Q&A with Mary Bronstein

Q. The strangeness of the world you set up in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is very effective. How did you achieve this off-kilter, hypnotic mood?

A. I wanted to place the viewer — quite radically — in the main character’s point-of-view. We never get any information she doesn’t have, we never see anything that she doesn’t see, or hear anything she doesn’t hear. We’re so staunchly in her reality that there’s no way to reality check against it. I wanted to have the world around her unravel as her mental state is unraveling and create a visual language where the viewer would have to decide: Is all of this really happening? Is none of it happening? Is it all in her mind? Is only some of it happening?

I’m also doing that with the sound. At the beginning of the film, it is quite realistic. But as the movie goes on the sound becomes more abstracted — the clocks become really loud, the baby monitor sounds more demented — to the point where we’re surrounded by a soundscape that puts us in a hole.

Q. Popular stories about mothers-gone-bad are often sensationalized in news cycles, as seen in the film’s references to Andrea Yates. How did these representations of motherhood influence your own take on the subject?

A. I’m fascinated with human behavior and I’ve always been fascinated by the psychology of what happens when someone’s brain snaps. I’ve collected these kinds of stories when they end up in the media ever since I was a teenager. There’s Susan Smith, who drove her children into a lake and then lied about it. When I was even younger, there was Diane Downs, who shot her children and then drove them to an emergency room and said a hijacker had done it. In the media, these women are seen as monsters.

Then, there’s somebody like Andrea Yates, who, to me, is a different case because she is a woman who had a mental illness. She had postpartum psychosis and was told, “Don’t have any more children, because this happens to you every time you have children.” For whatever reason, she had six children. One day, she woke up and drowned all of them in a bathtub and lined them up on a bed. It’s a horrible, horrible, horrible thing.

She called the police on herself and what we see in the movie is the first police interview with her, not more than a couple hours after this event had happened. What always grabbed me was that in the media she was positioned as a monster, but, to me, she is a tragedy. She is a tragedy of people not helping her; of her husband not helping her; of her doctors not helping her; of people leaving her alone with these children when she shouldn’t have been.

Why do we only hear about mothers that are going through these things — and there’s been a few in the last couple years that have made it to the news — once something horrible has happened? Why isn’t this something we talk about so that they don’t happen? Why aren’t there things in place so that they don’t happen? Why do we position these women as monsters when really, they’re ill?

Q. Your film is mostly shot in close-ups, emphasizing its actors’ faces and their most minute gestures. What motivated this choice and what was it like rehearsing with a cast that’d have to lean into such an extreme degree of intimacy?

A. I used close-ups to create a sense of claustrophobia in which this woman’s sense of the world is getting smaller and smaller. I also wanted to leave no room for the viewer to be inside anyone else’s experience.

The movie opens with what you think is a normal close-up, but then the camera dollies all the way up to her eyeball as she’s crying. The reason I open the movie like that is to tell the audience: “This is what you’re in for. You’re going to be dealing with this woman’s face. By the end of the movie, you’re going to know every pore on this woman’s face. I’m going to make you deal with her pain. I’m going to make you look at this woman crying.”

A lot of the time, I think that the scariest thing to anybody — men or women — is a woman who is upset. Nobody knows what to do. It feels bottomless. It feels endless. The degree of upset that Linda is feeling in the movie is certainly bottomless and endless. By doing that with the close-up, I’m also saying that there’s nowhere to go. You have to look at this woman and be inside of her head. I’ve always said that I would have put the camera behind her eyeballs if I could.

Rose [Byrne], as an actor, is the master of the microgesture. Before any of the close-ups, I would always tell her, we’re here [full face], or we’re here [mid-forehead to mouth], or here [eyes]. I’d tell her the caliber of close-up we were at so that she could recalibrate her performance to that close-up, because if I’m an actor and I say, “I’m here” [eyes], I’m basically saying, “You’re acting with your eyeballs.” That’s it, that’s all you’ve got.

Q. What’s the last film you saw and loved?

A. The new Adam Curtis documentary, Shifty.

Q. What’s a project you’d like to make someday, however impossible it might seem now?

A. I would love to make a movie about Cookie Mueller. I’d love to make a movie that centers her in the middle of the Dreamland Scene, you know, the whole John Waters scene. I feel like we’ve had movies about a lot of these little art scenes, but that is not one that has been done before.

Q. If you could choose to organize one retrospective, whose would it be?

A. Chantal Akerman.

Q. What have you been listening to lately?

A. I have been listening to a lot of Joan Baez, and I think it’s because I’m under a lot of stress. Her voice is just so soothing, it’s like a silky bath for me.

Q. What image would you like to end this interview with?

A. The part of a fire that’s blue. When I closed my eyes, that’s what I saw.