Teased as the smash hit of the summer, Love Lies Bleeding caused a stir at its premiere at Sundance earlier this year and again at the 2024 Berlinale. The film features Kristen Stewart as Lou, an introverted gym manager with a rough-and-ready family, and Katy O’Brian as Jackie, an ambitious bodybuilder with a secret past. The two become enmeshed in an intense, trippy love affair filled with blood, sweat, tears, plenty of muscle and a side of murder.
Set in a sandy American no-man’s-land (but filmed in New Mexico), the film is backed by a great ensemble cast and a pulsating, vibey 80s soundtrack with plenty of nods to the familiar tropes of heist, thriller and road-trip flicks and playing like a lesbian Thelma & Louise meets True Romance while upholding director Rose Glass’s singular narrative voice.
After her buzzy 2019 debut Saint Maud, Love Lies Bleeding is a statement piece that cements Glass’s success on the world cinema circuit. The Berliner sat down with the director the day after the film’s international premiere at Berlinale to discuss musical inspiration, working with Hollywood stars and the film’s lesser-known influences.
Where did the inspiration for such a wild, exciting story come from?
I think I was just really attracted to the idea of telling a story about a bodybuilder. In hindsight I guess I’ve always been interested in the relationships people have with their bodies, particularly when things like that push to the extremes. To me it just felt like quite psychologically interesting territory, to think about what qualities might lead someone to be able to do that. Because you’re kind of transforming yourself into a human statue kind of thing. So that was interesting territory to start. And of course, it’s visually super striking and interesting.
How was the process of directing these characters from the script to the real thing? I was struck by how fully formed the characters were…
I mean, it was a fun shoot. We didn’t have any rehearsal time with the actors so it was kind of like we all sort of got thrown into it.
Was it clear to begin with that this story needed to be told in the particular aesthetic and genre realms that it is?
I was clear [about] broadly the direction I wanted to go in, [I wanted] the tone to be pulpy. And for there to be violence and a love story. But I also knew I wanted to do something fun, with a lot of dark humour in it. So it ended up tapping into lots of genres and playing around with different things. Like there are quite a lot of elements of thrillers, noirs, crime films and romances. It was a weird sort of mash-up of those different kinds of tones.
It can feel a bit tricky to describe it concisely. I sent Kristen a long email trying to describe it. I was like, “Oh it’s kind of like a romance, thriller, satire, comedy, farce, fantasy kind of thing…. but it’ll be great, I promise!” And the look and feel, early on I knew I wanted it to be more textured and rough than Saint Maud, for it to be grungier, I guess. It’s very tactile, the muscles leading to sweat and blood. So it’s dirtier, I think.
With Clint Mansell on the score and some great music supervision by Simon Astall, can you talk to me about the importance of music for the film?
The music was really important, and we had a really great music team. To be honest, before Clint Mansell came on and Simon came on, we started by working with a music consultant who’s this really talented musician, Yigit Bülbül. He was working with me in prep, coming up with different playlists, trying to figure out the sonic palette of the film. And even during the shooting process, I got him to make playlists for Lou, Jackie.
I wanted to do something fun, with a lot of dark humour in it.
I think I knew that because the film was set in the 1980s, there’s a temptation to fill it with retro stuff. I wanted to avoid those really recognisable 80s needle drops, and I felt, for Lou particularly, I wanted [the film] to be filled with music that she would listen to – a little more obscure, a little underground. But Astall was really helpful, and got me on to things like [English industrial music band] Throbbing Gristle. And then ‘Whisper’ by Martin Rev at the end credits, and this Japanese ambient musician called Shiho Yabuki, which helped with the twinkly alien moods.
A lot of the tracks in there, some of the commercial tracks, are treated as score. Clint and Paul Davis, our sound designer, are guys that are older than me, so they had absorbed all those acts when they first came around. So Clint kind of used that as a launching-off point, then did this incredible score as well, and they sort of work interchangeably with those tracks. It was really cool to work with Clint, as I’ve been a fan since [I was] a teen hearing the score he did for Pi [1998]. I remember watching when I was 13 and being like, ‘Oh, I want to make films, this is so cool!’ So music and sound as a whole was really integral to the work.
You worked with large Hollywood actors for this feature, but brought along trusted crew members from your first. How was that experience and dynamic?
I think because we were filming in America, it was wonderful to have some sort of familiar faces around from the original team. Ben Ford has been our director of photography, Oliver [Kassman] and Andrea [Cornwell] also were the producers for Saint Maud, likewise with my editor Mark Towns. That was very comforting, because it was a little daunting – very exciting and everything, but daunting – being out there. The thing with working with big famous actors is that it’s weird the first day or so, a little surreal. But then you quickly are just like, ah okay, it’s just them. It was nice that we all felt like a team.
I know you’ve spoken of visual nods to films like Paris, Texas and Natural Born Killers. I wondered if there were any other places of influence, any erotica or television from the time?
There’s this body builder called Lisa Lyon. I think she sadly died last year, I wish we’d reached out to her, because she was a bit of inspiration for Jackie’s look. She was a bodybuilder in the 80s and she did a book of photography shot by Robert Mapplethorpe – black and white, artsy, cool and quite erotic stuff, with her posing looking amazing and really muscular with an amazing hairdo. So yes, that was maybe one touchstone. Filmwise I tried to be conscious of referencing, because there’s obviously so many bits of the film’s DNA that [pay homage to] films with couple murder in the US – all the Americana kind of stuff.
I told the actors to maybe check out The Night Porter [D: Liliana Cavani, 1974] with Charlotte Rampling, the kind of erotica in that film. The sexual dynamics in that film are quite dark and interesting. And also, A Snake of June [D:Shinya Tsukamoto, 2002], this Japanese cyberpunk film about a woman in a sexless, frustrated marriage, and then a guy starts photographing her whilst she’s masterbating and blackmailing her with the negatives – it’s completely mad. Super grainy black-and-white and weird, so we’re not going there, but there’s sensual elements.
- Love Lies Bleeding starts July 18
