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“There’s something so completely undeniable about it. There’s just nothing to hide behind. You only get looking like that one way and it’s by an undeniable amount of work,” says director Rose Glass of bodybuilding, the sport that is one of the focal points of her sophomore feature, Love Lies Bleeding.
The film, the follow-up to her incredibly well-received body horror Saint Maud, follows Lou (Kristen Stewart) as the manager of a gym in middle-of-nowhere America who falls for a bodybuilder Jackie (Katy O’Brian) after she blows into town on her way to a competition in Vegas. The two quickly run into trouble with Lou’s father (Ed Harris), an arms dealer who runs the local crime ring.
Ahead of the Berlin Film Festival, where the film will premiere on Sunday, Feb. 18, Glass talked to THR about bodybuilding and Saturday Night Fever influences.
How did the story first come to you?
The initial idea was: Wouldn’t it be cool to make a film about a female bodybuilder? I thought it sounded like an exciting, psychologically rich territory to have somebody in that world and with that sort of ambition. That was just a vague thing in my head when we were finishing up post for Saint Maud. Once we were in lockdown, that’s when Saint Maud got released. I wanted to make sure that the writing process was very different from Saint Maud because as much as I love making that film, and it was wonderful that it got received well, the writing process was incredibly isolating and quite stressful.
Why was that?
I had never written a feature-length script before, and I felt quite out of my depth. Probably a lot of first-time filmmakers are plagued by this awful fear, this question hanging over your head the whole time of whether you’re ever going to get to make the film. You feel a bit like you’re writing into a void. This time around, I was nervous about that happening again, so I was like, “Okay, I want to try co-writing.” I teamed up with Weronika Tofilska. We already knew each other well and had this shorthand. We locked ourselves in a room for many months, coming up with these characters. We thought let’s create Lou and Jackie, get them to fall in love, and then throw as many problems their way as possible. We went into it in an open, unpretentious way, led by wherever the story felt the most exciting.
What was it about bodybuilding that made you think you could build an entire movie around it?
I have always been interested in the relationship that people have with their bodies, and the opportunity to say something external about what’s going on inside. With bodybuilding, it’s pushing things to an obsessive extreme. But I didn’t really know anything about bodybuilding going in [to scripting]. I’d seen a photo of a “strong woman” from the ’40s or ’50s, billed as a sideshow. As a professional sport, female bodybuilding didn’t come about until the ’60s or ’70s, so seeing a woman that muscular was always a freak show attraction. There is also a weird, contradictory nature to it because it’s all about strength and building these amazing muscles but it’s all for the purposes of something aesthetic, rather than anything functional. And there’s all this work getting to look this incredible way but by the time they come to compete, they’re physically at their weakest because they are so dehydrated.
Why set the film in America?
By the time we got to the script stage, it was always America. But in that brainstorming stage, for some reason, it was a toss-up between America and Scotland. I couldn’t quite tell you why. It was maybe that I just liked the idea of muscley Glaswegian butches and that could have been a fun world to set [the film] in. But the story just made the most sense in America. With the level of murders going on and people having to cover stuff up, we realized there’s something about America and the vastness of it where that felt a bit more plausible. When you have so many muscles and guns going in there, the film, the characters, the story have a bit more to say of relevance in an American setting. And with the casualness of firearms, I still find that extraordinary going to America. I went to L.A. when Saint Maud was doing festivals, and that was the first time I’ve really been to America. If you’re not from there, it does have this weird mythological kind of feel to it. Everything just feels familiar, even though you’ve never seen it before. Even at Sundance, they’ve got signs before you go into a movie theater saying: “No firearms allowed.” Anyone from Europe is like, “What the fuck??” When you are going through security at the airport they are like “No firearms.” It’s like, no kidding! So the baseline or threshold for shock is higher already.
Were there other films you were referencing when trying to figure out the look of the film?
When I was doing Maud, me and Ben Fordesman, my DOP who shot this film as well, were giving each other long lists of films to watch. Because so much of the DNA and ingredients of [Love Lies Bleeding] is so easily connectable to so many other films — Wild at Heart, Thelma and Louise, True Romance, anything with two lovers with guns and murder in extremity — I was wary about not wanting it to [revisit them]. Instead, it was more about the feel of it than having lots of visual references. There’s something heightened and melodramatic about it, but texturally I knew it needed to be icky and sweaty. I gave the actors lists of films to watch but it was quite a weird mix of stuff. Like Saturday Night Fever, which has a balance of grittiness and dreaminess. The heavier the story gets, the more you have these fabulous dance sequences. Showgirls was just one of those films that I remember watching when I was probably too young to watch it quite late one night on TV. People have mixed opinions about that one. Say what you like about it, the momentum of the story in that film is insane.
What was the most difficult role to cast?
Jackie. I think I naively went into it being like: this will be fine. I’m sure there are plenty of bodybuilders who are also amazing actors. We auditioned a lot of people for it, and our casting directors got tapes from all over the place. We started looking quite early, and we had Kristen on board by then. I had gone out to Albuquerque to start prep, and the shoot was five weeks away, and we still hadn’t cast. [I was] growing more and more terrified every day. Then you end up having weird conversations about how maybe we could cast a regular physique-d actor and do something elaborate with body doubles and VFX and prosthetics. Then you just start being like, “What are we saying?” I already felt a bit out of my depth with so many elements, it’s more characters, more locations than anything I’ve done before.
The casting director put out an open call on Twitter or something, and I think a fan of [O’Brian’s], because she’d already done like Mandalorian, sent her the call. She was kind of like, “What? Why didn’t I hear about this?” She’s not a bodybuilder now but she has been doing martial arts since she was little and did compete in bodybuilding when she was 18. Luckily, she sent in a tape, and we got her to come and read with Kristen. That was basically the only rehearsal I really got with them. I think from the point where she found out about it to being cast and then on set, I want to say it was a month. She is already in amazing shape, but we also got her a trainer who gets people beefed up for Marvel films and stuff like that, and she immediately just dove into training.
Interview edited and condensed.