From Maggie Gyllenhaal (Academy Award-nominated writer/director of The Lost Daughter) and starring Academy Award nominee Jessie Buckley and Academy Award winner Christian Bale comes THE BRIDE! A bold, iconoclastic take on one of the world’s most compelling stories.
A lonely Frankenstein (Bale) travels to 1930s Chicago to ask ground-breaking scientist Dr. Euphronious (five-time Oscar nominee Annette Benning) to create a companion for him. The two revive a murdered young woman and The Bride (Buckley) is born. What ensues is beyond what either of them imagined: Murder! Possession! A wild and radical cultural movement! And outlaw lovers in a wild and combustible romance!
Leading up to the exciting release of The Bride! in Australian cinemas on March 5, a brand-new, very stylish trailer was released. Nick L’Barrow was one of the select global journalists to join a press conference with director Maggie Gyllenhaal to celebrate the release of the trailer, and hear Gyllenhaal break down some of the incredible things audiences will get to see in March…
When the idea of The Bride! first came to Maggie…
Maggie Gyllenhaal: If I want to go big, what story is it going to be? And I was at a party and I saw a man with a tattoo on his whole forearm of The Bride of Frankenstein, and I was like, huh. It just hooked me and people have been pitching me things, like different ideas, different IP, even just bouncing things and nothing was sticking. And I saw this tattoo and I was like, oh yeah, have I even seen that movie? I know the image, I know the character. And I went back home. I was doing press in LA and I went back to my hotel room and I looked her up online and I was like, right. And the Elsa Lanchester, original Bride of Frankenstein, just has this impact. The way she looks … Something about her is formidable. And then I watched the movie, which I hadn’t seen, and I realized she doesn’t speak. And maybe this is going to get to questions later, so I don’t want to get too off track, but what I thought was really interesting was here’s this movie called The Bride of Frankenstein, which is really not in any way about The Bride of Frankenstein, and yet Elsa Lanchester makes this impact, even though she’s in the movie for three minutes and doesn’t speak. Why? Well, because she’s kinda badass.
On the dramatic change in tone and style from The Lost Daughter to The Bride!…
Maggie Gyllenhaal: Well, I think when I made The Lost Daughter, which just came, I mean it was a lot of work, obviously, but it came very naturally. I was interested in the book, I wrote the script, I cast it, put it together. It was a tone and a feeling that came very naturally to me. I noticed that telling the truth about something, which is what we did in that movie, and something that was a little bit taboo, it hit a nerve. I mean, it’s a small movie and maybe it hit a small nerve, but it did. I could feel it. And I wondered, after that experience, seeing that happen, what would happen if I tried to tell the truth about something else and do it in a big pop way? Would that hit a nerve? What kind of nerve? In this case, it was something else that was on my mind, which is the monstrous aspects inside of every single one of us. I see it in myself, I see it in other people, and I thought, well, what if we really got down to it and told the truth about that, but did it in a way that was hot, did it in a way that was big and hot.
On the stylistic inspirations behind the look of The Bride!…
Maggie Gyllenhaal: I was interested in subverting a classic movie style. So yes, Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands and even Metropolis. And I think about a movie like Wild at Heart that does subvert those classic movie thingsin a David Lynch way, which is different than my way.
Stylistically, I don’t know, to be honest, man, I just 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. And so what’s nice about that and what’s also very vulnerable about that and about putting the movie into the world is that it comes from me in a very, very open way.
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. Yeah, the movie’s totally punk. And at the same time, I remember when I first started working with Christian, he started sending me images and even videos of Sid Vicious, and it’s where, yeah, I can’t give too much away, but yeah, 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. I loved those references. I loved that he was thinking that way. I do love Frankenstein as punk, and at the same time, there’s a whole new other kind of punk, which is referenced in your question. Yes, I think, in fact, making this movie where The Bride of Frankenstein is the center. So many people stop me on the street, or so many people. Friends of mine say, “Oh yeah, you made Frankenstein.” And I say, as gently and nicely as I can, “No, I didn’t. I made The Bride of Frankenstein.” And I think even that, in some way, has a punk aspect to it.
