A24’s Love Lies Bleeding has just hit theaters, and there are many reasons you should watch this movie. Of course, there’s the fact that it’s simply an excellent film; surreal, irreverent, funny, suspenseful, and down-right thrilling are all adjectives that come to mind. We won’t wax poetic too much about it here, but you can read our five-star review of Love Lies Bleeding for a better idea of the greatness it entails. Beyond that, the performances are stunning, the conceit, smart, and the vision, incredible. As a bonus, if you’re a queer person, get ready to worship because this movie will take you to church. All hail the sacred text of Love Lies Bleeding.
And so, as a queer person myself, it was my great pleasure to get to chat with Love Lies Bleeding‘s co-writer and director, Rose Glass, and its brilliant stars, Katy O’Brian and Kristen Stewart. From the meaning embedded in the movie’s wild imagery (and especially its ending) to what it was like to inhabit its perfect queerness, here’s a deep dive into Love Lies Bleeding with those who know the movie best.
Nerdist: Love Lies Bleeding has some of the best depictions of, I wouldn’t even say queer women necessarily, because I feel it really goes beyond the gender binary, but of queerness that I’ve seen on film. And it also shatters some tired ideas of beauty with Lou’s incredible androgyny juxtaposed against Jack’s ultra-feminine goddess-like nature. It’s really an ode to a non-normative existence. What was it like to write, craft, and perform these groundbreaking roles?
Kristen Stewart: That’s such a fun question. It’s so nice to be asked that question. How was it?
Rose Glass: Really fun. I don’t know. I mean, when you are, I don’t know, it was all just kind of fairly inherently baked into… It all happens fairly gradually and organically. You don’t necessarily think you’re doing anything particularly radical, necessarily, when you’re writing it or doing it. It’s only once you see the finished thing a little bit back then and see the way people react to it, you kind of go, “Oh, okay. Cool.” But yeah, it was just really fun.
Nerdist: I thought the movie captured this intense duality that I feel queer people especially experience, where, sometimes, the characters are these fantastical beings in these crazy realms, and then they’re also lying in their sweatpants on the couch all day. Can you talk more about how Love Lies Bleeding combined its heightened surrealism with a very grimy, grounded world?
O’Brian: I feel like Jackie is almost just always in a little fantasy world in her own head, and then when it came to this pseudo-reality, it was extra fun for her.
Stewart: Yeah. Lou’s always trying to be bringing up practical things. She’s like, “Stop. We don’t have to contend with the murder that we… “
O’Brian: Yeah, exactly. “Let’s just go to Vegas. Come on.”
Stewart: They’re living in this hyper-fever, dream nightmare, like uber-realistic kind of existence. But then moments where you’re so caught up in obsession, so caught up in the high of feeling in love with someone and feeling like newness. And then the thing that always happens… There’s this one scene where they connect, they have a big fight, but then they have the best sex of their lives, and then the next day, they wake up and get this phone call that changes the course of the whole movie. And that is, anytime you let your guard down, that moment where you’re like, “Maybe things are nice between us and life is good and easy.” And then just like-
Glass: “No. No.”
Stewart: And then the world comes in and goes, “Life is hard, and it’s scary, and it sucks, but maybe we could do it together better.” And then by the end you’re like, “I don’t know if I think love is good for anyone.”
Glass: “But this feels amazing.”
Stewart: Yeah. The pain and pleasure of it, the love and hate of it, it’s all there.
Nerdist: One of my favorite surreal moments was toward the end of Love Lies Bleeding, when Jackie became this powerful triumphant giantess, and I liked the jubilation of that. It felt almost out of a Greek myth or a fairytale or something like that. Is that kind of the energy you were imagining for that scene? And what did you hope for that ending moment to represent?
Glass: Oh, nice. I’m glad you said it. I’d sort of thought of Jackie as wanting, on some level, wanting to transform herself into a kind of god or a statue or something. So yeah, I think me and Weronika [Tofilska], my co-writer, we sort of toyed with having a version of the ending that was a lot more grounded, and you just saw the very literal version of what happens… And we wanted it to elevate it into a more emotional reality kind of thing, where everything does feel kind of sparkly and magical and ecstatic.
Stewart: The end can be interpreted in so many different ways. Yeah, it’s definitely a dealer’s choice, “Choose Your Own Adventure” at the end there, in terms of what actually happens. But there is exuberance abound.
O’Brian: It was fun reading it for the first time. I was sitting there shaking the whole script because I didn’t know what was happening next. And every page I’m turning, I’m turning, and then it’s like, “Oh, you’re a giant.” And I’m like, “That checks out at the end.” You’re like, “Yeah, at this point, yeah.”
Glass: It’s like, “Jackie turns into a giant.”
O’Brian: “Throws up Lou,” Oh!
