The year has just begun, but Love Lies Bleeding is already in contention for the most buzzed-about movie of 2024. After the erotic neo-noir’s rowdy world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, star Kristen Stewart embarked on a press tour that sent shock waves throughout sapphic communities both online and IRL: “Whole theater was lesbians, half of them showed up twenty minutes late, two girls in the row behind me had to change seats because of a love triangle situation,” reports Letterboxd member Jamie from the frontlines.

Writer and director Rose Glass’s explosive sophomore feature lives up to the hype: the tale of a bodybuilder (Katy O’Brian) who falls fast and hard for Lou, a gym manager (Kristen Stewart) with a dark family history, Love Lies Bleeding brings sex back to the movies with violent, surreal, darkly funny style.

Glass isn’t necessarily surprised by the reaction—“I knew that there’d be a lot of sex and violence in this one,” she tells me—but she is amused by it. For her, setting Jackie and Lou’s gym rat romance in the American Southwest circa 1989 was a natural choice for a story that’s the expansive, lusty yang to Saint Maud’s withdrawn, masochistic yin. I talked with the filmmaker about her intuitive process, her attention to grimy detail and the voyeuristic heart of cinema itself.

Both of your films so far have combined grounded material and fantastic elements. What is your approach to blending them, and how does violence play into that?
Rose Glass: I think it’s just what comes naturally to me. The short films I did also combine fantasy and reality. That’s the cinematic language I like the most: it’s poetic. We get to not be in the real world [for a while], so let’s do that.

But hopefully I can still make it feel relevant enough to the real world that it’s not just pure flights of fancy. When there’s some kind of link, that’s satisfying to me. With the violence, obviously that can be very real-world, but it doesn’t have to be.

My interpretation is that the violence is a catalyst for hurtling into the supernatural.
In Love Lies Bleeding, specifically, their love is what spurs on both the violence and the [supernatural elements]. The same thing can send them in quite different directions—with great love comes great responsibility, basically.

For me, a lot of cinema is living vicariously through whatever stories you’re telling. The reason a lot of people go to see films is because you get to experience something outside of yourself that you’d never get to do from the comfort of a theater seat. I think a lot of people have violent urges at various points in their life, even if most of us don’t act on them. It’s a very natural human instinct.

Telling a story gives you a nice stage to play out all of these less savory instincts, and channel them into something that doesn’t actually hurt anyone. Violence is also just some of the most fun stuff to [shoot]. It’s great fun to choreograph that kind of stuff. I knew that there’d be a lot of sex and violence in this one.

Lou and Jackie are perfect for each other, and also the absolute worst for each other.
I feel like the message of the film is actually very puritanical. “Just because it feels good, doesn’t mean it is good.” [Laughs]

I wanted to do something which felt a lot more extroverted, and kind of bombastic. But now, having done this, I have an urge to retreat into insular stuff again. So maybe it’s going to be an expanding and contracting thing.

Does that have anything to do with the film being set in America: a big, loud nation full of violent extroverts?
I was a bit nervous about setting [the film] in America. I tried to find a way to crowbar it into the UK somewhere, but it just didn’t make sense. America just seemed to fit thematically with bodybuilding quite well, and the dangers of excess and ambition and individualism and pursuing your dream at the expense of everything else.

America’s also just the omnipresent Roman Empire of today. Even though I’d only been to America a handful of times, and I’d never been to that part of the country, weirdly when we went there to film, it all felt really familiar. As with most people around the world who aren’t from America, I’d spent a lifetime being influenced by films and TV set in this country that I’d never been to.

And the American Southwest in particular—whole genres of film are centered there.
There’s a whole cinematic language and characters [associated with the American West], which is quite fun to draw on and play with. Hopefully, there are a lot of elements that feel very familiar, but go somewhere unexpected.

