Maggie Gyllenhaal on The Bride! – “With Jessie, I just talked to her like I talked to myself... We were really kindred spirits"

Maggie Gyllenhaal has made a monster movie that is, at heart, a love story. The actress-turned-director speaks about it less as a reinvention of a classic myth, than as a continuation of a question she has been asking herself for years, about what happens when you tell the truth about something people are not used to seeing.

When she directed The Lost Daughter, adapted from Elena Ferrante’s novel about a disaffected mother, she noticed the force of the reaction it evoked in audiences.

“I noticed that telling the truth about something,” she says, “which is what we did in that movie – and something that was a little taboo – hit a nerve. I could feel it.”

That sensation became the starting point for what followed. Not an urge to repeat the same tone, but to test whether the same kind of honesty could survive a much bigger, louder container.

“I wondered, after that experience, what would happen if I tried to tell the truth about something else, and do it in a big pop way?” Gyllenhaal considers. “Would that hit a nerve – and what kind of nerve?”

The subject she found herself circling this time was not motherhood, but what she calls the monstrousness that exists in ordinary people.

“It was something else that was on my mind, which is the monstrous aspects inside of every single one of us,” she reflects. “I see it in myself, I see it in other people. I thought, what if we really got down to it and told the truth about that, but in a way that was big and hot.”

The film that grew out of that impulse was The Bride!, her reimagining of the Frankenstein myth. She recalls watching James Whale’s 1935 film The Bride Of Frankenstein for the first time and being unsettled by what she saw.

“The Elsa Lanchester, original Bride Of Frankenstein just has this impact, it’s formidable,” says Gyllenhaal. “Then I watched the movie, and I realised she doesn’t speak.” The film is named for her, yet she is barely present, appearing for a few minutes before disappearing back into myth. “She wakes up and says no. That’s basically what she does, and that’s unusual.”

The refusal stayed with the director, and has become her film’s central pivot.

“What if she comes back, and she has her own needs and agenda, and her own wants and terrors?” she says. “That’s what this movie really gets into.”

Jessie Buckley in The Bride!

The film also explores fame, fantasy and projection.

“Frankenstein’s so lonely,” she says. “He doesn’t have anyone to talk to, and his primary relationship is with a movie star, because a movie star is someone you can imagine you have a relationship with, and they don’t know.”

The 1930s offered the right combination of fantasy and artifice. It was an era when cinema itself offered a promise – that anything could be projected on a large enough canvas to feel real.

“The movies are so fantasy,” says Gyllenhaal. “A lot of the movie is about the difference between fantasy love, fantasy looks, fantasy sex, fantasy everything, versus reality – and what is the real pleasure of a love affair that’s based in reality.”

Still, the director resists treating the decade as something to be recreated faithfully.

“It is set in the ‘30s, but it’s not exactly set in the ‘30s,” she says. “It’s like the ‘30s by way of downtown New York in 1981, so it’s a ‘30s that comes out of my imagination.”

When Gyllenhaal talks about style, she is wary of sounding too referential, as though the film were simply a collage of influences, yet certain touchstones recur.

PUNK ASPECT

“I was interested in subverting a kind of classic movie style,” she says. “So yes, Bonnie And Clyde, Badlands and even Metropolis. And I think about a movie like Wild At Heart that does subvert those classic movie things in a David Lynch way, which is different than my way.”

The word ‘punk’ keeps coming up around the film, sometimes as praise, sometimes as shorthand for its refusal to behave. Gyllenhaal seems amused by the elasticity of the term.

“I do think the movie is punk,” she says. “But is punk just a celebration of something that doesn’t fit easily into a box? Then yeah, totally.”

Christian Bale, who plays Frankenstein, sent her images of Sid Vicious early in their collaboration, a more literal strain of reference that she enjoyed. At the same time, Gyllenhaal finds something quietly subversive in the act of simply insisting on the Bride as the centre of the story. “Even that, in some way, has a punk aspect to it.”

Christian Bale and Jessie Buckley in The Bride!

Casting Jessie Buckley as the Bride, meanwhile, felt less a strategic choice than an inevitability the filmmaker tried to postpone. Having worked together on The Lost Daughter, they already shared a shorthand.

“We were really kindred spirits,” says Gyllenhaal. “With Jessie, I just talked to her like I talked to myself, it’s completely pure.” Still, she resisted writing the part specifically for the Irish actress, worried it might shrink the character. But when she finished, the answer was obvious. “I wrote it and I was like, okay, it’s only Jessie. I still really don’t know who else could have played this part.”

What Buckley offers, says Gyllenhaal, is an ability to hold contradictions without smoothing them out.

“Every human being holds the whole spectrum of feelings,” she says. “So fierce and powerful, and right next to that is the deepest vulnerability – so smart and also totally irrational. What’s so extraordinary about her as an actress is she really allows all those things to be a part of the work.”

That range matters because the Bride is not simply rebellious or strong; she is confused, angry, searching.

“She plays somebody who in her life was not able to get herself expressed before she dies,” Gyllenhaal says. “She comes back to life not knowing who she is. She’s without any point of reference, any compass to figure out who she is. Part of her agenda is just to figure out her identity.”

The exclamation mark in the title is part of that exploration.

“Maybe when you come back to life, you have a backlog of many things you need to get said. When it finally comes out, it comes out with an exclamation point attached.”

Gyllenhaal’s approach is shaped by her own experience, and she is careful not to impose a pre-imagined performance.

“As an actress, I don’t want a director to have imagined my performance before I get there, and then try and fit me into it, it just kills the life of things,” she says. Instead, she describes her job as creating a shared understanding of tone and then letting the actors surprise her.

REALM OF MAGIC

“They surprised me a hundred times a day,” says Gyllenhaal. “It’s my job inside of that to just tip it back a little if it goes off. Like, ‘Let’s just get you right back on, I got you.’”

Even the decision to release the film in Imax came from curiosity rather than calculation. “My question was, why grow vertically? What’s the emotional reason?”

In her film, the frame expands when the story moves into someone’s mind or the realm of magic, and the director chose to animate those shifts rather than hide them. “By being a beginner and just imagining what it could offer,” she says, “we ended up doing something that hasn’t really been done before.”

For all the scale and spectacle, Gyllenhaal keeps circling back to what she wants the audience to feel.

“The movie is a deep, deep love story about a very imperfect connection – and if we’re honest, that’s every love story.”

Love, in her telling, is not a clean arc, but something messier, threaded with pleasure and damage and longing all at once. That complexity, she hopes, is the nerve the film might hit – only this time with the volume turned up.

• The Bride! is in cinemas from today, March 6.