🎧 ‘If I Had Legs I’d Kick You’ Director’s Most Dreaded Word for a Female Role

Mary Bronstein on her incendiary new A24 movie about motherhood. Plus: Taylor Swift’s Hollywood ambitions

KICK START Rose Byrne, left, with If I Had Legs I’d Kick You writer and director Mary Bronstein. “My film offers more questions than it gives answers,” Mary tells me. (Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for FLC)

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There’s a single word that makes Mary Bronstein’s “spine crumble.” You’ve probably heard it before, too, whether from studio executives offering notes on a script or audiences baffled by a movie character making choices that feel all wrong. It’s the most dreaded L-word in Hollywood: “Likable.”

It’s a word that very much does not apply to the lead character of Bronstein’s film, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, starring Rose Byrne as a therapist and mother whose life is crumbling both because of the pressures of those jobs and her own unraveling mental state. Bronstein wrote the script nearly a decade ago, when her own daughter was undergoing a medical crisis, and spent years afterwards trying to find someone not just to make it, but make it exactly the way she had imagined.

“She’s a character who’s doing things that you’re not going to like sometimes, she’s doing things that are just objectively wrong,” Bronstein, 46, tells me about Byrne’s character, Linda, on today’s Prestige Junkie podcast. “She’s behaving in a way that we’re not used to seeing women behave onscreen, which for me was the whole point.”

If I Had Legs is Bronstein’s first film since her debut, Yeast, in 2008. Her journey since then — securing writing jobs on movies that never got made, enduring endless meetings about If I Had Legs that went nowhere — is indicative of both the difficulty of independent filmmaking and its rewards when a project finally comes together. Since its debut at Sundance earlier this year, If I Had Legs has been praised both for Byrne’s raw performance and Bronstein’s fearless vision, which included shooting on 35mm film and holding the camera sometimes just inches from Byrne’s face. You’ve really never seen anything like it.

When Bronstein first met with A24, which produced the film and is releasing it in theaters this weekend, she told them plainly, “This is the movie. I’m not developing the script.” The company was on board, and in the final film, as Bronstein puts it, the audience can tell that nothing was compromised. “There’s no big brother wagging their finger and saying ‘You can’t go that far because you’re going to lose the audience,’” she says. “There are parts of this movie that are going to lose some people. That doesn’t scare me.”

Hear much more from Bronstein on today’s episode of the podcast, which starts with a conversation about another uncompromising woman of the moment, Taylor Swift. Vanity Fair’s culture and society reporter Kase Wickman, co-author of the new book Taylor Swift: Album by Album, joins me and Christopher Rosen to talk about the theatrical experience around Swift’s new album The Life of a Showgirl, and what her next Hollywood ambitions may be. For much more on Taylor and the movie business, you can catch up with the Substack Live conversation Chris and I had with Hunter Harris last Friday as well. I promise that’s it for our Taylor talk for now, but if you need me, I’ll be listening to “Opalite” on repeat for the next few weeks.