Love Lies Bleeding: A lesbian body-horror rammed with rage and ’roids

Driving the film is this camp queer gaze – it’s in the way Lou cooks Jackie’s eggs for her, fishing out the yolks with her hands while smoking a cigarette; it’s Lou flicking through a copy of Macho Sluts while feeding her cat. The steroid injections also seem symbolically queer, railing against normative femme bodies with this magical potion. When I spoke to Glass, she said, “All I wanted was more, more and more.” As the film progresses, Glass takes us to more fantastical territories, pushing the thriller into ultimate camp with a playfulness that feels entirely modern.

Below, Dazed speaks to Rose Glass about making a queer body thriller, vaginal landscapes, and working with Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian.

When I watched the film, the first thing I felt was how visceral and bodily it was – uncensored bodies during sex, bodybuilding, gory bodies after violence, Jackie’s body literally bulging while taking steroids and the gory sound that accompanies it. How did you decide to build the film around the body/sensory in this way?

Rose Glass: I think I’ve always been interested in bodies and the relationships that people have with their own ones, and what those relationships can say about a person’s mindset, how they see themselves, how they see the world. Did they take care of their body? Did they destroy it? The initial thing that started this whole idea off was thinking it would be fascinating to tell a story about a woman who’s trying to be a bodybuilder and how she’s trying to become almost untouchable and strong, but it’s so contradictory because it’s also an aesthetic desire.

I’ve always felt this weird disconnect between our brains and our bodies, like in your mind you can feel so grand and encompass so much, and yet on some level we’re also confined to these weird fleshy vessels which can go wrong, be inelegant and suffer.

It’s interesting in the cinema as well watching it is quite bodily, I was physically flinching.

Rose Glass: Apparently someone threw up. My co-writer Weronika Tofilska and I did a Q&A at Curzon Mayfair. We both used to work there as ushers actually. After the screening, one of the managers came up to me with this huge smile on her face and was like ’somebody threw up, I thought you’d like to know’.

John Waters is one of my favourite filmmakers and his nickname is the Prince of Puke. He said once that if somebody throws up in one of his films it’s like a standing ovation, so that was the first time I got a taste of what that feels like which was quite gratifying.

The film takes a distinctively sapphic gaze in a way – the way Lou looks at Jackie and the way the sex scenes are filmed, to even the crack in the landscape which almost looks more vaginal, and of course the ending. How did you approach this kind of female gaze?

Rose Glass: That came about quite naturally, and I’m glad you noticed the landscape. I remember repeating to the VFX company that the crack in the earth needed to look vaginal. And then, of course, we have the guns and the syringes on the other hand. The film plays with these symbols of power throughout. I know this is a spoiler, but in Lou’s final confrontation with her dad, it’s still fairly suggestive when she’s kind of shoving the gun in his mouth. But we went so much further than that in some outtakes. When we were shooting Kristen was literally *Rose stands up and mimes gyrating with a gun* in his mouth. Ed Harris was a real trooper for playing along.

What was the casting process? The chemistry between Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian is electric.

Rose Glass: I was picturing Kristen Stewart for the role during the writing process and she immediately said yes. She just seemed like a very natural fit for the role and I find her incredibly charismatic and likeable and funny in this in spite of the fact she’s kind of playing an asshole. I’d love to see Kristen play more comedies. She is really funny in person and super twinkly.

Jackie was harder to cast. I was hoping it would be a discovery, where we’d find a bodybuilder who’d never acted before who would be great, but it turned out it’s quite difficult for such a complex role. Anyway, we got out to Albuquerque and the shoot was just kind of looming closer and closer and I was having a lot of sleepless nights, and then Katie saw this casting ad on Twitter and tweeted a picture of herself flexing saying I’m free. From the point where we cast her until we were shooting was literally two weeks. We didn’t have time to rehearse and went straight into shooting.

Love drives them both crazy, and they are both raging and all over the place in the best way.

Rose Glass: Weronica, and I were very much railing against the idea that female characters are expected to be morally righteous and make people feel comfortable. Lou and Jackie have this monstrous rage and that turns each other on, and their love for each other is extreme and all over the place. One second, they are fighting on the streets, another second, they are embracing each other. I’m interested in seeing women making terrible decisions and really making a mess of things. When Jackie throws up and gives birth to Lou in this dream-like sequence, we were thinking of how lovers consume each other in this kind of dependent relationship. When Wera and I were first writing it, the idea was of a Pygmalion kind of thing where one woman creates the other and controls her, then it all gets out of hand. We were not trying to let them off the hook easily for this insane love.

The film is a maximalist camp kind of mix. How did you build that world with your collaborators – from the set design to the costumes?

Rose Glass: I had a few references of this kind of excess throughout the film – Showgirls by Paul Verhoeven, Crash by David Cronenberg, and Saturday Night Fever were the three I kind of kept in mind throughout. All the films were pretty different but I think they all exist in their own strangely heightened sort of universes. The performances are quite earnest, but you sense something is weird, uncanny in their worlds.

Saturday Night Fever especially is an incredibly gritty, super dark, real-world sort of film but the more sinister and real and horrible the story gets in reality the dreamier and more heightened and fantastical the dance numbers come throughout the film. I wanted to encourage this kind of mindset.

The sequence which was a bit sleeker and colder visually were those red sequences with Kristen Stewart with younger makeup and extensions. When she was in the dressing room, she was like, ‘I look like Bella Swan again.’ And I laughed, saying, ‘yeah you do, now get that gun.’

Did you always want to go into more fantastical territory with the film?

Rose Glass: Wera and I really wanted the end to go more into that dreamlike territory. We did try writing a much more grounded version of the ending but it just felt like a bit of a cop out and we both desperately missed giant Jackie. And to me it seemed like just the most natural conclusion of where the film’s heading. This endless pursuit of more and more. It’s only got one place to go. It’s either total annihilation or she turns into a giant. And of course, it’s that feeling of their love which seems invincible and larger than life.

Love Lies Bleeding released in the UK on 3 May 2024