Bride,” a retelling of “The Bride of Frankenstein” starring Christian Bale and Jessie Buckley.
“There’s sexual violence. There’s 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 stated that following test previews, Warner Bros. “asked to take some” of the film’s violence, “so what you’re seeing is even a little bit pulled back from what was originally in the movie.” During the film’s development, she made it a top goal to avoid portraying any violence as easier to tolerate.
“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,” Gyllenhaal said. “There’s the Stormtrooper 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.”
In conclusion, she added, “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. 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.”
