Maggie Gyllenhaal “Pulled Back” Onscreen Sexual Violence In ‘The Bride!’ At Warner Bros’ Request: “Very Hard To Watch”

As Maggie Gyllenhaal put her punk spin on The Bride of Frankenstein , she was met with studio pushback on the film’s depiction of sexual violence. The writer/director of The Bride! noted that what is depicted in the movie, now in theaters, is “a little bit pulled back” from the original script after Warner Bros. “asked to take some” of the sexually violent scenes out following test screenings. “There’s sexual violence. There’s violence,” acknowledged Gyllenhaal to The New York Times . “Because it’s a big studio movie, we tested and tested it. 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.'” Related Stories News Maggie Gyllenhaal Says ‘The Bride!’ Can’t Forgo “The Major Issue” Of Consent: “What About Her?”