If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is Mary Bronstein’s portrait of a woman pushed beyond her ability to cope after a ceiling leak means that she and her daughter need to move out of their apartment. It’s tense, tender, often funny and stress filled. Rose Byrne stars as Julie who is dealing with her daughter’s mystery illness while her husband is absent. All the small things get wound into the large things and soon Julie is in freefall, professionally, personally, and psychologically.
Nadine Whitney had the opportunity to speak with the writer/director Mary Bronstein about her work after it premiered at the Melbourne International Film Festival 2025.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is currently in theatrical release in Australia.
Screening or Streaming Availability from JustWatch:
Mary, you’ve said your film is Rose Byrne, and you're completely right. I don't think at any stage you let it get beyond her point of view. The shots are very tight on her face. How was it creating that kind of intimacy with an actor?
Mary Bronstein: It was a luxurious joy. I come through to filmmaking through theater, through performance, through studying performance, and also reverence for performance. Rose availed herself to me in a way that most film actors and directors do not have the luxury to do for whatever reason. She was very serious about this performance. We worked together for between three and four months before the production office even opened up, and it was at my kitchen table, and she would come over three times a week for three hours or so. We'd have tea and snacks. I always had bagels. I always had something. She would drop off her kids at school and come to my apartment. She was so serious, and she cared about making this movie excellent in the same way that I did, which is so beautiful, and rare. We became true partners, right?
The work that we did was on our performance. Not rehearsing but taking and analysing the script like a dramaturgy, whatever the session might be. Over this time really getting to know each other. Oh, man, if we ever get into a fight, we know about each other! We are very close friends, and there would be no way that I would have been able to get a performance like her if we were not going to get close in that way.
My vision for it visually is very intimate. We could not be closer, literally, yes, at some points. The trust that she had to have in me, that she did have in me, is something that I will be eternally grateful for. She did what I wanted her to do, and then a million-fold more. If I said sprint, she ran a marathon, she did it, and she was going to do it to the nth degree. The movie became not ta case of, “Oh, it's this thing that I care about, and I'm making you do that.” No, we cared about it together, and that was how this performance needed to be crafted.
Having seen a lot of Rose’s dramatic work, I think it is the best thing she's ever done – it's her crowning glory.
MB: What a wonderful thing. I'm going to tell her that you said that, she is so proud of the performance. She's so proud of it. A wonderful thing to say, yeah, she would appreciate that so much. She wants to do more of this type of work in Hollywood. She enjoys it thoroughly. She enjoys doing her comedic work and doing her television series. She loves it. But, you know, one of the first things she said to me, when I we had our first meeting on Zoom, her first question to me was, “Why did you send me this script?” And I said, “Okay, what do you mean?” She says, “Well, I don't get scripts like this.”
I didn't know what she meant, because to me, she's Rose Byrne, she's got a pile of those scripts. And she said, “No, no, no, no, no. Because you get put in a category, in the box, right? And it's very hard then to break out of the box.” You're a working actor, but you're also an artist. And so, this film for her was fulfilling something, that part of her as an artist which has no commercial struggle to it. It's a creative struggle. My hope is that people will see this film and get her out of the box as she needs to do more of this type of work, because it is, it is in her. Oh, there's more. I didn't tap it out there. There is more. There is more. I can't wait to see what she does next.
Rose was so sad to not be here [at the MIFF premiere], because she's so proud of the movie, and her family came last night, and that was so wonderful.
Danielle MacDonald as well. What a treasure. Oh, my goodness. How you guys turn them out. Australia makes some fabulous actors. I guess there's a whole lot of them, though, and they make it over to the States, and then we get the pleasure of having them. But they're yours, you know.
She's one of ours – we never let them go. They're always ours.
I wanted to talk to you about the thematic resonance of the film. I don't think you even need to be a mother to understand the just the pressure can of one thing going wrong and that one thing tumbling over into every other part of your life.
That one thing going wrong is the cliff face that that she gets when you I'm not going to be able to say this correctly, because I'm paraphrasing, but you have Rose’s character Linda talking about what time is, and it's a series of things you have to do, a series of cliffs, and once you get to the edge of the cliff, there's another one.
