“If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” Writer/ Director Mary Bronstein on Rose Byrne, Motherhood, and Her Breakthrough Second Feature Film

Mary Bronstein’s long-awaited second feature, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, is a darkly absurd and psychologically intense exploration of motherhood pushed to its breaking point. The film follows Linda, a psychotherapist portrayed by Rose Byrne, as she sinks under the weight of caring for her daughter, who suffers from a pediatric feeding disorder requiring nightly tube feeding.

When their Montauk apartment floods and the family is forced into a shabby motel, Linda’s life spirals further — her absent ship captain husband Charles (Christian Slater) insists she’s not doing enough to expedite repairs, her increasingly hostile therapeutic relationship with her own therapist (Conan O’Brien), and the chaotic presence of motel clerk Caroline (Danielle Macdonald) and superintendent James (A$AP Rocky) all collide in a fever dream of maternal desperation and sleep-deprivation.

Born from Bronstein’s eight-year journey caring for her seriously ill daughter, this film excavates what it means to be seen as a parent when the world is crashing down around you and you’re unsupported. Mary shares her journey on bringing this film to life with Creative Screenwriting Magazine.

Your first film Yeast was made in 2008. What have you been up to creatively since then?

After Yeast came out, I couldn’t figure out how I would fit in to this industry, or even the independent film scene. The work I was making was a lot more hostile than was the trend at the time. But I never stopped writing although I would never know how to get them made. Yeast was completely self-financed. I knew that I couldn’t or wouldn’t do that again.

I also started doing other kinds of writing. I wrote chapters for academic books. I wrote original feminist theory. I wrote about five of those and I enjoyed it. But it didn’t scratch the itch of true creative script writing. It’s a totally different skill, even though it’s still writing.

Mary Bronstein. Photo by Sissey Goold

Then I got into a pattern of writing a lot of things for television, movies, pitches, and other things that never got made. But I was getting paid for it. So I was making a living.

And all the while, I had this idea for If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You. It was growing in my mind as I was experiencing real life situations with my own child. She became very ill when she was about seven years old. She’s sixteen now. I started writing that script in the moment when we were going through that. It took me two years to write. And then it took me four years to find a home for it. I finally did with A24. Then I made the movie.

How did you come up with the title?

I’m a big title person. I love titles. And it’s very different.

Like Yeast, when I landed on that – it was so correct for the film. It’s just one word that popped. This is a very longer conceptual title.

When I was eighteen, I went to NYU. I’ve always been a lover of language. And this phrase, “If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You,” came into my mind, wholesale, at that time. I didn’t know what I would use it for. But I wrote it down.

I never forgot it. Then when I was writing the script, I was ten pages in or so. And I remembered the phrase and was said, “That’s the name of the script.”

What the phrase signifies is that it’s a play off of the phrase, “You don’t have a leg to stand on.”  This Linda character has less than that. She’s got got nothing supporting her, nothing holding her up. She’s under so much stress and pressure. If you just flicked her, she would fall over. But if she was given legs, she would use them for revenge and violence.

Your husband Ronald Bronstein co-wrote Marty Supreme with Josh Safdie. How did this relationship help get your film made?

It’s actually a lovely story. My husband’s first film, Frownland, premiered in 2007 at South by Southwest.

I’m in that movie. We had made that film in complete isolation in New York, not a part of any scene, not really knowing any other filmmakers. We go down to South by Southwest and Josh and Benny Safdie (Uncut Gems) were there with their short films. We met them. A few months after that, I started making Yeast and Josh held camera. Josh and Benny are also in Yeast.

That’s the first time that Ronnie, Josh and Benny worked together. What grew out of that was a real partnership between the three of them. There was a community that we were a part of. It was a very small community, but there were other people making films. We were in New York and it sort of grew.

Ronnie and Josh are real creative partners like Lennon and McCartney. Their sensibilities can be quite different. Josh can be a little more whimsical. Ronnie can be more caustic. It somehow works to make films that really engage with people.

While I was in my “writing and nothing coming out” phase, they were having tremendous success, one after the other with their films. When Uncut Gems came out, that changed everything. Because it was that was the their biggest movie to date that got the most exposure. And it it afforded them the ability to produce other films. And the first narrative film that they set about producing was If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.

Iit was still a long journey even though they had a partnership with A24.  It was not an easy sell to a studio because it’s not Uncut Gems. It’s not commercial. It’s a smaller movie and has a smaller target audience.

But having their support behind it and them saying, “Trust us, this is going to be good. She can do this,”  really helped the movie get made.

Therapist (Conan O’Brien) & Linda (Rose Byrne). Photo Logan White/ AA25 Films

Describe the genre and tone of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

When I first started writing the film, I didn’t set out to write a particular genre. Genres have rules and structure and they have certain creative tools that you must use to help you tell a story in a certain way.

When I started writing this movie, I didn’t I didn’t have one genre in mind, but I knew that I was going to use humor. I knew that there was going to be some devastating drama. I also wanted to use horror elements.

And so, using those three genres, it was really like a tightrope walk, writing it and structuring it so that it didn’t go overboard. If there’s too much humor, it can get silly and undercut the the real emotional drama. If it goes too far into the drama, it becomes a punish. If the horror elements take over the film, then it’s a horror film, which I didn’t want.

It became really calculated and mathematical at a certain point. The way, I saw the movie while I was writing it. It was like a machine. It’s a machine that’s filled up with so much and has a lot of steam inside of it.

I used genre elements like a little valve to release pressure so that the machine can sustain itself all the way to the end. I think if it was a straight drama without the horror and surrealist elements and the humor, it would not sustain itself because it would be too much for the viewer. The machine would explode.

Where does the audience need a little release? Where does it need a little break? Where where does it not? Where can I push it? It took me two years to perfect that in my mind. The key was finding a performer who could do all those things.

And that’s where Rose Byrne came in. I needed the extra element of having a person that everybody likes and has a kindness towards.

James (A$AP Rocky) and Linda (Rose Byrne) Photo by Logan White/ A24 Films

How Did Rose Byrne react when she first read the script?

I got the script to her through her agent. What’s funny about her career, even though she’s been working in the industry for over twenty years, is she never led a film before in this way.

That was something that excited me too as a as a writer and a filmmaker. It’s like, “Let me reintroduce you to them through my material.”

When we had our first Zoom call. And her first question to me was, “Why did you send this to me? Nobody sends me scripts like this.” In my mind, she was swimming in them. “I don’t know if I can do this,” she said. I knew that she could and it became a process of mutual trust.

We did a six week workshop before the production office opened. It was me and her at my kitchen table three times a week with the script. I said, “Let’s pretend like somebody else wrote this and we’re going to analyze it together.” We went from page one to the last page.

Both of us were curious about discovering things in the script together. The way in for her was through her experiences with motherhood. Like a dramaturgy, we analyzed the script on an intellectual level and shared personal stories.

There’s no improvisation in the film. It’s all from the page, which was very important to me. There are some monologues I wrote that I thought I’ll work out later with the actor because it felt unperformable.

Not only did Rose figure out a way to perform them, but they’re spectacular. Also, Conan O’Brien, who had never acted before in a dramatic role, performed that rat monologue which is one of my favorite things in the script. It’s really one of those, what David Lynch calls, “A big fish idea” that just came out of me.

by Staff Writer

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