Maggie Gyllenhaal explains her inspirations for 'The Bride!'

“I was at a party, and I saw a man with a tattoo on his whole forearm of the Bride of Frankenstein,
and I was like, ‘huh.” Gyllenhaal explained. “It just hooked me, and people have been pitching me things, like different ideas, different IP, even just bouncing things, and nothing was sticking. And I saw this tattoo, and I was like, ‘Oh yeah, have I even seen that movie?’ I know the image, I know the character. And I went back home. I was doing press in LA, and I went back to my hotel room, and I looked her up online. Elsa Lanchester, the original Bride of Frankenstein, just has this impact. The way she looks … something about her is formidable.”

Gyllenhaal quickly watched the 1936 film, and became inspired. “I watched the movie, which I hadn’t seen, and I realized she doesn’t speak. What I thought was interesting was here’s this movie called The Bride of Frankenstein, which is really not in any way about the Bride. And yet, Elsa Lanchester makes this impact, even though she’s in the movie for three minutes and doesn’t speak. Why? Well, because she’s kinda bada--. Because, well, this is actually a new idea that’s coming to me right now. But she wakes up and says NO. I mean, that’s basically what she does, and that’s unusual.”

As Gyllenhaal explained, the tone of the film drew inspiration from many disparate classics. She said, “I was interested in subverting a classic movie style. So yes, Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands, and even Metropolis. And I think about a movie like Wild at Heart that does subvert those classic things in a David Lynch way. Which is different than my way. Stylistically, I don’t know, to be honest, I just let my mind open up and roam. So of course, there are inspirations, major inspirations, but I think I just let it go anywhere at all.”

The Bride! is set in the 1930s, the era when the original film first came out. But that wasn’t always the case. Gyllenhaal originally meant to go back even further in time. She said “I first set the movie in my mind, in the 1860s, 1870s. Which is not when Frankenstein was set, by the way. [Mary Shelley’s] Frankenstein [is set in] 1820. But in the 1860s and ’70s, there was a big thing about people speaking to the dead. There was the spiritualist movement. There had been the Civil War. Lots of women were losing their children in childbirth, and I thought, so there was a job that was as common as being a therapist. And I thought, well, in a movie about people who have come back from the dead, maybe that’s an interesting time to set it.”

However, Gyllenhaal switched up the time period when she realized she needed a movie star as a character. She said “I was writing, I realized Frankenstein’s so lonely, and he doesn’t have anyone to talk to, and his primary relationship, before we meet him, is with a movie star. Because a movie star is someone you can imagine you have a relationship with, and they don’t know you at all. Also Frankenstein, whose face is so scary, and who people run screaming when they see him, he’s safe in the dark [of a theater]. So once I realized I wanted him to have a relationship with a movie star, I thought, I’ll set it in a time when there are movies.”

Of course, movies existed before and after the ’30, even if that was Hollywood’s so-called Golden Age. Why that time period? Beyond a reference to when the original movie was released? “I chose the ’30s because I love them aesthetically, and the movies [of that decade] are so fantasy everything” said Gyllenhaal. “It’s fantasy versus reality, and what is the real pleasure of a love affair that’s based in reality?” Gyllenhaal added that while The Bride! takes place in the ’30s, it’s not exactly the ’30s. She described it as “The ’30s by way of downtown New York, 1981.”

With that version of the ’30s in play, Gyllenhaal tapped into the punk rock vibes of early ’80s Manhattan as well. With a punk rock vibe in effect, was there any particular punk song that embodied the film? “I would say the Siouxsie and the Banshees cover of the Iggy Pop song, “The Passenger,” both because, just vibe-wise, I think it fits right in with the movie,” Gyllenhaal stated. She added, “They present her as the passenger when that is absolutely not what she is. She’s driving this story.”

Gyllenhaal is working with a truly stacked cast in this film, including legendary names like Annette Benning, her husband Peter Sarsgaard, and for the first time in 25 years, her brother Jake Gyllenhaal. Was he one of her first choices? Turns out, not so much. “With my brother, I will say he was one of the very, very last people I asked. And he plays a character who is a matinee idol in movies. And I asked him because I wanted to make sure it was right for our relationship. I came to realize it absolutely was. And I haven’t worked with him since Donnie Darko [in 2001]. And it was such a pleasure. I would find myself laughing so hard that tears were streaming down my face. I loved it. It is true for all my actors, but of course, there’s a special something with my own brother.

The original James Whale film can’t exactly be described as romantic. Especially as the Bride appears in a mere three minutes of the film. But according to Gyllenhaal, that’s not going to be the case for her iteration. She said, “The movie is a love story. I think the movie is a deep, deep love story about a very imperfect connection. And I think that, if we’re honest, that’s every love story. And maybe that’s another one of the things that I thought. Is it going to resonate? Is it going to hit a vein? Love is a very complicated thing, with ecstasy, pleasure, and also darkness and things that are broken.”

The Bride! arrives in theaters on March 6.