Stewart: “And flies off into the cosmos.”
Nerdist: I really love that. It did really feel like goddessy to me. And I think there’s all these ideas of queer monstrosity that exist in cinema and media, and this is kind of turning it on its head because it’s a victory, a happy ending. So I really loved over-the-top nature of that.
Stewart: I got to a mouthpiece, a facepiece, for the audience at that moment because I’m just taking her in and going, “Whoa.” It’s like, “I’m astounded by you,” as everyone should be.
Nerdist: I also really loved the sequence in the middle of the pageant where Jackie vomited or gave birth to Lou, who was all in white. What was the meaning of that moment from your perspectives?
Glass: Well, it’s just a very, probably quite literal… I don’t know, the feeling of… I guess it’s a visualization of codependency in some way. And that was the sort of romance that I think we quite liked the idea of exploring, is the kind where you do just kind of slightly feed off each other and your identities become a bit blurred. So it was just taking that to a fairly literal physical extreme.
Nerdist: A little queer cannibalism never hurt anybody.
O’Brian: So true.
Nerdist: I felt like Love Lies Bleeding also had a great time flipping queer and normative romance tropes. We got a kind of “One look is all it takes,” which is usually reserved for more straight couples in media, but we didn’t get so much endless longing and ethereal tragedy that we sometimes see in queer movies. Were there any queer tropes that you were trying to avoid and any more normative romance tropes that you were trying to queerify in this movie?
Glass: I didn’t want it to be another film… I mean, there’s many excellent examples of it, but I feel like it is a lot more familiar where a character’s sexuality, their queerness, is sort of an obstacle that needs to be grappled with. So I think that was definitely something we wanted to sort of sidestep. And it’s like their identity in that aspect is incidental and there’s a lot more else that’s happening in their lives and in the story.
Stewart: There’s this one part in a scene where we’re in a restaurant, and there’s an extra that walks by and says “Dyke,” or something. And it’s not ultimately in the movie. And it’s fine that it’s not there because we understand that happens. Even just the way we inhabit our bodies in public space is like, that part is still available even though he doesn’t actually articulate that word in that moment.
I still feel like when I look at those kids sitting in that Chinese restaurant in the middle of nowhere America, I’m like, “That’s not a safe space.” But they’re not talking about it, which is really relieving.
Nerdist: More and more characters who aren’t men are allowed to embrace their rage on screen, and their rage also comes from maybe more justified and meaningful places sometimes. Katy, I thought you were just as terrifying as Jackie when the darkness kind of overcame her. Did you enjoy embracing those intense emotions?
O’Brian: Yeah. I mean, it’s fun. JJ is a piece of shit. So it is something that you kind of always, in a weird way, want to do. You want to make somebody hurt the way that they’ve hurt someone else that you care about. But there are a lot of things that hold you back. And obviously, in a movie, you can do whatever you want, and there are no repercussions in anything. So it’s kind of, at least in that one instance, it’s empowering to feel like, “Ah, justice is served,” and then we take it a bit further.
Stewart: Yeah, never having to circle back and be like, “We’re now going to contend with our choices and mistakes.” It’s like… Yeah, I mean, sure, somebody who watches the movie will have to do that. But no, that was an instinct. It was followed and it was the right one.
Nerdist: Lou, meanwhile, seemed to be stuck waiting for her life to begin, but then, in the end, she was kind of the more take-charge, dominant one, whereas Jackie was a little bit more naive to things in a sense. Kristen, how do you feel Lou transformed throughout Love Lies Bleeding?
Stewart: I think Lou wants to be the guy that someone can lean on. And I also think that there were a couple choices that didn’t need to be so definitive. I wasn’t like, “I don’t think I should ever take my clothes off because I’m the top.” And it’s like, okay, well she also is touchable, you know what I mean? That person, she has walls, and then they come down, and there’s strength in that. I guess there’s vulnerability. But yeah, there’s something really sweet about someone who just sort of takes it all on the chin, and ultimately, that’s just not sustainable, and no one is such an altruistic, perfect person.
And so I think her having to contend with that and not being able to keep all the pieces together and actually not being able to clean up the mess and letting it all kind of get away from her is the most endearing thing and less of the trying to be so perfect or whatever.
And I just think it’s also really fun to have a feeble, basically a walking collapsed lung, trying to take care of this stupendous example of what a human can be (gestures to O’Brian). It also brings… Queer sex isn’t always about necessarily physical stuff. It’s like the stories we tell each other, the stories we tell ourselves, the fantasies that we have, the ways we want to feel. And if you co-sign that feeling, then it’s real. I can be big. I can be as big as I want to be, even though I’m 5’5″ and weigh less than her. Yeah, it’s just cool to see these people push each other into being. It’s satisfying.
Love Lies Bleeding is now in theaters for your viewing pleasure.
