Sold as a Bonnie and Clyde-esque take on a Universal Monsters movie, it stands to reason that new horror-romance The Bride is... pretty violent. Its '30s setting makes way for gun-toting gangsters while Christian Bale's "Frank" and his newly resurrected lover have intolerant punks and the police to worry about.
Given all that and the fact it's a big-budget flick, writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal says they "tested and tested it" with audiences before finalizing the finished product – and that some scenes were "pulled back" after some viewers dubbed them too nasty.
"So fascinating, and one of the things that they brought up was the violence: Is it too violent?" Gyllenhaal explained on The New York Times' The Interview podcast. "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.'
"There's the Stormtrooper version of killing people, where they have white masks on and you don't know who they are. Then there's the version where every single death has a consequence and a cost – every single one."
She went on to say that she was particularly "taken to task" for the film's sexual violence, recalling how a couple of female guests came up to her after the early test screenings to tell her they "don't want to see a woman being violated."
Gyllenhaal added: "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. 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. 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."
Elsewhere in the chat, Gyllenhaal revealed the wild note Warner Bros. gave her after showing it to audiences... which involved a more... intimate moment between Frank and Ida/Penny (Jessie Buckley).
"I loved working with Pam Abdy, who runs Warner Bros. with Mike De Luca," she gushed. "There would be times where she would be like: 'Maggie, you cannot have Frankenstein lick black vomit off the Bride's neck. It's just too much. You can't do it.' But she understood why I wanted it."
Also starring Annette Bening, Peter Sarsgaard, and Penélope Cruz, The Bride! releases on March 6. While we wait, check out our picks of the best horror movies or our guide to the most exciting upcoming movies still to come.
