Maggie Gyllenhaal said she was asked to tone down the sexual violence in The Bride! after viewers of the initial test screenings felt it was too much.
The horror sci-fi, which marks Gyllenhaal’s second time in the director’s chair, stars Jessie Buckley as a murdered 1930s Chicago woman who is brought back to life by a groundbreaking scientist (Annette Bening) to serve as a companion to Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale). Gyllenhaal’s younger brother, Jake Gyllenhaal, and her husband, Peter Sarsgaard, also star.
Speaking to The New York Times ahead of its Friday release date, Gyllenhaal, 48, confirmed: “Yes, there’s sexual violence. There’s violence.”
She added, “Because it’s a big studio movie [Warner Bros. Pictures] 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.”
Gyllenhaal said a major point of viewer consensus was the amount of violence and whether it was “too violent.”
“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 Lost Daughter director recalled.
“I was asked to take some of it out, and I did,” she noted. “So what you’re seeing is even a little bit pulled back from what was originally in the movie.”
She explained that it was important that all the characters receive proper backstories, even those who ultimately die.
“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 continued. “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.”
Turning the conversation back to the film’s sexual violence, she revealed, “That’s another thing that I have been taken to task for.”
Asked to clarify who had taken her to task, she responded: “Just by the things 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,” Gyllenhaal shared. “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.”
She said that gender-based violence has occupied her mind and her work for some time. “Even starting with Secretary when I was 22, this is something that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about,” she said. “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.”
In early reviews, The Bride! has divided critics, with The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey writing that the “punky revival isn’t as feminist as it thinks it is,” in a three-star review.
The Bride! is out in theaters Friday.
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