Next year’s best actress Oscars race is already off to an early start thanks to Rose Byrne’s sustained existential scream of a performance in writer-director Mary Bronstein’s feverish comedy thriller If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.
Byrne stars in the film as Linda, a therapist and mother whose life seems to be crashing down upon her. Her daughter is suffering from a mystery illness that requires a feeding tube and constant care; her husband is unsympathetic and away on business; her patients are suffering peculiar crises; her own therapist has turned hostile; and a leak in her apartment building has caused her bedroom ceiling to explode into a gaping hole, forcing her and her daughter to take up seemingly un-ending residence in an unpleasant nearby motel. In claustrophobically tight close-ups capturing every distraught twitch of Byrne’s visceral and astonishingly detailed performance, the film follows Linda as she flees through an increasingly surreal series of quotidian humiliations, failing to find support or reprieve seemingly anywhere.
In a pair of surprisingly effective and undistracting supporting performances, Conan O’Brien co-stars as Linda’s therapist, while rapper ASAP Rocky plays her motel’s charismatic superintendent.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is Bronstein’s second film as a writer-director, following her 2008 mumblecore favorite Yeast, which starred a young Greta Gerwig. The new feature premiered to strong reviews at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this month and is screening in the Berlin International Film Festival’s main competition next week. The movie will be released by A24 in the fall, with an awards season campaign in the works for Bryne.
Ahead of the film’s bow in the German capital, THR connected with Bronstein and Byrne to discuss the film’s creation.
Mary, what was the creative genesis of the project, or how did the story and vision for this film come to you?
Mary Bronstein So, about seven years ago, I was dealing with some very challenging health issues with my daughter, and it required us to relocate from New York to San Diego for treatment. During the time — eight months — my daughter and I shared a very small, hospital-subsidized hotel room, which was in a really weird motel. So, I was displaced and under so much stress, and I just started unraveling. I kept treating it like it was temporary, even though it kept going on and on. I had no space of my own. At night, when my daughter would go to sleep, I would go into the bathroom and hang out on the bathroom floor because it was the only place I could turn a light on.
At some point, I decided to sort of take control — even though I didn’t know at the time that this was what I was doing — by turning this experience into a piece of writing. When we make art, we do have a form of control. So, that’s where I started. This project started from a very low place.
Rose, I wanted to ask you…
Rose Byrne Hey, do you like my drink? (Holds up a large glass of a neon green liquid and takes a sip)
Is that Mountain Dew?
Byrne May as well be. It’s disgusting. Sorry, go ahead. (Takes another sip.)
What drew you to the role, and how did you prepare for this incredibly intense performance?
Byrne I read the script and it was the kind of script you don’t forget reading. There have not been many times as an actress that I’ve had something come my way that was this compelling. I was obsessed with it. And then Mary and I met, and we were lucky enough to just kind of hit it off. This was the period around the Hollywood strikes and everything in the industry was shifting around so much, so we had a chance to work together on this character for months. I would go to Mary’s apartment three days a week, and we would just sit and talk over every detail, every piece of dialog, every descriptive part of the script, every word on the page. But all of the preparation that we had done together over those months was also there underneath the performance. I’m just really grateful for the whole experience.
Let’s talk about the way the film is shot — its claustrophobia of extreme closeups and handheld shots. Rose, what was it like for you to perform within this aesthetic?
Byrne Mary described it perfectly by saying she wanted to be behind Linda’s eyeballs.
Bronstein On day one, the first shot was a really tight closeup of Linda’s face, and we pulled in and Rose was like, “Is this necessary? Do you really need to be that close?” Because we were shooting on 35mm, so the information you’re getting on film is going to degrade the more you use a zoom. So we were right up against her face and because it’s a film camera, she could hear the camera working at every moment, capturing her.
Byrne It’s a technical adjustment and you just have to get used to it. I just didn’t want to fuck it up. Obviously, I knew it was all going to be very intense for the viewer, but once I saw myself in some of the footage, the cinematic language was sort of beyond my wildest sort of imagination. I was very excited to be part of this aesthetic.
