Rose Glass: ​‘Like every direc­tor, there’s a god com­plex somewhere’

After achiev­ing crit­i­cal acclaim for her break­out debut Saint Maud, Rose Glass teamed up with Kris­ten Stew­art for a rough-n-ready romp in the New Mex­i­co desert. The result is Love Lies Bleed­ing – a thriller about girls and guns, both the lit­er­al and metaphor­i­cal kind.

LWLies: There’s a real ​‘mid­night movie’ feel to Love Lies Bleed­ing – like the sort of thing that you’d stum­ble across as a teenag­er on late-night tele­vi­sion that would change your entire world. Are there any films that felt like that for you when you were younger? 

Glass: Yeah, loads, but they sort of fell into dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories – the films which made me go, ​‘I think I want to make films,’ and then the ones which are more what you’re refer­ring to, which are on TV at night when you should have gone to bed. I feel like this is the film that teenage me would have been most excit­ed to know that they would even­tu­al­ly make – there are a lot of things in this which reflect some weird nerd teenage long­ing. Show­girls was one of those films I did ran­dom­ly stum­ble across prob­a­bly late night on Chan­nel 4 or 5 or some­thing when I was prob­a­bly too young to watch it and didn’t get it, but it def­i­nite­ly made an impression.

You gave your cast some films that you felt could be set in the same uni­verse as Love Lies Bleed­ing, and Show­girls was on the list, as was Crash. Are you big into Cronenberg? 

He’s actu­al­ly one of my favourite film­mak­ers. Crash in par­tic­u­lar – I saw it and then read the book and that came quite ear­ly on when I realised body hor­ror and things going wrong with bod­ies and people’s brains was the sort of the stuff that I found the most excit­ing to see unfold­ing on screen. Weird­ly with Crash, the thing that I thought was maybe use­ful to show to my actors was less about the actu­al, bod­i­ly stuff that hap­pens, and more about the demeanour of every­one in the film. That and Show­girls, they’re both played straight, earnest­ly, but have this know­ing weird­ness per­me­at­ing every­thing. All the char­ac­ters share the thing of feel­ing as if they’re just con­stant­ly excit­ed or aroused like their ener­gies are very close to their skin.

Aside from Pump­ing Iron there aren’t many main­stream films about the world of body­build­ing. What sur­prised you the most dur­ing your research? 

While we were in Amer­i­ca I went to a cou­ple of body­build­ing shows, which was fas­ci­nat­ing and so much fun. It was not until I was actu­al­ly there watch­ing a live com­pe­ti­tion that I prop­er­ly appre­ci­at­ed the the­atri­cal­i­ty and per­for­mance art side of it, because they have these line-ups and there’s a box-tick­ing part with this set num­ber of pos­es, but then there’s a point where the con­tes­tants do their own rou­tines. And it becomes a bit like impres­sion­ist dance, or ice skat­ing or gym­nas­tics. Even look­ing at each song choice and the tone of their per­for­mance, it seemed to give such a fas­ci­nat­ing lit­tle glimpse into what each of those com­peti­tors was like or how they felt about what they do. Some of them are very campy and fun, and they’ll pick some big famous ​’80s song that every­one knows, and it’s a lit­tle bit more wink-wink and humor­ous, but then there were a cou­ple which would do these very emo­tion­al feel­ing, very beau­ti­ful per­for­mances. There’s just some­thing strange and fas­ci­nat­ing about it.

Saint Maud and Love Lies Bleed­ing are very dif­fer­ent in tone and sto­ry, but both have this obses­sion with bod­i­ly dis­ci­pline and the temp­ta­tion of the flesh. How aware were you of the con­nec­tive tis­sue between them while writing? 

When I first start­ed talk­ing to Weroni­ka [Tofil­s­ka, co-writer] about the idea, I think there was more con­nec­tive tis­sue with Saint Maud because, in the very begin­ning, I hadn’t con­ceived of it as being such a big-scale sto­ry. I was think­ing of it as a one or two-han­der about a body­builder los­ing her mind as she trains for a com­pe­ti­tion, but it felt a lit­tle bit too sim­i­lar to Saint Maud. But Jack­ie and Maud are both char­ac­ters who are try­ing to trans­form them­selves via a kind of self-dis­ci­pline, and shap­ing how they want to be seen by oth­ers. Maybe this is a sim­plis­tic way of look­ing at body­build­ing, but there is this idea of get­ting your­self to look almost like a stat­ue, and that fits in with this idea of some­one who wants to trans­form her­self into a kind of icon, or a god, which is some­thing that’s in Saint Maud as well. I don’t know what that says about me – like every direc­tor, there’s a god com­plex somewhere.