Mary Bronstein Told A24 They Could Only Make If I Had Legs I’d Kick You On One Condition

Mary Bronstein thought her new film If I Had Legs I’d Kick You would be a television show. But when Natasha Lyonne, star of prestige series Orange is the New Black and Poker Face, read the script, that idea quickly died.

“She said, ‘Bronstein,’ – she called me Bronstein – ‘Bronstein, this is not television. You take this and you make it into a movie, and you win all the awards. Go do it. It’s not TV, it’s a movie.’ I thought about it and I was, like, ‘Oh fuck, she’s right.’”

Getting the powers that be in Hollywood to agree was a different story. Bronstein spent two years writing the script and then seven trying to get it made. “It is a dirty word in Hollywood, it’s an art film,” she says. “Art films like this are a dying species – an endangered species.

“I wrote the script independently by myself, and I heard lots of ‘no’s from companies, but I kept going.” When A24 (the production company behind Everything Everywhere All At Once, Moonlight and Uncut Gems, which was co-written by Bronstein’s husband Ronald Bronstein) said it wanted to make the film, Bronstein had one (big) condition. “I said, ‘I would love to make this movie with you. My only thing is that the script is done. This is the script. This is the movie. I’m not developing it. I’m not changing it. Do you want to do it?’” she says. “I was betting on myself, because I believed in the movie that much. And I said the same thing to other companies and they said, ‘No, thank you.’”

By staying firm, even at the risk of her film never getting made, left Bronstein with the ultimate satisfaction for a filmmaker. “I’m sitting talking to you about the exact movie that I wanted to make – that’s awesome. I feel that’s a very rarefied position.”

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is the follow up to Bronstein’s debut feature, the 2008 mumblecore film Yeast starring Bronstein and Greta Gerwig. If I Had Legs opened this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival and is led by Australian actress Rose Byrne as Linda. Byrne’s performance earned her a Silver Bear (the Berlin International Film Festival’s top acting accolade) and is already – as Lyonne predicted – getting Oscar buzz. The film features compelling supporting performances from A$AP Rocky and Conan O’Brien (who Bronstein told to brush down his signature bouffant for the role), but it is undeniably Byrne’s movie.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You follows Linda as she teeters on the edge of exhaustion while her husband is away on a work trip and she acts as the sole caregiver for their child, who has an illness that leaves her with a fear of food.

“I always knew that the film needed to open with an extreme close up on Linda, because it tells the viewer, ‘This is the character that you can see every pore on her face, and we’re gonna be that close with her through this.’” Framed almost entirely in close-ups as Linda unravels, the film is an uncomfortable watch, but ultimately a rewarding – and at times, bitingly funny – one.

While comparisons have been made to Marielle Heller’s 2024 film Nightbitch, a black comedy starring Amy Adams that tackles similar themes, Bronstein sees her new film as being “in the tradition of” the 1977 film Eraserhead.

“ Eraserhead is an expressive movie, not based in reality, about something very real and personal for the filmmaker David Lynch, who had just had a baby and was clearly – through the movie – struggling with that,” says Bronstein. “Like, ‘Holy shit. What did I just do? I don’t want a baby. I am not a father. I want to be an artist. I don’t want this.’

“So he makes the baby this weird, little alien creature thing. Did the baby come out like that? Or is that his perception because of his feelings about the baby? I don’t know. David Lynch is not here to tell me. And if I asked him, he would say, ‘That’s not my business.’”

In Bronstein’s film, Linda’s child is similarly alien, in that you constantly hear her voice without seeing her face. Like Lynch, Bronstein would rather not explain her film, instead letting the audience interpret it for themselves and, luckily, she assures us that there are” no wrong answers.”

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is playing at MIFF.

@marywallwashere