If I Had Legs I’d Kick You additionally marks the long-awaited return of a singular voice in unbiased movie. Bronstein first emerged within the mid 2000s with Yeast, a cult favourite costarring Greta Gerwig and the Safdie brothers. Right here, she speaks with Vogue concerning the surprising response to her first function, discovering humor in despair, and what it means to make a “tough” movie about motherhood.
Vogue: You began in theater earlier than filmmaking. When did you understand you wished to make films?
Mary Bronstein: It was a circuitous route, not your typical manner folks get there. After I was a young person, I grew to become obsessive about films. I’d watch each film that an actor I favored was in. Numerous filmmakers have the identical expertise however with a director. Over time, I spotted the identical individual directed these films. That should imply one thing.
After I studied performing on the Strasberg Institute as a young person, I went to Tisch, and later the Playwrights Horizons studio, the place we lined every thing: performing, directing, manufacturing design, voice, motion. Six months in, I spotted that the directing class was my favourite. Each week we’d get an project to write down and put up somewhat one-act. That’s when it hit me: I’d gotten it completely mistaken. I believed I wished to be an actor as a result of I revere efficiency—however I didn’t truly need to carry out. I wished to create characters and usher them up onto the display screen as full folks.
You had been a part of the Frownland crew, which in hindsight looks like a who’s-who of New York’s movie scene—Ronald Bronstein, collaborators just like the Safdies, and cinematographer Sean Worth Williams. How did you discover your manner into that blend?
Actually the week I graduated, I noticed a flyer at Tisch to audition for Frownland, and that’s the place I met Ronnie, who directed the movie and is now my husband. The flyer, I bear in mind to today, had a three-panel Peanuts strip, one of many ones the place Charlie Brown is being tragic. They had been on the lookout for a younger girl to play a young person, however principally the flyer described the kind of individual they wished to draw. I don’t bear in mind all the small print, however one of many references was to The Smiths’ lyrics. I took the flyer so nobody else may.