MB: It's task oriented, you know? And if she doesn't have somebody telling her how to complete the task correctly, is she doing it wrong? I think that's something that we all struggle with. I mean, I have a theory about art, any form of art, that the more specific you get the more resonant it can be. Some people are mothers, some people are not, some people are women. This is about a very specific thing of having a very sick child. 95% of mothers never will experience that. I think that the more specific you get in a piece of art, the more general it can be related to, if you go broad, there's nothing for you to find, right? There's nothing for you to discover yourself in. Because if it's for everybody, it's for nobody. That's how I feel.
I've gotten a lot of feedback. I've talked with a lot of people who are not mothers, who are 25 years old, who are men of all ages. The movie resonates with them on a level, like you're saying. Because who among us cannot relate to that? That was one of the building blocks for me, of the movie, is this idea of one thing goes wrong, okay, but then another thing goes wrong, another thing goes wrong, another thing goes wrong. Suddenly all of those things feel equal, but they're not. There's the problem here. That's the main problem. And then one day, you're writing a note, and your pencil breaks, and that's the thing that is too much, yep, because the straw that breaks. Then it becomes a thing of like, “Why does the universe hate me?”
And that's something you feel very much with Julie, is that people are weaponising themselves at her. That everybody is antagonistic towards her in some way, and she's quite antagonistic and she doesn't know what to do.
MB: Yes, and something that, that for me, conceptually in the movie, is that she has a de-evolution of how she's handling things an adult by the time. I don't want to give anything away, but by the end, she's a teenager. She's a teenager, and she's actually wearing a shirt at one point [and it’s] my shirt from 1993 that I still had and has holes in it, and it's disgusting, and is a band t shirt, and it's one of those things. She's showing up to work in that and sweatpants and she's become a bratty teenager. At that point there's so much going on that her adultness has left the room. And that happens to all of us.
And you know, there are times when as an adult woman, I'm just want my mum, you know? I want somebody to just make this stop.
MB: Can't somebody just come and tuck me into bed and bring me soup? Please just make it stop. Make it better. Make it better, even just for a minute, right? Just wash my hair for me. It can be something as small as that, right? And you're right. You just want your mum, and you just want to feel comfort, and you want your teddy bear from when you were five.
It’s something she’s doing in her therapy sessions with Conan. She's doing the “transference” which is something usually she’d be so well aware of as a therapist.
MB: Oh, and counter transference!
As you said there is a specificity to the root issue being that her child is sick. We don't know why, and Julie feels that she's failing. And one of the reasons she feels that she's failing because your character, Dr. Spring, is setting unreasonable goals which aren't unreasonable.
MB: Everybody else seems to be able to follow them, right? That's what my character would say. Yes, there's a room full of mothers at the mother's meeting. All of these women seem to be able to follow what Dr Spring is asking them to do. Why can't you?
That’s how she perceives it.
MB: What I'm interested in too, is, like you said, we're so in her point of view, we don't see anything that she doesn't see. We're not in any room that she's not in. We never leave her. Ever, ever, ever, ever, ever. So, a viewer can decide this for themselves. A viewer can read it as, yeah, the universe is against this woman, right? The viewer can also read it as is she perceiving it this way? Well, that's it, combination of the two, and it can be a combination of the two. Absolutely two things can exist at once. And that's what I was very interested in.
Yeah, she got a bad lot. She got a bad lot with this situation with her daughter. But she's letting it destroy herself. She's destroying herself. She's sacrificing herself onto the altar, you know, and that's not necessary as a viewer, as a someone with compassion for the character, but inside the movie, who is it that has the compassion, you know, and she I don't know that's a that's a question for the viewer.
The audience feels empathy, but we're trying to work out what is real and what isn't within the film. She's not sleeping. Every time she has an opportunity she goes outside and runs away.
MB: She's not sleeping, and we see she's sleep deprived. She is drinking. She's eating horribly. She's eating snacks. She's stuffing herself with peanut butter cups and eating disgusting lasagna microwave meals. She’s not taking care of herself.