“I watched [1935] film the Bride of Frankenstein “I didn’t know, but she was only at it for two minutes and didn’t say a word,” Maggie Gyllenhaal recalls. “And it made me wonder, and it made me curious what she was thinking, after she was exhumed and told that she was supposed to marry someone she didn’t know? What was going through her mind?”
And so it began Bride!Gyllenhaal’s second directorial film that gives Bride of Frankenstein her big moment. Set in 1930s Chicago, Frankenstein’s monster (played by Frank, played by Christian Bale) asks Dr. Euphronius (played by Annette Bening) to create a companion for him, while they bring back to life a murdered young woman known as the Bride.
Jessie Buckley is likely just days away from winning an Oscar for her performance in a movie Hamnetplays the role after she and Gyllenhaal worked together in 2021 Missing daughter.
“She was absolutely amazing and spoke my language in a way that I’ve never encountered in the same way before,” Gyllenhaal said of the star at the film’s New York premiere on Tuesday. “I also love working with actors who speak another language, and it’s very exciting. [but] Jessie and I are real sisters and artistic sisters, and have been for a long time.
The director also explained how she wanted the Bride and Frankenstein to look, departing from the visuals from previous adaptations. When creating Buckley’s look, “We knew it had to be iconic, and at the same time I wanted it to be very real and very human. She’s wearing one dress throughout the whole movie — this dress, how do you sweat in it, how do you live in it? And it smears and rips and rips.”
Gyllenhaal continued: “The same was true for Christian, I wanted him to be scary like a monster but very real. I think it’s even more disturbing to see a face that looks like it could have been stitched together – the neck sewn onto the face and then something that looks like a Halloween mask. So we wanted that almost graphic novel to be very lively mixed with very realism.”
Bale, who previously worked with Gyllenhaal on screen Dark Knightshe said when she first sent him the project, he thought “she had written one of the best, most extreme, daring, naughtiest scripts I had read in a long time. I couldn’t believe a studio would put that kind of money into it.”
He went on to credit Warner Bros. Mike De Luca and Pam Abdi for their support of the project, as studios typically “make choices based on fear” and “they make choices based on courage, based on a true love of cinema, based on a love for the filmmakers as well and it really pays off for them.” They’ve had the most successful year and the two of them have really helped save theatrical release films and I’m so proud to be a part of that.” Bell added: “Maggie just steps out of the box, she’s a truly amazing director.”
Bride! — which also stars Gyllenhaal’s husband Peter Sarsgaard and his brother Jake, alongside Penelope Cruz, Julianne Hough and John Magar — hits theaters on Friday.
Erin Kim contributed to this report.
