DIVA sat down with the director of the new sapphic film starring Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian
BY MARY W, IMAGE BY A24
Love Lies Bleeding is the sapphic, fever dream, anti-love story that we didn’t know we needed. Starring Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian, the film takes you on a journey of fresh love, murderous fathers, and… bodybuilding.
Lou (Stewart) and Jackie (O’Brian) meet for the first time in Lou’s small, seemingly uneventful hometown. From their first encounter, things take some very dark twists and turns – ending in a place you’d never expect.
We sat down with the director and writer, Rose Glass (acclaimed director of St. Maud), to learn more about Love Lies Bleeding, her career, and what it’s like to create a queer film that is so much more than your typical romance.
There’s a lot of canonical “lesbian” traits in the film (i.e. uhauling), but there are even more themes that we’ve rarely seen paired with WLW. Like addiction (steroids), bodybuilding, murder? Tell me more about this.
It just felt like quite a natural fit! I felt like I have seen crime and romance and violence, which are all sort of pillars of cinema, and countless films with heterosexual couples in the center of them. It felt a bit too easy to do the same thing.
We rarely see LGBTQIA stories like this, why is this kind of representation so important?
It’s reflecting life. It’s reflecting the world. It’s sort of shocking how homogenized cinema has become. There’s a degree of self-consciousness around self-representation and around women. Particularly with female queer characters, there has to be a degree of self-righteousness and feeling noble or good about themselves. There is more room for a messy reality and complexities with queer characters at the center, where the story isn’t about the fact that they’re queer.
Katy O’Brian and Kristen Stewart are the leads. Why these two and how was it working with these queer icons?
I feel like I don’t really need to explain why I wanted to work with Kristen and why she would be brilliant at this. I felt like: ‘Why haven’t I seen her do more films like this?’ I felt like she’d be a good greasy, sexy, anxious weirdo heartthrob, who is again, kind of a douchebag at times, and other times, incredibly charming.
10/10.
More grease. Bigger bags under her eyes.
Katy, I wasn’t familiar with before. As soon as we met her, we were like “Thank God. That’s Jackie. She’s perfect.” We literally saw hundreds of people for this role. Finding someone who has that bodybuilder physicality, and is an incredible actor who could really hold her own against Kristen in this big dramatic role, proved very difficult.
We have to talk about the steamy scenes. There is a lot of sex that accurately captures WLW lust i.e. the “I want to stretch you” scene. Why was it important for you include these moments?
I got so much pressure to take that line out!
[These scenes] always originate because the story leads you there. And this is a story about two people falling really hard for each other in the first days of their relationship. Sex was always going to be an important part.
I guess a lot of sex scenes, particularly between two women, often become quite homogenized in cinema. They kiss. They fall on the bed. The cameras sort of pan away.
You want there to be a degree of specificity and make it feel real. In both sex scenes, their clothes are pretty much on. The main one youre talking about, in the bathroom, you actually don’t see anything. There’s no nudity in that scene and it’s anatomically a bit more specific on what they’re doing.
You have so many tender scenes juxtaposed with gore and violence. Can this be called a love story at the end of the day?
I’d say at its heart, it’s kind of like an anti-love story. Their relationship is definitely the spine of the whole thing. We never wanted it to be a “love conquers all” story. As anyone who has ever been in a toxic relationship can attest to, when you’re in it, your perspective is very clouded.
Are we supposed to like anyone in the film? Are these good people doing bad things or bad people who sometimes do good things?
Definitely. They’re all kind of assholes at different points. Anti-heroes are the most intriguing to me. That’s what I like about cinema. It puts you in the shoes of someone doing stuff that, at the surface, is morally reprehensible, and can get you to emphasize with these terrible things.
What do you hope audiences take from this film? Who would you say this movie is for?
Obviously, I’m delighted that queer audiences are really connecting with it. There’s something in it for everyone. For me, it’s a lovely family-friendly romp. This is for everyone.
On the most basic level, I hope people just have a really good time watching it. I think it’s a good one to watch with a crowd. If nothing else, I’d like people to take away that it’s very difficult to quit smoking. You should never start… And that we eventually turn into our parents.
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