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.
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