I’m glad you did. So, Jackie and Lou’s connection is very sexual. There are a lot of sex scenes in this film. But there are also elements of—I’m just going to be blunt and say there are some fetishistic elements in this film.
I don’t know what you’re talking about. [Laughs]

[Laughs] Okay, well, let’s talk about your research process.
It all came quite instinctually. I think if I would have stopped and thought about it too much, I’d have become self-conscious. Like the giantess stuff—I didn’t realize that giantesses were a fetish. Someone told me that giantess porn is a thing, and I was like, “I need to search this.”

Obviously, muscular women are totally a thing. I think it’s even in Pumping Iron II—in the past, or maybe even now, bodybuilders will sometimes have a lucrative sideline in beating up guys.

Yeah. You can pay a muscular woman to wrestle with you.
Well, fabulous! At one point, we did have more of that kind of thing in the script, but it felt contrived. But it’s a fascinating subgenre.

Some of it just came about during the shoot. It’s only a split second, but there’s a bit towards the end where Lou finds Jackie lying all tied up, and we needed to have her tied up in a convincing way. When I was there on set, I thought, “She’s really strong, so it’s not going to be convincing that she’s just held there by [regular knots].” So then I was like, “Does anyone know how to do shibari [Japanese rope bondage]?” And fortunately, the partner of somebody on set was an expert in rope bondage, so we called them and said, “Quick, can you come and tie up our actress in a beautiful, kinky kind of way?”

For me, cinema is inherently kinky. There’s something voyeuristic about the idea of the act of going to the cinema and sitting in a dark room with all these strangers and all having this shared experience, being so close to each other but not interacting. All of that stuff’s beautiful and fun and exciting to me.

There’s a voyeuristic aspect, and then there’s also this potential to fixate on details in a way that can be fetishistic.
And hopefully it gives people a bit of something they might not think they would get. Depending on the way you film it, hopefully it can help [satisfy those impulses]. In an ideal world, films help you see perspectives and appreciate things that you wouldn’t in real life.

More impulses that we don’t actually indulge, like you were talking about with the violence.
Absolutely. We all fantasize about smashing someone’s head in at one point or another. Hopefully, we don’t act on it, but acknowledging that the feelings are there is healthy.

I’m just really happy people are having fun watching it. To me, this is a comedy. Saint Maud’s not a comedy, but to me, Love Lies Bleeding is a funny film. There are jokes in there. You do it to entertain people, so when you hear people sounding entertained, it’s lovely.

The comedy element is closer to the surface in this film, but it’s dark comedy. Does that reflect your sense of humor?
I wrote it with one of my best friends, so we must have a macabre sense of humor. Or maybe it’s a European thing, I don’t know. We were actively trying to make each other laugh when we were coming up with the script. It was a lot of fun. There’s a lot of slapstick in there.

The casting in this film is so key, I was wondering if you wrote the main roles with anyone in mind.
I was definitely picturing Kristen very early in the writing process. You go through the mental exercise of fantasy dream-casting, and she was [my first choice]. So it was particularly nice when she agreed to actually be in the film.

She was the only one I was picturing while writing. Jackie was hard [to cast], because when you’re casting, you’re thinking of big famous actors, and there just wasn’t anyone who I felt could convincingly play a bodybuilder. You could spend a lifetime committing to becoming a bodybuilder, and women who bodybuild want to be bodybuilders, not necessarily actors, so that was tricky.

For the others, the faces kind of swim around and change. That’s the exciting bit about the casting process.

It’s cool that you have a female bodybuilder as an object of lust and desire in this film, because that’s not the mainstream Hollywood beauty ideal for women.
It’s mad though, because she’s beautiful. She looks fucking amazing. And also, many muscular women exist in the world. Many women go to the gym. It’s not that unusual. When we were doing it, I was like, “These girls look really cool and hot. This is great.” It’s only once I started putting this film out into the world and promoting it and talking about it a lot that I realized how surprised people were [to see Katy O’Brian in that role].

And then people are like, “My God, Kristen’s so butch.” It’s like, come on. Even then, they’re both still slim, conventionally attractive, beautiful women. It shouldn’t be so radical. It’s no revelation—everybody knows [about] the homogeny of film characters, particularly in romantic leads. But hopefully that’s changing.