What made Jessie Buckley the right fit for The Bride…
Maggie Gyllenhaal: Well, I had worked with Jessie in The Lost Daughter, in my first film. She is really brilliant in that movie, and I loved her and I knew, and I think we both knew when we worked together that we were really kindred spirits. And as a director, 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 talked to her like I talked to myself. It was 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. And so I just tried to think of no one and just imagine anything. 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.
And Christian Bale as Frankenstein…
Maggie Gyllenhaal: I just let my mind wander to who is Frankenstein? Who is my Frankenstein? My Frankenstein is, I really pulled from the book in some ways, in that Frank in the book is like, he’s so feeling, he’s so vulnerable. He’s so full of need and hunger, and he’s also so smart. I mean Frankenstein in the book just hangs out in a barn and listens to people and learns French. That’s hard to do. And so I needed somebody with all of those characteristics and also tough. Also, he does some fucked up stuff, this monster, as monsters do. And as I would say, we all do. So I needed someone that could hold all of that, same thing, a massive aspect of, and to be able to hold the monstrous in a way that lets us look at it and go, yeah, okay, I don’t bash people’s heads in personally, but there’s parts of me that have that kind of rage.
On utilising the IMAX format in a new way for The Bride!…
Maggie Gyllenhaal: I really have gotten really curious and interested and learned so much about IMAX. So Larry, my cinematographer, started to speak to me about it before we started shooting, or even really started thinking about the visuals in the movie. To be completely honest with you, I think I’d seen one movie in IMAX before this, and I think it was on a school trip at the Natural History Museum. I was just not someone who thought in IMAX or had much experience of it. So I started to learn about it because I was curious and … Larry and I started to then imagine our own use of IMAX and the purpose for it. Like I said before, to me, I want everything to be aesthetically appealing to me, even if it’s ugly, to fit into something that’s appealing, but it has to come from story, otherwise who cares? So basically shooting something for IMAX really means, at least in my understanding of it, that we’re changing aspect ratio, that we’re sometimes shooting in 2:39, which is the native aspect ratio for our film, which is like widescreen. And then that if we want to in most IMAX theaters, we can then jump vertically to 1:90, and in just a couple super special IMAX theaters, we can go all the way to a 1:43 aspect ratio. So we started in a very horizontally long one, and then we can build to 1:90, we can build to 1:43. And to me, my question was, well, why? Why grow vertically? And I know that for some really incredible filmmakers, they’ve said, “Okay.” I think in Dune 1, I think, I’m not sure, I’m a huge Denis Villeneuve fan, major fan. I think that he was like, “All right, let’s just grow when we go outside. Let’s just grow for exteriors.” That’s a formula. That’s a way of doing it. For me, I was like, okay, well what’s … The emotional reason? And in my film, I started out with the idea that we would grow when we moved into someone’s mind. The movie has a lot of magic in it, as you can imagine, because we’re bringing people back to life. I mean, it’s a mythological concept. So when we went into someone’s dream life, when we go into someone’s mind, when we hit the magic, we would grow. And it was particularly interesting because we shot anamorphically. So on anamorphic, you can only have our native 2:39 aspect ratio. I know I’m getting technical here, but it’s interesting. So we had to choose beforehand when we would shoot on spherical lenses because on spherical lenses, we could grow vertically. And the other thing I wanted to do, and really, I promise I’ll stop in one second. But what I wanted to do is I hadn’t seen, and I went to IMAX and asked if I could see examples of where, instead of just jumping vertically, and I think most people try to do it so you don’t even notice. I wanted to know what would happen if you grew it, if you animated it. There are examples of doing it, but what they told me, which I thought was amazing, is that it hasn’t been done like this before, in the way that we animate it. And what’s cool to me about that is by being a beginner, by coming at it as a real beginner, by going, “Okay, I don’t know about this and I’m going to learn about it,” my imagining of what IMAX could offer ended up being something that has never been done before.
