Mary Bronstein, the director who wrote her way out of a motel bathroom

Mary Bronstein

Photo: Elena Ternovaja / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	1979 White Plains, New York, United States
Occupation	Filmmaker
Known for	If I Had Legs I'd Kick You

For years, Mary Bronstein was easier to place in New York film circles as part of a household than as a filmmaker in her own right. Her husband, Ronald Bronstein, wrote the Safdie brothers’ nerve-shredding crime films with Josh Safdie, and she has joked that the family’s Chelsea apartment is “the house that Uncut Gems built.” Her own debut had come and gone on the festival circuit. Then she wrote a second feature in the bathroom of a cheap motel, with her sick daughter asleep on the other side of the door, and it did what American independent cinema rarely manages: it made audiences squirm in their seats and still carried its star to the Oscars.

That film is If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, and its subject is a mother coming apart. Bronstein insists it is not autobiographical. She did not do the things her heroine does, she has said, but every feeling in it is emotionally true. The question it asks, what is left of a woman once her whole self has been handed over to keeping someone else alive, is the question her career now seems to be built around.

She grew up as Mary Wall in White Plains, a suburb north of New York City, where she was born in 1979, and trained as an actor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Performing came first, and it never fully left. In Frownland, the abrasive micro-budget feature Ronald Bronstein directed in 2007, she played Laura. That training explains why critics call her an actor’s director.

Her own first feature, Yeast, premiered at South by Southwest in 2008. She wrote it, directed it and played Rachel, a young woman inside a post-college friend group that slowly falls apart. The credits read now like an early sketch of a generation of New York independents, with early contributions from Greta Gerwig, the Safdie brothers and Sean Price Williams. Bronstein later described her character as someone “literally yelling, ‘Be my friend. Don’t leave me,'” without being heard. “No one wants to hug a porcupine, right?” she said. “But sometimes a porcupine needs a hug.”

Seventeen years passed between her first and second features, and the reason was not a lack of ideas. When her daughter was seven, she became seriously ill, and the treatment she needed meant moving from New York to San Diego. Ronald was shooting Good Time in New York and could not leave. Mother and daughter became roommates in a small motel room in Del Mar, a beach town that, Bronstein recalled, felt oppressive precisely because everyone else seemed to be on holiday. Lights out came at eight. She would shut herself in the bathroom, turn on the light, eat fast food and drink cheap wine. “I literally started writing the film in that bathroom,” she told Cultured magazine.

The script took years. When A24 read it, Bronstein said, the answer was “No notes. Let’s go.” The production was anything but comfortable. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You was shot in Montauk in August and September 2023, under an interim agreement granted by SAG-AFTRA during the actors’ strike, in 27 days. Bronstein gave up her director’s fee to buy two extra days of shooting. Before cameras rolled she spent six weeks with Rose Byrne at her kitchen table, three times a week, going through the script page by page, and handed her the journals she had kept during her daughter’s illness. Conan O’Brien made his dramatic debut as the heroine’s exasperated therapist; Bronstein gave herself a small part as Dr. Spring.

The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 24, 2025, then played in competition at the 75th Berlinale, where Byrne won the Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance. A24 released it in American cinemas on October 10, 2025. Byrne went on to win the Golden Globe for best actress in a musical or comedy and the Independent Spirit Award for best lead performance, and earned her first Academy Award nomination, the film’s only one.

That last detail is where the story of Bronstein’s breakthrough gets complicated. The prizes went to the face on screen, not to the woman who wrote the script from her own worst months. Bronstein was nominated for best director at the Gotham Awards and the Independent Spirit Awards and for original screenplay by the Writers Guild of America, and won none of them; the Academy did not nominate her at all. Critics, meanwhile, kept reaching for the men around her to explain the film. Time’s Stephanie Zacharek called it “Uncut Gems for moms,” and reviews routinely noted that Josh Safdie was a producer and that Ronald Bronstein had co-written the Safdies’ films. The comparison is meant as praise, and the jittery, claustrophobic style does invite it. But it files a film about the invisible labour of motherhood under the work of the men in the next room, which is roughly the complaint the film itself is making. Bronstein has not helped her own case: she calls Byrne her “emotional avatar” and says that without her “there would be no film. It’s her face.”

What she does next will test which reading holds. In July 2026 Clockwork, the new specialty label at Warner Bros., announced Nasty, a gymnastics thriller written by Isabella Jarosz, whose script landed on the 2024 Black List. Jenna Ortega plays a young athlete fighting for a place on the Olympic team whose most dangerous opponent is her own coach; Byrne returns, and at the end of October Justin Long joined as the coach’s brother and co-coach. Margot Robbie‘s company LuckyChap is producing with Ortega, and the shoot is set to begin in New Orleans in November, ahead of a theatrical release planned for 2027. It is the first time Bronstein will direct a screenplay she did not write.

Television is also circling. Apple has been developing The Nanny Squatter, a limited series adapted from Bindu Bansinath’s New York Magazine story, with Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Cecily Strong attached to star and Bronstein set to write, direct and run the show. No series order has been announced.

Bronstein is married to Ronald Bronstein, and the daughter whose illness gave her the film is now a teenager who, in her mother’s words, is “doing great.” She has said she believes movies should only be made when somebody really has something to say. Nasty will show whether that urgency survives a studio budget, a script by someone else and a gym full of Olympic hopefuls, and whether the next round of prizes finally lands on the person behind the camera.

Tags: actors, a24, Jenna Ortega, Rose Byrne, If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, Mary Bronstein

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