Mary Bronstein on the Primal Screams of Humans and Hamsters in ‘If I Had Legs I’d Kick You’

It’s probably low on the list of truths universally acknowledged, but you cannot direct hamsters. 

The fact that the small rodents do not care for marks, blocking, or the importance of making a shooting day is one of the many challenges that writer and director Mary Bronstein set for herself to pull off in the Oscar-nominated “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.” But there are opportunities, in both filmmaking roles, for catharsis — and for hamster carnage. 

Enter Smores, the hamster that struggling mother Linda (Best Actress nominee Rose Byrne) buys for her sick daughter (Delaney Quinn) out of desperation. Linda, of course, immediately regrets the purchase, even before they can get the critter back to the seaside motel where they’re staying because of a catastrophic (and possibly existential) apartment leak in their own home.

Smores meets a grizzly fate when he gets loose in the car, and then bolts across the road in a doomed bid for freedom. The sequence is a loadstone for the tone of “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” — darkly, absurdly funny, sharply claustrophobic, and with a kind of poignant inescapability to it, too. 

Bronstein based her cinematic hamster on one her own daughter talked her and her husband (“Marty Supreme” Oscar nominee Ronald Bronstein) into buying. “It was one of the worst decisions that ever got made,” Bronstein joked on a recent episode of IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast. “His name was Max. He was an interloper. He would sleep all day, and as soon as my daughter would go to sleep, he would be like, ‘Party time!’ He’d come out, and he would do monkey bars back and forth on top of his cage, like he was bulking up for some plan.” 

What happens in the movie is a fantasy, wish-fulfillment revenge on Max (Bronstein eventually took the real hamster back to the pet shop). Of course, no hamsters were harmed in the making of “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.” But once in director mode, Bronstein and her team had to figure out how to realize the directions she’d written into the script — that Smores, escaping from his box, would scream like Jack Nicholson breaking through the bathroom door in “The Shining.” 

“As soon as I wrote that, I knew it had to be that. And I also knew you could never get a hamster to do that. I wanted to make a practical movie. This movie has quite a number of special effects and surrealist elements, but I wanted it to be practically done. So that means, in this instance, puppets,” Bronstein said. “We have five or six different hamster puppets. The screaming hamster is its own puppet. But Rose Byrne was actually driving the car; we had puppeteers lying on the floor of the backseat and the amazingly talented Delaney Quinn dealing with these puppets. It was the two days on set we laughed the most.” 

Victor Broadley, Alan Scott, and Jason Matthews from Legacy Effects insisted on traveling with the hamster puppets on their lap to make the sequence happen. “They took the puppets on the plane, from LA to New York, on their own dime. We could not afford to fly them out. This is how dedicated they were to bringing this idea to life, and that’s why it turned out that way — because I lucked into artisans that cared about this idea that much.” 

The death of Smores (Bronstein still has one of the puppets in her office) isn’t close to the worst thing that happens in Linda’s awful, rotten, no good, very bad life over the course of “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” but it’s a great example of the kind of technical complexity that can go into visualizing Bronstein’s ideas. That includes a de-evolution of Linda’s clothing in the costume design, the suffocating lack of perspective provided by the film’s choice to shoot mostly in close-ups, or what the casting of someone like Conan O’Brien can do to trouble the cliches that film and television attach to therapy and therapists. 

‘If I Had Legs I’d Kick You’Courtesy Everett Collection

“Therapy on film and television is very frustrating, because it is so clean and so arc-ed out. The therapist is perfect in some way — Judd Hirsch in a cardigan is the pinnacle.  Robin Williams even copies him in ‘Good Will Hunting.’ That’s the same performance. It’s the same therapist,” Bronstein said. “ That guy cares about you beyond the borders and walls of his ethical duties and job. He will meet you in a park in the cold, and he will tell you a personal story. Those therapists that do that are bad therapists. Therapists don’t do that.” 

While listening to O’Brien’s podcast, “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend,” Bronstein thought he really had a great, serious therapist voice, but wanted to complicate it by giving him a therapist character that doesn’t get listened to and doesn’t give great advice. Bronstein worked with O’Brien for about a year over Zooms and “a bootcamp situation” in Los Angeles in order to give O’Brien some of the tools and feedback he’d need to play someone as withholding, burnt out, and insular as Linda’s therapist. 

“ He was so open and trusting and vulnerable to take a risk and do something that he hadn’t done. He said to me, ‘This scares me to death, and that’s why I’m gonna do it.’ That’s the spirit of the whole movie,” Bronstein said. “ I approach my filmmaking in that way where it’s like, ‘I don’t want to— I call it making movies about movies. We all know what a movie is. You can make that movie. We’ve seen that movie. That’s anti what I want to be doing.” 

What Bronstein does, from casting to practical effects to cinematography, is try and find new configurations that make us remember how exciting each of the tools of filmmaking once was, even while telling a story of one of the self-embattled and myopic women on film. “I think we settled into something very boring. Let’s use [the tools]. That’s where the spirit [of the film] was coming from,” she said.

To hear Mary Bronstein‘s full interview, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. You can also watch it at the video at the top of this page, or on IndieWire’s YouTube page.