Maggie Gyllenhaal Opens Up About Receiving Studio Pushback Over Sexual Violence in 'The Bride!'

Maggie Gyllenhaal is opening up about the challenges she faced making The Bride! for Warner Bros.

She is on the latest episode of The New York Times‘ The Interview podcast discussing the pushback received from the studio over depictions of violence and sexual violence in the film.

Maggie explained that Warner Bros. asked her to remove “some” of the violence during test screenings.

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“So what you’re seeing is even a little bit pulled back from what was originally in the movie,” she said, via Variety.

Regarding the testing, she explained that they did quite a bit of it “because it’s a big studio movie” and it was something she hadn’t done before on this scale.

“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.’” The Dark Knight star shared.

The filmmaker said she found it important that “everybody who is killed, is hurt – we, at least for a moment, get to know them,” she wanted every death to have “a consequence and a cost.”

As for the sexual violence, that was something else she was “taken to task for” in the screenings.

“I had a couple of women say, ‘I don’t want to see a woman being violated.’ And I think, 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,” Maggie said. “And 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. And 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.”

The Bride! opens in theaters on March 6. Watch the trailer!