Filmmaker Mary Bronstein on ‘If I Had Legs I’d Kick You’

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 co-starring 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 out 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 people I talked to who are filmmakers have the same experience, but with a director. Over time, I realized these movies were directed by the same person. 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.