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(Editor’s note: The following interview contains major spoilers for “Love Lies Bleeding” and its ending).
If you’ve already seen “Love Lies Bleeding,” there are probably some images from the movie that you’re still getting out of your head. Rose Glass’s 1980s Southwest-set midnight movie centers on the volatile but inevitable romance between Lou (Kristen Stewart), a bored lesbian gym manager, and Jackie (Katy O’Brian), the angry bodybuilder who comes to town to save Lou from the boredom of his small town.
But as the pair fall in love, the bodies pile up, as do the heads, after steroid-addicted Jackie brutally murders wife beater JJ (Dave Franco), who is married to Beth, stunned by abuse (Jena Malone), who is also Lou’s sister. Meanwhile, looming over all is Lou and Beth’s father, the twisted, bug-eating gangster Lou Sr. (Ed Harris), with his share of secrets, in the form of bodies and weapons smuggled into the depths of a nearby canyon.
While the film’s sex scenes have sparked much chatter, what about its harrowing, even balletic violence? The image of Franco’s unceremoniously crushed skull is one that the film returns to ever more closely, with his murder (one that audiences are sure to applaud) at first shown in shadows before being seen in all its glory, care of a stale closure. Photo courtesy of cinematographer Ben Fordesman.
“Sometimes the consequences of violence have a little more impact,” Glass, who co-wrote the film with Weronika Tofilska, told IndieWire during a recent interview. Glass said depicting Franco’s gruesome death was “like a fun choreography exercise. Having (Jackie) break her head just felt like an imagining of the feeling that was perhaps at that moment most impactful off-screen. Then the consequences also become a punchline. I guess it’s joyfully irreverent.”
Glass said there was fervent discussion with the film’s backers, including producers Andrea Cornwell and Oliver Kassman, who produced Glass’s first feature, “Saint Maud,” about how many times to show JJ’s death.
“Maybe we showed it one or two more times than in the movie, and then we got to the notes, and they were right, to show it just a little more select number of times,” Glass said. “Our visual effects company, Time Based Arts, based in London, basically created the entire look of what I (said) was: ‘His face has to be completely messed up.'” (Following Jackie’s initial hit on JJ during a sneak attack on her home invasion, her completely dislocated jaw is seen swinging from her skull after her.)
“We filmed Dave, a plate of him, with a lot of red on his face, but all the details are completely digital. And those guys came up with the idea of, ‘Actually, now we’ve created this, if you have that shot where they put his body in the trunk, his jaw moves. Everyone had a great time doing that. “I’m not sure about Dave,” Glass said with a laugh.
And he added: “He knew they had to break his head, but he didn’t know the details. Kristen only saw the finished thing when she saw the finished movie. She was like, ‘Oh, fuck, if she had known what that would be like, she would have reacted differently.'” When Lou stumbles upon JJ’s dead body, he reacts more placidly than any normal person, under any circumstances the horrified person should.
“I’m so glad she reacted that way, undermining him beautifully. “It’s really fun and it really works well for Lou’s character, who we discover later in the movie has seen a lot,” Glass said.
Then there’s the film’s final, deliriously extravagant visual twist, which doesn’t come out of nowhere if you’ve been following the “Black Swan” body horrors that befall Jackie’s physique as she compulsively increases her steroid use. Jackie transforms into enormous proportions, the size of a movie monster, and crushes Lou Sr. just like the, well, bug-eating bug that he is. And just before he’s about to kill his own daughter, Lou realizes that he definitely, years ago, killed his missing mother for knowing too much about his criminal plans.
“When we were writing it, we tried versions where everything was kept very grounded and real, and it never felt like a satisfying resolution given the tonal shifts of the film,” Glass said. “I felt like we needed to do something that left the real world behind, maybe in practical terms, but that stuck to a much more emotional reality. They are very seduced by being in each other’s lives again. That feeling of love that makes you feel like you are running into the sunset and that you can do anything.”
Regarding Jackie’s final transformation, Glass said, “I like the idea of Jackie being someone who feels invisible but aspires to become this godlike figure, so we took it literally. When we were writing it, it was a little bit like, ‘Can we do this? I’m not sure. We’ll see.’ Maybe it has something to do with many audiences’ obsession with superheroes, but doing so was, at least for me, a big step into the unknown. “I’m sure Katy, having been in all this Marvel stuff, is probably a lot more used to doing gray screen stuff.” (O’Brian has had supporting roles in the “Ant-Man” and “Agents of SHIELD” films.)
In practical terms, the ending of “Love Lies Bleeding” was a big leap in visual effects for Glass, especially compared to the more grounded surrealities of his religious horror film “Saint Maud,” also from A24. “It was the first time I did something where you have a plate of actors reacting to tennis balls on sticks, which is hilarious,” she said. “The footage of Ed and Kristen reacting and then filming Katy against a gray screen and composing it together… it was definitely pretty nerve-wracking.”
Glass said she’s sure the final results “will divide people, but to me, it seems like the most authentic way to cap that part of the movie. And then them running through the clouds was just them running across the tennis court that we filmed the scene on before. Time Based Arts, our visual effects company, did all the brilliant magic.”
While “Love Lies Bleeding” almost ends with a scene in which Lou and Jackie literally run toward the horizon, Glass and co-writer Tofilska aren’t content to end their film with one last sick coda. Lou, now on the run with Jackie and the cat in tow and a dead father in town, realizes that her old love and current stalker Daisy, whom Lou Sr. sent Jackie to kill, is still alive in the Lou’s trunk. get up. Lou emotionlessly strangles Daisy to death, and in the final shot, she is shown dragging the body (another one she had to dispose of, if you include JJ wrapped in a rug) into a nearby field at the side of the road. road. .
“It was always very important to end that. We definitely had some notes that maybe we should finish it when they ride off into the sunset. That would defeat the whole point,” Glass said. “For me, obviously it’s doing it in a joyful way, but if we say anything it’s that violence is completely cyclical, and violence only perpetuates more violence. It’s terrible and bad when someone does it. You spend a lot of time with these kids telling them, ‘I’m not like my dad, I’m different, I’m better than that.’ I didn’t want to leave anyone out. … Anyone who does something terrible probably thinks they have a very good reason for doing it.”
“Love Lies Bleeding” is now in theaters worldwide from A24.