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Inspiration can spark in the most surprising ways.
Maggie Gyllenhaal joined host Danielle Robay on the Tuesday (March 3) episode of the Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club podcast where she spoke about her new movie The Bride!, out March 6. The film is a reimagining of The Bride of Frankenstein, inspired by Mary Shelley's sci-fi Gothic classic Frankenstein, that explores how the story would be different if the Bride was the main focus and breathes new life into a character who previously held no agency of her own.
Gyllenhaal, who wrote and directed the film, explained how a chance encounter inspired her latest project.
"I was trying to think about what I wanted to work on next after The Lost Daughter, and I saw this guy at a party with a tattoo of the Bride of Frankenstein on his entire forearm. I mean, that's a major commitment to a character, and I was like, who is that again?" she said.
After watching the 1935 film for the first time, she was left wanting more from the titular character.
"I realized she's not really in the movie. She's in it for two minutes at the end... She's literally in the movie for two minutes and she doesn't say one word. I was like, wow, this movie has the wrong title. I was expecting a lot more Bride in the Bride of Frankenstein, but somehow those two minutes made a major impact on our culture."
The concept of The Bride! came from Gyllenhaal's reflections on Shelley's original story and if there were ideas she wanted to write in her 1818 novel that would have been too radical for the time.
"It started to creep up in my mind, what if Mary Shelley had some other things she wanted to say, like what would they be?" she said. "And were they unpublishable in 1820, were they, as we say in the film, unthinkful, couldn't even think them? And what might those things have been, and could we make a movie about that? That's kind of how I got in."
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