The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of The Bride!

That dance number was incredible! What was it like to direct a big dance number?
Maggie Gyllenhaal: That dance number required a very specific tightrope walk. The way we shot it and the way we choreographed it took a lot of care, forethought, and then a lot of work. But you know, it was also an immense pleasure. Three cameras, two-hundred extras, a massive, beautiful room. We had all these New York dancers letting their monster out. It was a terrifying pleasure.

the thing that makes their love possible is the monstrousness

How did you prepare everyone for it during pre-production?
With all the people that I work with, with my crew, with my actors, what we’re trying to do in prep is to get on the same page, and also to create real love and trust and respect. I think actors work so much better when they feel loved and seen, and I think it’s the same for production designers, for costume designers, for DPS, for editors. My ultimate goal is to make a space where we start off on the same page, and then once we start shooting, we have created enough respect and trust that people feel free to go to the edges of what they know about themselves and actually learn something on screen, as opposed to acting like they’re learning something on screen.

Can you talk about how you approached using lenses in this movie, and how that compares to your relationship with lenses on The Lost Daughter?
When I started to prep The Lost Daughter, which was during pre-vaccine COVID, I was for the very first time in my life prepping with a cinematographer. I didn’t know what that meant. Hélène Louvart shot that film. She’s very experienced, totally brilliant. We began the process on Zoom and during that prep, I thought, I don’t care about lenses, I don’t care about aspect ratio, I don’t care about light. What I really care about is emotional reality and storytelling, communicating this complicated story. Then we start prepping. And she said to me, how do you imagine the light in this first scene, page one? And at first, I thought, oh, I don’t know about light. She said, no, just tell me what you imagine. And in fact, as soon as I opened my mind to thinking that way, I was incredibly specific about how I imagined the light. It became a very exciting collaboration. I think we had five lenses. We had no dolly track. We had so little money and so little to work with. I started to learn about my aesthetic and my vibe.

With this film, we had Technocranes, we certainly had dolly tracks, we had all sorts of lenses. We have so many tools to play with and so much expertise in the hands of the people who I’m working with. The VFX was a whole new world. It was a major learning trip. I felt like I was becoming fluent in a language that I had just learned how to speak while working on this movie. And I needed that language in order to get what I wanted on the screen. For instance, I found that I love long lenses. My editor used to joke that I should be a bird watcher, and my cinematographer made a dirtier joke about my love of long lenses! I find that it’s good for trying to get into someone’s mind. In the very beginning when they first burst into that ballroom, you see the whole room, and you see all the people. And then a change happens. Something magic happens when they’re looking at each other across the room. That’s the long lenses.

Could you talk a bit more about the learning curve in creating the production design for this particular period, along with the VFX?
I had originally set it in a different time, but about halfway through I decided to set it in the thirties because I wanted Frank’s primary relationship to be with a movie star because he’s so lonely and so alienated. He imagines that he’s got this real relationship with this guy who of course doesn’t know who Frank is. It had to be set in a time where there were movies, and the movies of the thirties are so based in fantasy. They’re delightful. They’re joyful. The clothes are sick, but they’re not real. And this movie, this love story, these people, the thing that makes their love possible is the monstrousness. It’s the reality that is like, you fucking lied to me from the second I was born. And still, I love you. That is a love that I recognize more than the Fred Astaire Ginger Rogers one, which we’ve all tried to fit ourselves into—but I don’t fit. The love at the core of this story makes more sense to me. Bouncing my characters off the movies of the 1930s felt good, felt like it worked. But then, it’s not really the thirties. Part of the prep was that I had to explain that it’s not just the thirties, it’s the thirties by way of 1981 downtown New York, and also right now, and also Berlin. Along with Karen [Murphy], my production designer, we had our own language. We had our own way of realizing, now we’ve tipped too far into 1981, or this is too clean straight-up 1930s, and we don’t want that. We walked that line together because we have a very similar aesthetic and were mutually inspired.  

And regarding the effects, here’s the thing about VFX. Most visual effects language is not my taste. I worked with a very strong visual effects house, and they’d send me beautiful things that were exceptionally good. But it didn’t feel right to me. I wasn’t making that kind of a monster movie. And it took a while with the VFX for me to believe it. The same thing happened even with The Lost Daughter, where we had zero dollars and I had to do little things like make a cricket move and make a worm come out of a doll’s mouth. And it took a while on this film. I’m so into the idea of world building, and it took time to build this world.