If I Had Legs I’d Kick You director Mary Bronstein talks to The Contending about creating a biblical flood — and making Conan O’Brien a dramatic actor.

Director Mary Bronstein is fully aware that people are calling her film If I Had Legs I’d Kick You “Uncut Gems for motherhood.”

“Obviously, I have all the love for Uncut Gems because of my husband [Ronald Bronstein is a partner with the Safdie brothers],” says Bronstein, “but it’s also like I feel we need to be past the point where it’s like ‘such-and-such for women.’ We never say it’s such-and-such for men.”

If I Had Legs stars Rose Byrne as Linda, a woman on the edge, raising a child with a mysterious illness while dealing with a hole in her ceiling. The camera never shows her child, instead focusing on Linda.

And while some audiences view Legs as anxiety-ridden, Bronstein sees it as heavy with something else.

“It’s dread, which is different.”

“Making a Movie is Like Going to War”

Bronstein describes the writing process for Legs as wonderful because she wrote it as a spec script, so she was “totally free.”

“Nobody was waiting for it. Nobody knew I was writing it. No one was over my shoulder. The first draft of it was probably like 250 pages or something outrageous like that. Then it took me about two years to really refine it into something I was ready to show people, and the script kept getting more and more complicated as the process went on. At a certain point, it becomes almost mathematical. And then with directing it, the only things that changed were logistical things.”

For example, she had Linda scaling a cliff at one point.

“Some ideas were perhaps too lofty or complicated for what I could do, but the main thing that changed really was when I started working with Rose. Just having the character I created turned from an idea into a full human being — that informed a lot of my directing choices as far as performance. Basically, making a movie is like going into war, and there are a lot of battles and some of them you just have to win. My whole thing was that some of the ideas were difficult or uncomfortable for people; I just had to keep them inside myself. I can’t worry about that or else I’m gonna end up changing it into something that isn’t true for me.”

“I Wanted a Biblical Flood”

For the gaping hole in Linda’s ceiling, Bronstein only had two chances to get it right. The set had two ceiling panels that were pre-sliced but not broken, crashing from the weight of the water into a bedroom set built in a studio with a moat around it.

“I wanted a biblical flood. So much hinges on that working. If that doesn’t work, I don’t know what I would have done. But also, all of the special effects you see are practically done, and that was the approach I wanted to take on this film. It’s the harder approach, but I felt like it was the right one. It needed to be visceral.”

But creating a biblical flood wasn’t her only major feat: She also turned Conan O’Brien into a dramatic actor.

“When I approached him with the idea, he spent the whole first meeting trying to convince me not to hire him. I knew he could do it, and what we ended up with was him saying ‘This scares me to death because I’ve never done it before, but that’s why I’m saying yes to it.’ And that’s the energy we approached it with.”

Bronstein worked with O’Brien for about a year, and the gifted improviser stuck to the script, including that monologue about the rats.

“As I was writing it, I knew I was writing something that was kind of unperformable. It’s so didactic and so abstract. It’s like we discovered another gift that he has, and I think when people see that it has Conan in it, they might imagine something different, but no — he’s a dramatic actor in this movie. He’s holding court with Rose.”

“Rodents are Resilient Creatures”

Rodents aren’t just part of O’Brien’s monologue; they’re a theme throughout the film (including the most evil hamster you’ll ever see). Was Bronstein implying that women are a little like rodents, in that they are “resilient creatures”?

“Rodents find a way to survive. Of course, the other rodent in the film does not, but he escapes. In the script, I described the hamster breaking out of the box as like Jack Nicholson coming through the door [in The Shining] — it’s an evil hamster. But that monologue and that line, so few people have asked me about that, so thank you. It is about that. We like to put women in categories, in boxes, in cages, to control them. We like to have power over them, but no matter what anyone does to us, we survive and we have our own power. That’s, for me, what that line really means.”

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is in select theaters.