Mary, I’d love to hear about the thoughts that went into casting Rose. I found myself wondering whether you felt that her comedic chops and intense likability would allow you to push your story even further.
Bronstein Yes, 100 percent. When I was writing, it was really pure and I didn’t have a performer in mind at all. Soon when I was done, I was like, “Oh boy, who the fuck is gonna do this?” Because the movie is almost two hours long and the character is in every scene. So, we needed a face that could carry the audience along. It had to be both a fabulous actor, but also someone who could make these micro-choices with the details of their face. I also believe that if you’re asking the audience to go way down to the bottom of the emotional pit with you, you’re going to be helped if the audience has an initial positive reaction when that person comes on screen. And that’s totally the way it is with Rose. Whenever I told someone I was making a movie with Rose Byrne, they would go, “Oh, I love her!” That was so valuable for this film, because there’s a goodwill going in, which gave the character a bit of sympathy that the audience will need to ride out this story. And the movie is as comedic as it is dark, but the humor is really dark. Doing that kind of comedy is like walking on a razor’s edge. Rose is so comedically intuitive and her timing is impeccable.
Byrne Whenever you place a compelling character at the center of a story, whatever their mistakes — or even the terrible things they do — the audience can’t help but to sort of root for them. But I think Mary had a really clever intuition in putting some familiar faces in the film but then asking the audience to have a different relationship with them. Like with Conan as the therapist. He comes on the screen and it feels like a fun hat tip to the audience, but then his character and his performance is something we’ve never seen him do before. It’s a whole new context for him as a performer. And he doesn’t have his TV makeup on, so he looks different and he’s lit different, and it becomes something really compelling.
I was amazed by how quickly he disappeared into his character for me.
Bronstein He had so much trust and just availed himself so blindly to the process. He was like, I don’t really know if I can do this, but let’s try. To his credit, there’s a lot of humor in his character, but he didn’t use any of his usual comedic tools. It turned out that he’s an incredible actor on a technical level. I think he surprised himself with that.
I wanted to ask you both about the movie’s point of view. The perspective of the film seems to be that we’re seeing the other characters and situations through Linda’s distressed, traumatized eyes, so everything is heightened and distorted. I was wondering whether you think that also applies to the way she sees herself — like maybe she’s not actually as reckless and out of control as the movie presents her to be. Perhaps we’re seeing her self-judgement to an extent.
Byrne That’s interesting. I like that way of flipping it.
Bronstein I don’t think I have an answer. From the writing stage on, I was trying to get inside Linda’s point of view. She has main character syndrome in the worst way. When we meet her, she’s already had it bad and is not her optimal self — and she has no idea how much worse it’s going to get. There’s a long history of “woman going mad” movies, but most of them were made by men. So I tried to create this from my experiences by getting really specific, so that people would be able to relate to it more generally. So yeah, we’re in Linda’s psyche and we’re seeing the way she’s seeing. Is her daughter’s doctor really being that mean to her? It seems like it — but who knows? Is the hole in her apartment ceiling really that unmanageable, ever-changing, and scary? I don’t have the answers to those questions, because we’re in Linda’s mind with her. That’s why we never see the daughter until the very end — because Linda is not really seeing the child. The child is just another way that she feels she’s being put upon — it feels to her like another obligation or obstacle that’s victimizing her. I wanted the audience to feel in a really expressive way how Linda is increasingly getting paranoid, depressed, defiant and all of these things. But if we had shown the little girl, all of our sympathies naturally would go straight to that little girl. We’d be worried about how the mom is affecting her. How could we not? It was a really radical choice to have the little girl with Linda all the time but never to show her. But it was essential to getting the audience inside Linda’s perspective to question how they feel about her.
How do you feel about her?
Byrne We love her.
Bronstein We spent so much time with Linda that she’s like a real person to us. Anything she does in the film, we can show up and defend. But if someone feels she’s unlikable, that’s great. We were very interested in pushing the audiences to have a dialog with themselves, of like, “Well, why did I dislike her?” I think the answers to that question will be fascinating.
