WILD AT HEART And Other Totally Unexpected Movies That Influenced Maggie Gyllenhaal’s THE BRIDE!

The late, great David Lynch didn't just make terrifying surrealist horror and game-changing television – he also made a mean road movie. In 1990's Wild at Heart, Laura Dern and Nicolas Cage star as Luna and Sailor, a young couple on the run from Lula's domineering mother and the criminals she hires to kill Sailor.

According to Letterboxd, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale all chose Wild at Heart as one of their chief inspirations when working on The Bride!, with Buckley even teasing at last year’s CinemaCon Las Vegas that the horror-romance is “like Bonnie and Clyde and Wild at Heart and all those characters, but ours has petrol in its skin, and we’re holding a match to it,” adding that it is “the punkest love that’s ever existed.”

As Jessie Buckley's quote above tells us, 1967's Bonnie and Clyde was another huge influence on The Bride!, with Buckley, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Annette Bening all picking this one. Directed by Arthur Penn and starring Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty as the infamous outlaws, Bonnie and Clyde helped cement the term in popular language to mean “couple who fuck shit up while loving each other deeply”.

In The Bride! it looks like Christian Bale's Creature and Buckley's Bride are going to wreak havoc across Depression-era America just like Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker did, but with way more stylish outfits.

Ingmar Bergman's 1966 Persona was another of Maggie Gyllenhaal's inspirations when creating The Bride!, and we're particularly intrigued to discover why. The avant-garde psychological thriller stars Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann as a young nurse and her patient respectively, the latter being a well-known stage actress who has suddenly stopped speaking.

Themes of personhood, identity, life and death run throughout Persona, just as they do in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and its subsequent adaptations. Even Persona‘s opening sequence evokes ideas of mortality and resurrection, and we expect The Bride! will explore many of the same images and ideas.

A legendary Fred and Ginger musical comedy, 1935's Top Hat was chosen as an inspiration for The Bride! by both Maggie and Jake Gyllenhaal, making us wonder if it's a movie they grew up watching together. With The Bride! being set in the 1930s, we imagine Top Hat will have provided a ton of style inspiration as one of the chicest classic movies of all time.

We can also see Top Hat being an inspiration for The Bride!‘s dance numbers, with star John Magaro previously telling The Hollywood Reporter that the film is “a mix of a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie, Young Frankenstein, Frankenstein, Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands.” Does Christian Bale have moves like Fred Astaire? Only time will tell.

Given that a key plot point of Fritz Lang's seminal sci-fi silent film Metropolis follows a grieving man “resurrecting” his deceased wife in the form of a synthetic humanoid, we can see why Jessie Buckley chose this one as a key inspiration for her performance in The Bride!

Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein inspired Metropolis, and Metropolis in turn inspired some of the visuals in James Whale's 1931 adaptation of Frankenstein, making the pair perfect companion pieces.

Jessie Buckley also selected the 1933 noir-comedy Baby Face as a film that inspired her creation of The Bride!. One of the most notorious films of the Pre-Code Hollywood era due to its frank mentions of intercourse, Baby Face stars Barbara Stanwyck as a promiscuous young woman who uses sex to advance her social and financial status.

If we had to guess, we'd say Buckley probably took some key inspiration from Stanwyck's portrayal of Lily Powers, and the character's tough, no-nonsense attitude when it comes to getting what she wants.

Christian Bale choosing James Whale's 1931 monster movie Frankenstein is an obvious choice, sure, but it's a classic for a reason. Boris Karloff's performance as the Creature paved the way for all other Frankenstein adaptations that followed, and though we're sure Bale will take a unique approach, there's no denying that we can already see the influence in his make-up alone.

We can't imagine Bale was the only one influenced by Frankenstein either, even though Whale's 1935 sequel Bride of Frankenstein is the far more obvious inspiration.

Christian Bale also cites Alex Cox's Sid and Nancy as one of his key influences. The 1986 biographical drama follows the tumultuous relationship between Sex Pistols punk rocker Sid Vicious (played by Gary Oldman) and his troubled groupie-turned-girlfriend Nancy Spungen (played by Chloe Webb).

Sid and Nancy's love story was hardly healthy, and definitely not #couplegoals, but the film still stands in high regard, and we can certainly see where Bale could pull inspiration to portray a rock'n'roll couple living life on the edge.

Yes, you read that right. Oscar winner Christian Bale chose the 1997 splatstick comedy Beverly Hills Ninja as one of his key inspirations when working on The Bride!. We're not even sure what to make of this, to be honest.

Is Bale's Creature going to show off some sweet ninjitsu moves, Chris Farley-style? We'll be sat day one to find out.

Guillermo del Toro's 2017 fantasy-romance The Shape of Water was influenced by another classic Universal monster movie, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, so we can definitely see how Annette Bening was influenced by when working on The Bride!.

del Toro's films frequently explore themes regarding the humanization of monsters, with his own take on Frankenstein doing this just last year, and we expect we'll see a similar narrative in The Bride!

