Maggie Gyllenhaal was asked to make big change to The Bride
Following test screenings, Maggie Gyllenhaal was asked to tone down the violence in The Bride.
Maggie Gyllenhaal was asked to remove some of the violence in The Bride.
The 48-year-old actress-turned-director's upcoming horror/science-fiction crime film - which stars Christian Bale and Jessie Buckley - is a reimagined take on the iconic Frankenstein bride character and her first "big studio" movie-making experience saw her undertake a number of test screenings, which led to some of the scenes being toned down.
She said on the New York Times' The Interview podcast: “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.'”
Following feedback from the screenings, Warner Bros. "asked to take some of" the violence out, leaving the final cut "a little bit pulled back from what was originally in the movie.”
But although the violent scenes could be "very hard to watch", it was important to Maggie to have them depicted in the way that she wanted because they reflect reality.
She explained: “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.
"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.
“But I 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.”
