How Maggie Gyllenhaal Navigated Pushback Over Violence in Test Screenings for 'The Bride!'

Test screenings are often a big topic of conversation in Hollywood. You want the audience's opinion, but you also don't want to neuter your vision thanks to a bunch of people in the valley telling you one thing or another.

Well, Maggie Gyllenhaal is taking a massive swing with her upcoming directorial feature, The Bride! It's like a horror crime film with really cool visuals and a lot of other outside-the-box ideas to make it unique.

Getting that movie to the big screen has been hard.

The filmmaker recently opened up to Variety about the grueling and eye-opening test screening process and revealed that the film’s intense depictions of violence and sexual violence have sparked some studio pushback behind closed doors.

Let's dive in.

• YouTubewww.youtube.com

The Bride! and The Test Screenings

The Bride! is a revisionist reimagining of the classic Bride of Frankenstein lore. The movie boasts an all-star cast including Jessie Buckley in the titular role, alongside Christian Bale (as Frankenstein's monster), Annette Bening, Penélope Cruz, and Peter Sarsgaard.

This is a movie designed for a wide IMAX theatrical release. The project marks a significant step up in scale for Gyllenhaal, bringing with it the intense scrutiny of the traditional studio test screening process.

For Gyllenhaal, screening the film for large, general mall audiences was a completely new experience as both an actor and a director.

She said, “There’s sexual violence. There’s violence. Because it’s a big studio movie, we tested and tested it.” Gyllenhaal continued, “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.'”

According to reports, test audiences flagged the film’s heavy use of violence and sexual violence as points of contention.

Gyllenhaal had specific reasons for those scenes.

'The Bride!' Credit: Warner Bros.

“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.”

When it came to other forms of violence, she did stop and listen to the people, and then synthesize the note behind the note.

Gyllenhaal said, “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.”

The push-and-pull of studio filmmaking and the process can all be boiled down to one piece of feedback Gyllenhaal received from a Warner Bros. executive regarding the film's gore: "You can't have Frankenstein lick black vomit off the Bride's neck."

It's nice when they're so specific, but it also feels a little arbitrary.

Summing It All Up

The Bride! represents a fascinating case study in modern Hollywood. We have an arthouse, auteur sensibility scaled up to an $80 million blockbuster budget. '

That means studios are looking for a return and a wide hit, with a movie that maybe has choices wider audiences are not used to seeing.

It's cool to see studios taking these chances, and I'm always rooting for hits.

Let me know what you think in the comments.