By LINDSEY BAHR AP Film Writer
Maggie Gyllenhaal had earned a little currency as a filmmaker and wanted to make something big. Something epic. Something honest. Something that wouldn’t just hit a vein, as she’d done with her first film, an adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s “The Lost Daughter,” but burst it wide-open. She wanted there to be blood all over the room — both proverbially speaking and, in the case of her new film “The Bride!” literally too.
What started as a curiosity about an image of Elsa Lanchester’s “Bride of Frankenstein” she saw on a tattoo, evolved, through her wild imagination, into one of the year’s most audacious, electric films. Like her studio brethren “Sinners” and “One Battle After Another,” “The Bride!” is a kind of genre-defying spectacle that’s bursting with personality and full of things that the filmmaker loves. It’s got romance, action, dancing, matinee idols, professional women, big ideas, thorny themes and Jessie Buckley, a kindred spirit who, like Gyllenhaal, is fascinated by the idea of meeting your monster.
“Both Jessie and I … we’re interested in the edges of what we know about ourselves, and the edges of what we know about ourselves in relation to the world and really getting into a place where we can learn something,” Gyllenhaal said.
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s big swing
After working half her life as an actor in Hollywood and on the stage, Gyllenhaal has found her calling as a filmmaker. In front of the camera, her ideas, her intelligence, her creativity were only occasionally valued or even heard. Behind the lens, it was a different story. Her first film was a small one, made for around $5 million, but it made a splash with three Oscar nominations, for her actors, Buckley and Olivia Colman, and her adapted screenplay. “The Bride!” shot her to another level.
“I was curious to know what would happen if I was very honest, as honest as I could manage to be, in a different format, in a much bigger format, in a pop, hot, roller coaster ride of a format?” Gyllenhaal said.
“The Bride!” is an ambitious studio production with major stars, including Christian Bale, Annette Bening, Penélope Cruz, her brother Jake Gyllenhaal and her husband Peter Sarsgaard, a production budget north of $80 million and a wide theatrical release this weekend with IMAX screens and all. As a filmmaker, it was Gyllenhaal’s first time with test screenings and meaningful studio feedback. It was a learning experience that even led to some changes, and she knew behind it all was a champion in Warner Bros. co-chair and co-CEO Pamela Abdy.
“If you’re getting the same note from a group of people, even if you feel defensive initially, or it’s hard to hear, it’s probably something you should consider,” she said. “It was very helpful to me all the way along in all sorts of places to hear the things that were working for people or not.”
How Jessie Buckley transformed into the Bride
At the center of “The Bride!” is Buckley, who by the film’s second weekend in theaters is likely to be a newly minted Oscar-winner. While the anguished mother of “Hamnet” is quite a different role than the Bride, it’s also just further proof that she is one of the most arresting and original actors working today.
But when she first read this script, she had no idea what to do with the character. In the movie her task is three-fold: She’s an omniscient Mary Shelley, a 1930s woman entrenched in a world of gangsters, and a reanimated corpse brought back to life against her will for the sole purpose of being a companion to Frankenstein’s very lonely, very romantic monster, Frank (Bale). She’s also a live-wire full of questions and ideas.
In the 1935 movie, the Bride of Frankenstein is on screen for less than three minutes and doesn’t even speak. In Gyllenhaal and Buckley’s hands, she becomes an accidental revolutionary, a feral, punk vigilante who speaks the truth and runs wild and free with Frank by her side. Buckley gave herself a year to figure it out — a wild act of creation and destruction in its own right. But that’s how she and Gyllenhaal like to work.
“I want to go down to the bottom of the ocean of myself and touch the edges that maybe haven’t been touched for a long time or maybe never have been touched and find a way to bring that back up to the topside world,” Buckley said. “To bring the unconscious back into the consciousness, and kind of like stir the collective, ripple it a little bit, you know? What if I put this thing that I’m scared of into the world and the topside world?”
Made for theaters, and IMAX
The film arrives in theaters at a time of profound transition in the industry, as Warner Bros., one of the last big studios operating that actually supports original ideas and bold filmmaking, stares down new ownership under Paramount. At the film’s London premiere last week, Bale said it feels like, “we’re sort of in the death throes of theatrical release movies.”
Being part of go-for-broke movies like “The Bride!” is “more than having fun,” he said. “It’s like just exhausting yourself in the most joyful way possible because you feel like this might be the end.”
And Gyllenhaal made it to be seen on a big screen, with a big crowd. For her, it’s what makes film such a unique and potent art form.
“Ideally, to see a film like ours, which does dare you to think differently, does dare to let some of the monster inside of you up to the surface, does sort of say, hey, have you ever felt love that looks like this instead of what they tell you it’s supposed to look like? To do that in a room with other people? That really turns me on,” Gyllenhaal said. “That makes me feel like we’re doing something radical and exciting that could have an effect on people’s hearts and minds.”
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AP Entertainment reporter Sian Watson contributed from London.