Romeo and Juliet might be another somewhat questionable love story, but it's still a classic for a reason. Annette Bening chooses Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 adaptation of the classic Shakespearean play as an influence on The Bride!, although we would put money on Baz Luhrmann's hyperkinetic and stylized Romeo + Juliet being on the list too.

The second Ingmar Bergman influence on The Bride! is the 1973 television drama Scenes From a Marriage, which Annette Bening chooses as another of her picks. Starring Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson, the six-episode Scenes From a Marriage spans ten years and follows the trials and tribulations of a married couple living in Stockholm.

Between Scenes From a Marriage, Romeo and Juliet and The Shape of Water, we're beginning to suspect that Bening might be a fan of complicated love stories, and we're sure we'll see that reflected between the Creature and his betrothed in The Bride!

Another noir crime-thriller on the list of influences behind The Bride! is Joseph H. Lewis's Gun Crazy, which Peter Sarsgaard chose as one of his key inspirations.

The 1950 pic follows, you guessed it, a gun-toting couple (played by Peggy Cummins and John Dall) on a crime spree across the country. We're beginning to see a pattern emerging here.

Alan Parker's Angel Heart from 1987 is a Neo-noir psychological thriller starring Mickey Rourke as Harry Angel, a New York City private investigator, is hired to solve the mysterious disappearance of a singer known as Johnny Favorite.

Controversial at the time for its sexual content, Angel Heart comes with a devilish twist that makes it an intriguing choice for Peter Sarsgaard to include on his influences list. We're intrigued to see if The Bride! goes in a similar direction…

Another noir thriller on Peter Sarsgaard's influence list is The French Connection, another classic from The Exorcist legend William Friedkin. Starring Gene Hackman, Roy Scheider, and Fernando Rey, The French Connection follows two narcotics detectives in pursuit of wealthy French heroin smuggler.

What makes The French Connection a key influence on The Bride!, we hear you ponder. If we had to put money on it, we'd guess that it has something to do with the former's infamous car chase sequence, which is widely considered one of the greatest of all time.

The ultimate on-the-run movie, it's easy to see why Peter Sarsgaard claims Ridley Scott's 1991 road drama Thelma & Louise was a key influence on The Bride!

A classic tale of female independence in the face of male oppression, we can imagine Jessie Buckley's self-assured and take-no-shit central character has a lot of both Thelma and Louise in her.

Penelope Cruz chooses the 1944 noir Double Indemnity as one of her chief inspirations when working on The Bride!, which funnily enough features another performance by Barbara Stanwyck as a woman who knows what she wants and isn't afraid to take drastic measures to get it.

We're also wondering if Stanwyck's iconic yellow dress on the poster had any influence on the Bride's bright orange gown.

Speaking of yellow dresses, Penelope Cruz also cites the 1940 screwball comedy His Girl Friday as an influence when shooting The Bride!, and we're hoping this means we get some satirical giggles in Maggie Gyllenhaal's monster movie.

Starring the legendary Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, His Girl Friday follows a divorced journalist couple who find themselves investigating on one last story together.

As a fellow gritty new take on a classic cultural icon, we're not hugely surprised to learn that Todd Phillips' Joker was an influence on The Bride! Penelope Cruz picks the Joaquin Phoenix-starring crime thriller as an inspiration, which makes us even more curious to learn about her character, Myrna.

We imagine The Bride! and Joker will share themes of societal abandonment and criminal psychology, and to be frank, we're just glad it wasn't Joker: Folie à Deux they were watching on set.

Penelope Cruz's final choice in the list of The Bride! inspirations is another screwball comedy starring Cary Grant. This time it's 1938's Bringing Up Baby, and all we have to say is, please, PLEASE say there's a leopard in The Bride!

Jake Gyllenhaal chooses an absolute classic for one of his picks, with the 1952 romantic comedy apparently acting as a key inspiration on The Bride! The Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds-starring pic is widely considered to be one of the greatest musicals of all time, and for very good reason.

As we've already established, The Bride! boasts a few dance numbers, and according to Maggie Gyllenhaal, her brother is going to be playing a “matinee idol”, suggesting that we're going to see Jake pull some slick moves.

Jake Gyllenhaal picks another romantic-comedy classic in Adam's Rib, which stars Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn as married lawyers who come to oppose each other in court.

We're beginning to craft quite a keen image of the central relationship in The Bride! with these picks, that being, an unconventional couple with a badass female half.

W.S. Van Dyke's The Thin Man is Jake Gyllenhaal's final selection, and you'll never believe it, but the 1934 comedy-mystery follows an oddball, hard-drinking couple who both become embroiled in criminal activity.

It looks like The Bride! might be putting a modern spin on the Nick and Nora Charles archetype, and frankly, we can't wait to see it.