“Mommy is stretchable,” a young girl observes of her mother at the start of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Linda, the mother, bristles at the description, but it’s an apt one. How many mothers are made to extend themselves for others again and again—and how long can they do that before they snap? That, in a sense, is the story of motherhood and what Mary Bronstein’s new film captures with bruising, darkly funny precision.
Rose Byrne, in a career-high performance, plays Linda, a therapist in Montauk barely holding it together as she cares for her daughter, who is suffering from a mysterious illness, and the world collapses around her. Her apartment’s ceiling falls in, forcing her and her daughter into a motel; a patient disappears; and Linda’s clueless husband, away on business, berates her over the phone. All the while her own poker-faced therapist (played with grim restraint by Conan O’Brien) offers no solace.
Following a clutch of recent films trained on motherhood in extremis (Nightbitch, Saint Omer, Tully), Bronstein’s film is an unsentimental new addition to the canon, marked by bold creative choices. The daughter—glimpsed only through her feeding tube—remains unnamed and her face is almost never shown, keeping the focus on Linda’s self-blame, fear, and guilt. While inspired by Bronstein’s own experience caring for a seriously ill child, the film, she says, is “not factually autobiographical but emotionally true.”
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You also marks the long-awaited return of a singular voice in independent film. Bronstein first emerged in the mid-2000s with Yeast, a cult favorite costarring Greta Gerwig and the Safdie brothers. Here, she speaks with Vogue about the unexpected reaction to her first feature, finding humor in despair, and what it means to make a “difficult” film about motherhood.
Vogue: You started in theater before filmmaking. When did you realize you wanted to make movies?
Mary Bronstein: It was a circuitous route, not your typical way people get there. When I was a teenager, I became obsessed with movies. I would watch every movie that an actor I liked was in. A lot of filmmakers have the same experience but with a director. Over time, I realized the same person directed these movies. That must mean something.
After I studied acting at the Strasberg Institute as a teenager, I went to Tisch and later the Playwrights Horizons studio, where we covered everything: acting, directing, production design, voice, movement. Six months in, I realized that the directing class was my favorite. Every week we’d get an assignment to write and put up a little one-act. That’s when it hit me: I’d gotten it totally wrong. I thought I wanted to be an actor because I revere performance—but I didn’t actually want to perform. I wanted to create characters and usher them up onto the screen as full people.
You were part of the Frownland crew, which in hindsight feels like a who’s who of New York’s film scene—Ronald Bronstein, collaborators like the Safdies, and cinematographer Sean Price Williams. How did you find your way into that mix?
Literally the week I graduated, I saw a flyer at Tisch to audition for Frownland, and that’s where I met Ronnie, who directed the film and is now my husband. The flyer, I remember to this day, had a three-panel Peanuts strip, one of the ones where Charlie Brown is being tragic. They were looking for a young woman to play a teenager, but mostly the flyer described the type of person they wanted to attract. I don’t remember all the details, but one of the references was to the Smiths’ lyrics. I took the flyer so no one else could.
The audition itself was more of a conversation—sussing out who I was, whether my personality was something he could work with, and how it might be shaped into a character, versus trying to fit me into a pre-written script. It was revelatory to me as a theater student who had just spent four years breaking down a play into beats. This was something totally foreign to me, but it was so exciting, and immediately I knew that was how I wanted to work. Frownland was really my film school. I would load the film, and whenever I wasn’t in a scene, I made a point of staying on set, learning everything I could.
It’s been a long time since Yeast. I know the reception wasn’t quite what you expected and you stepped away from filmmaking for a while after that. What did that period look like for you?
I remember a very hostile reaction to the premiere of Yeast at South by Southwest in 2008. I was in the front row, and men were sitting there with their arms crossed, staring at me, clearly mad. I don’t know exactly what was on their minds, but if I had to guess, the feeling I got was, How dare you? How dare you interlope, and how dare you make this film? It felt like a challenge to their authority, like somehow my work was better than theirs. Instead of revving me up, it made me feel unwelcome. I retreated. You don’t want me here, so I won’t be here. Looking back now, I don’t regret any of that time away from filmmaking, because that’s why I was able to make [If I Had Legs I’d Kick You], because I lived through some tough experiences and had something to say.
There’s a trap people can fall into if they follow a more traditional path: You go to film school, make a movie, make another movie. But what are you making movies about? What experiences have you actually had besides making movies? I don’t say that bitterly—it’s just a genuine question. I just literally don’t know what I would be making movies about today if I had gone straight down that path. During those years I did a million things. I earned two graduate degrees, one in psychology and one in a specialized field working with sick and disabled children. I worked for many years in New York City’s public hospitals. I had my daughter. Then, a friend and I ran a sort of illegal preschool in Williamsburg for many years.
An underground preschool? New York can always use more preschools, it seems.
It was completely below ground. By the end of it, pregnant women were signing up. I was always writing, too, but never knowing how I would claw my way back [into filmmaking]. Then came a point where my daughter became seriously ill, and that became my full-time job for a while. I was disappearing into the task at hand, which was caring for my daughter. We were transplanted to San Diego and lived in a tiny motel room together, focused entirely on getting her better and eventually returning to New York. But then another layer hit me, and the existential crisis intensified. I realized, Wait—she is going to get better and we will go back to New York. Then what? Who am I?
