Maggie Gyllenhaal, director of The Bride!, reveals that Warner Bros. requested that she remove some of the violence from the film, specifically sexual violence. The film had many test screenings, and the main takeaway from many of them was that the violence was too much to handle for casual movie-goers. In an interview, Gyllenhaal said, “There’s sexual violence. There’s violence. 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.'”

She stated that there was a specific way she wanted violence to be portrayed in the film, and she ended up butting heads with the studio because of it. She recalled Pam Abdy, a head of Warner Bros. Pictures, telling her, “Maggie, you cannot have Frankenstein lick black vomit off The Bride’s neck. It’s just too much. You can’t do it.” Gyllenhaal elabaorated, stating why she feels that violence and sexual violence need to be portrayed on screen. “I want to talk about the sexual violence, because that’s another thing that I have been taken to task for [in the test 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. 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! is Maggie Gyllenhaal’s first major studio release as a director. The film is a reimagining of a subplot from Mary Shelley’s original novel, Frankenstein, following the Bride of Frankenstein. The film stars Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale and hits theaters this weekend.