Director Rose Glass Didn’t Know ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ Would Turn Into a Crime Thriller
Love Lies Bleeding is writer and director Rose Glass’s second feature film, and it’s already making a splash. With a raw, blood-spattered sensibility and a complicated love story at its core, the film is an exhilarating queer romance about two young women sucked into a cycle of violence and revenge.
The Mary Sue sat down with Rose Glass to talk about storytelling, violence, and how sometimes, lovers and parasites can be hard to tell apart.
You’ve previously said you wanted Love Lies Bleeding to be fun, pulpy, and melodramatic. It’s all those things, but there’s so much more going on in the film. What surprised you the most as you were putting these story together?
I’d never co-written before until working on this project. I wrote with Weronika Tofilska, who’s a good friend, and if either of us had been writing this film by ourselves, it obviously wouldn’t have been the same thing. We tried to be very fluid and instinctual, because we didn’t have a clear thing from the beginning. We were literally building the roadmap of this story as we were going along.
I mean, I’m surprised I ended up doing a crime thriller. I wasn’t expecting that. I sort of knew there’d be murder involved at some point, but there are certainly elements which just sprawled out into something far bigger than I think I’d consciously been aiming for starting out. I definitely surprised myself there occasionally.
Tell me more about the crime thriller angle. How did that idea get planted in your mind? How did you decide that that was the story you wanted to tell?
Like designing a puzzle in reverse?I don’t know. I’m very bad at summarizing this stuff in hindsight. I think I felt I wanted to do something quite violent. And then, inevitably, as you start writing your main character as someone who you know is going to undertake these great acts of violence, it sort of turns into a kind of weird morality kind of maze. It sort of naturally lends itself to the mechanics of how you get away with a murder. Then [I wondered,] why is there part of me that really wants to see this character commit violence, and yet it’s not okay for these other characters [to do the same thing]? I certainly didn’t intend it as any sort of statement about women and violence in films, but when you’re writing it, those sorts of things come in.
I think me and Weronika enjoyed playing with a lot of familiar tropes and clichés about how you expect people to behave in movies. We hoped to turn good and evil on their heads a bit. But it was enjoyable to start off with some familiar ingredients, like good guys and bad guys, and then let it spread out a bit like a web. One character kills a guy, but she’s right to do it. There are good moral reasons [for her to do it]. It sort of became an over-the-top way of exploring the cyclical nature of violence. It’s awful no matter who does it and what the context is, but everyone who ends up doing it probably thinks they’ve got a pretty good reason. Humans can justify awful things to themselves.
Let’s talk about the people at the center of the story. Lou and Jackie are so complicated and layered, and Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian have such great chemistry together. How did their story evolve from the script to production?
We decided early on that it was going to be a love story, but we really wanted to explore a romance that’s not a virtuous “love conquers all” story that brings out the best in people. Sometimes, in film, romantic love is kind of held up as this ultimate aspirational sort of thing that’s going to make someone complete. [Lou and Jackie’s story] is a weird kind of power play between the two of them. Obviously Jackie is a character who, on a surface level, has a huge amount of power and strength, and has a lot of what Lou wants and needs, but their relationship is sort of a relationship between a romantic and a cynic. We always saw Lou as inertia, and Jackie as all action.
[We also wanted to explore] the parasitic effect that love can have on people feeding off each other. Lou is kind of stuck in a rut, and she has all these feuds with the men in her family, but she doesn’t ever have the balls to do anything about it. Jackie completely knocks Lou out of her comfort zone, and Lou is just blown away by that. Lou latches onto her and almost acts vicariously through her.
When you talk about power plays and parasitic relationships, I immediately think of the other love story in the film: Lou’s sister Beth (Jena Malone) and her husband J.J. (Dave Franco). How did that story come together?
Lou’s relationship with her sister is the key thing that Lou tells herself is stopping her from ever leaving town. It’s anchoring her. Her urge is to protect her sister, but she’s never able to actually do anything about it. We needed the first big act of violence in the film to feel as though it’s morally righteous.
Can you speak about the fantastical and supernatural elements of the film?
I think that’s the kind of cinematic language that just comes most naturally to me. Maybe one day I’ll do a film without it, but that’s just what always comes out when I start thinking of stuff. Quite early on, I thought of Jackie as a little bit like a superhero. That’s certainly how Lou sees her, and I wanted the film to have that visceral feeling. So all the bulging, hulking muscles felt like quite a natural escalation to me. Also, the film is a romance at its heart, and it takes place in the first few ecstatic weeks of a romance. When that’s happening, you don’t always feel like you’re in the real world. You get these giddy, unreal kinds of feelings. That’s what excites me about cinema—being able to play with that kind of language and show these inexpressible feelings in a heightened way.
(featured image: A24)
Have a tip we should know? tips@themarysue.com