One night, sitting on the bathroom floor with the lights on—the only place I could go after she fell asleep—it hit me: I am an artist. I am a filmmaker. I am a storyteller. I’d been running, not exactly away, but avoiding that feeling. I didn’t like the way it felt when Yeast premiered and people didn’t get it. I interpreted that as meaning there was no place for me. But then I decided, Fuck it. I’m going to make a place for myself. That’s exactly how I began writing this film—literally in that bathroom, literally from that emotional place.
There’s been so much talk about so-called difficult women in recent years, but you were making raw, uncompromising portraits long before that was trendy—with Yeast and your short film Roundtown Girls. Looking back, do you feel like the culture has finally caught up to what you were doing then?
Yeast has this life of its own now, and I’m always getting requests from theaters to screen it. Young people now are angrier—and that anger is fueling something interesting. It’s not just women; men are responding to it too. In the mid-2000s, that energy just wasn’t in the air the way it is now. There’s also a kind of fantasy fulfillment in it: I can’t be that aggressive in life, but art gives me that permission. The people onscreen can act out those impulses for us, and we can feel it with them.
As women, most of our stories are still told by men. That’s something people don’t want to hear, but it’s true. I have zero interest in making a film that centers a man—about as much interest as I’d have in going to Mars. I can’t fathom trying to say something about what it’s like to be a man, and sometimes I wonder, Why are you guys so obsessed with us? Why are you so focused on figuring us out? Part of it is curiosity, but another less generous way to put it is control: I’ll tell you who you are. I’ll tell you what things are like for you. It’s great that last year a movie with the same budget as my movie won best picture, but I don’t think it’s great that it was a story about a female sex worker, written and directed by a man. I don’t know the filmmaker personally, and I don’t have anything against him. But can we be done with that, please? Why is that still what we want to reward?
In If I Had Legs I’d Kick you, one bad thing happens after another. You crank the intensity up to 11. Some critics have called it too much—too bleak, too chaotic. What do you say to that?
If you make something for everybody, you’re really making it for nobody. Why does it have to be that bad? Why does it have to be a nightmare? Because that’s what the story is and that’s how it felt. I’ve abstracted that reality—through horror, surrealism, and experimental language—but it comes from something deeply real. The answer is: It had to be this way. It could’ve been a different movie, but it’s not.
The question isn’t whether you like it but how it makes you feel. If it made you uncomfortable, why? Why is discomfort so threatening? It’s a movie; it’s not going to hurt you. Why is that feeling so intolerable? Why does this behavior unsettle you? Why does it provoke anger instead of curiosity or empathy? That’s what art does: It reflects you back at yourself. What you see onscreen, ultimately, is you. I love that everybody sitting in the theater is coming with their own life and what happened to them that day and even what happened to them five minutes before. I love to hear people’s interpretations, even if they’re totally different than mine.
Are there any that come to mind that you can share?
That there never was a daughter. The film puts the viewer firmly inside a perspective [Linda’s] where there’s no way to reality check what’s happening. So when someone said that, I realized, of course, that’s one way to see it.
Part of what anchors the movie is the humor, which is often right next to the horror.
I can’t do anything without humor. It’s my biggest coping mechanism. I’m the kind of person who laughs when they’re uncomfortable. There are two ways your body can release tension: laughing or crying. I grew up in a household where it was basically a question of, are you gonna laugh or are you gonna cry? This movie is very much in that tradition. It’s a tightrope walk to get right and one of the reasons I wanted Rose. She has an instinctual understanding of comedy and finds a comedic beat where it’s not obvious. The laughs often comes on the heels of a cry or vice versa, and she can pull that off. The list of people who can do that is very short.
Same with Conan. In our first meeting, he was reading the script and, without giving too much away, saw the hamster scene and said, “Please let that happen” and laughed his ass off. I’ve had screenings where moments like that get huge laughs and others where they don’t get any. It depends on the screening. The film can be watched straight; everyone has a different sense of humor. Mine tends to be pretty ghoulish.
The film’s look keeps shifting—lighting, cinematography—as Rose moves through different spaces, like the motel or her office. I also noticed a lot of yellow—in her sweatshirt, in the wallpaper. What role does that color play for you?
In the hospital, I didn’t want it to feel warm or welcoming because, for Linda, that’s not her reality. The soundscape is actually drawn from prison sounds. I chose sickly yellows that nobody could look good against. They make you look sick. Rose is gorgeous and can wear anything, but that shade of yellow, in that light, is unflattering on everybody. I also use green in the fields, which is Linda’s escape when she smokes weed. But even there, it’s a very particular green, again chosen for its emotional effect. The colors are almost garish, and that’s deliberate. Then we step outside for some scenes and it’s sunny, as if you’ve just escaped hell only to find it’s a beautiful day. That, to me, is offensive, and I wanted to capture that feeling.
The characters interact with food in such vivid and grotesque ways. Rose does this thing where she balls up the cheese from a pizza and chews it with only her front teeth. What interested you about that?
I love food. I love eating. Food is one of the pleasures of life. But in Legs we’re dealing with a child who isn’t eating, so all the food was meant to be revolting. Linda’s got to eat, but she takes no pleasure in it, shoveling that disgusting microwave lasagna into her mouth. Even the peanut butter cups: That’s a treat you’re supposed to enjoy, but she’s binging them. This goes back to my experience of ordering a ton of shit from Jack in the Box and eating it on the bathroom floor, one of the ways that I handled my stress. It was disgusting. There was actually more of it in the script, but I got the note from my husband, who’s always my first reader, that it might be a little too much. And he was right. I have to give him credit for saving you from more disgusting food moments.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.