Last year, creature-feature fans got a lavishly gothic version of Frankenstein from Guillermo del Toro. This year, it’s all about The Bride!, featuring a punky take on a familiar character who—per the brand new trailer that dropped today—would really rather not be called the Bride of Frankenstein. Just the Bride, if you please.
Bringing this horror heroine to life is Jessie Buckley, who is currently everywhere thanks to her award-winning Hamnet performance. That acclaim will surely help elevate The Bride! when it opens March 6, but writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal already knew the range of Buckley’s talent when she cast her.
“I had worked with Jessie in The Lost Daughter, my first film,” the actor-turned-filmmaker explained in a press conference for The Bride! attended by io9. “She is really brilliant in that movie. I loved her, and I think we both knew when we worked together that we were kindred spirits. One of my favorite things about being a director is figuring out what language you have to speak to each actor in. And yet with Jessie, I just talk to her like I talk to myself. It’s just completely pure. So I had to keep myself from writing this part for her because I thought if I write it for her, maybe I’ll limit what it could be.”
Clearly, that approach didn’t work, Gyllenhaal admitted. “Then I wrote it, and I was like, ‘Okay, it’s only Jessie.’ And I really still don’t know who else could have played this part. I think it’s to do with her wisdom in knowing that every human being holds the whole spectrum of feelings. So fierce and powerful, and right next to that is the deepest vulnerability. So smart, also totally irrational; sexy, and also sometimes ugly. All of it put together makes a person. And I think that what’s so extraordinary about her as an actress is that she really allows all of those things to be a part of the work, and so because of that, I think it means that many, many people then can relate to what she’s doing. And the Bride, the part that I was asking her to play, needs all of that in order to work.”
Gyllenhaal also talked about Buckley’s character in more detail. “There are a few things that were on my mind when I was making her and writing her and then watching Jessie interpret her. She plays somebody who in her life was not able to get herself expressed before she dies … and so she comes back as someone with a lot to say. And I think that there are a lot of people in the world that I imagine, myself included, which is part of why I made this, that can relate to that feeling,” she said. “This is hinted at a little bit in the trailer: the Bride comes back to life not knowing who she is. And without any point of reference, without any compass to figure out who she is. So what does she need? What is her agenda? Part of it is just to figure out who she is. There’s been so, so many movies, so much literature—so much written, made, thought about—with men in that position. Like, ‘Who am I? Who am I really?’ So that’s another real motivation for her: ‘Who am I?’”
In terms of the film’s style, Gyllenhaal name-checked Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands, Metropolis, and Wild at Heart as some of her inspirations, with an eye toward subverting “classic movie things.”
That said, “To be honest, I just kind of let my mind open up and roam. So of course there are inspirations, major inspirations, but I think I just let it go anywhere at all,” Gyllenhaal admitted. “And so what’s nice about that, what’s also very vulnerable about that, and about putting the movie into the world, is that it comes from me in a very kind of open way.”
Gyllenhaal also spoke about The Bride!‘s setting; ostensibly, it’s the 1930s, but viewed through a more raucous lens.
“As I was writing, I realized Frankenstein’s so lonely, and we hint at this a little bit in the trailer; he doesn’t have anyone to talk to. And his primary relationship is, before we meet him, with a movie star. Because a movie star is someone you can imagine you have a relationship with, and they don’t know you at all,” Gyllenhaal explained. “And also Frankenstein, whose face is so scary and who people run screaming [from] when they see him, he’s safe in the dark. So once I realized I wanted him to have a relationship with a movie star, I thought, ‘Okay, it’s got to be set in a time when there are movies.’ I chose the ’30s because I love it aesthetically, and the movies are so fantasy, and a lot of the movie is about the difference between fantasy versus reality, and what is the real pleasure of a love affair that’s based in reality.”
But also, there’s that punk factor: “It is set in the ’30s, but it’s not exactly set in the ’30s … it’s the ’30s by way of downtown New York, 1981, and now. So it’s a kind of a ’30s that comes out of my imagination.”
Later, she elaborated on that. “I do think the movie is punk, yeah. But is punk just a celebration of something that doesn’t fit easily into a box? Then yeah, the movie’s totally punk … when I first started working with Christian [Bale], he started sending me images and even videos of Sid Vicious … that’s straight-up punk, right? I mean, that’s what you just classically call punk. So there is just an aspect of straight-up punk in the movie.”
The Bride! hits theaters March 6.
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