Why Love Lies Bleeding Is a Movie About the “Battle Between Our Brains and Bodies”
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The post Why Love Lies Bleeding Is a Movie About the “Battle Between Our Brains and Bodies” appeared first on Consequence.
The funniest thing writer/director Rose Glass says in an interview with Consequence is maybe only funny if you’ve seen her new movie: “Ultimately, it is just a film about a woman trying and failing to quit smoking.” It’s amusing because it is, functionally, the actual truth — though the surreal thriller Love Lies Bleeding, starring Kristen Stewart as a New Mexico gym employee who gets entangled with aspiring bodybuilder Jackie (Katy O’Brian), encompasses a whole lot more.
Glass initially came at the idea for the 1980s-set film from the latter perspective, “wanting to tell a story about a female bodybuilder who’s coming unraveled as she’s training for the competition of her life.” In working with co-writer Weronika Tofilska, she adds, “we spent a long time taking her in lots of different directions and trying to make our characters’ lives as difficult as possible, and it quickly became a love story.”
The decision to make it a love story evolved out of the writers’ interest in a character like Jackie, “because the clarity of vision and level of obsessiveness that I wanted this bodybuilder to have, it felt like we wanted someone for her to pull against,” Glass says. In addition, Glass’s first film, Saint Maud, was “a lot about loneliness — so, having done a film where a lot of it’s about a relationship a woman’s got with something in her head, it’s like, let’s get some real people to knock against each other and see what happens. Because if you think that being on your own’s hard, try being in a relationship.”
Back in 2021, Kristen Stewart was praising Saint Maud in interviews, foreshadowing her eventual collaboration with Glass. “That was around the same time that we met, as well,” the director says, having started working on the script for Love Lies Bleeding just before the beginning of COVID, and knowing from the beginning that “I wanted her to be in the role. But I didn’t know if she’d do it or not. It was all very surreal and I just was very pleasantly surprised and excited that she said yes.”
Katy O’Brian said that her first reaction to reading Glass and Tofilska’s script was “How did they write this movie that I didn’t know I wanted to always be in? How did this all come together?” (When you find out that the actor, previously featured in The Mandalorian and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, also has a background in martial arts and bodybuilding, the kismet feels real.)
As passionate as she was about the script, though, O’Brian admits that she had “a moment of self-doubt” about taking on the project, “just really thinking like, is this too much for me? Will I be able to stand up there with Kristen and Ed [Harris] and not drag the movie down and hit these notes that need to be hit? And then I was like, I gotta try. I’m not going to grow if I back away from something like this. So I just dove head first, and it was a wild ride.”
Glass’s interest in the world of bodybuilding, she says, comes from the the fact that “I’m the furthest opposite of a bodybuilder and have always felt myself characterized through physical weakness and sloth and lack of discipline. So I’m just fascinated by what I don’t have myself. Maybe it’s like a short man syndrome kind of thing, or short woman, but even if I don’t act on it, I feel like I have blood lust and rage in me in some levels and I’m sure that’s a universal thing, and maybe what maybe what stops some people acting on it is physical ability and opportunity and lack of consequences.”
Love Lies Bleeding is primarily a crime thriller, but its most brilliant surreal touches come as a result of Jackie’s passion for bodybuilding, which proves to be an essential part of the narrative. When it comes to the practice, O’Brian notes that “a lot of people think of it as like as specifically a vain sport. They think, ‘Oh, you’re not training for strength. You’re just training to look good.’ And technically I guess at the end of the day, you are training to have a very specific aesthetic.”
Perhaps that’s why Glass sees bodybuilding “as much of a performance art as it is a sport. There’s just something sort of weird and anarchic about it, but in a really interesting, beautiful way, where you’ve got people lifting and going through all this physical training, ultimately with the goal of something aesthetic. They’re not being judged on how much they can lift, even though obviously you have to put in a huge amount of physical labor to look like that. It’s artistic and just quite strange, I think.”
Added Glass, “the freestyle routine bit, it is such a kind of performance of who that person is — there’s so much variety in what kind of music they choose, what tone of performance — do they go funny and silly? Some of them go very heartfelt. There’s that documentary [Pumping Iron], with Arnold Schwarzenegger and the idea of treating your own body as a sculpture — I think it’s fascinating. It’s a strange process.”
O’Brian says that “I specifically think of myself as a not graceful person,” so her focus during the preparation for the film was on “this beautiful choreography at the end of the bodybuilding competition. I had this Black Swan kind of madness in my mind: There’s the body horror, and all of that that I was really excited to get to play with, but then there’s also this flowy, flowery, beautiful dance, like you’ve transcended reality and you are in your own world doing this. It was really cool, for me, this awkward, clunky person, to get to play with a little bit of grace and poise, but also aggression and harsh movement. And I love that that fed into the horror and the surrealism of the film.”
Something the film captures, if not directly but expressively, is that “there’s a really dark side” to bodybuilding, according to O’Brian: “You do all this work, you go out on stage for like 30 minutes, you’re looking your literal best. And then the next day, you eat a normal meal or you drink water and you gain 10 pounds. There’s something called bodybuilding blues because your body rebounds and you get way bigger, and you have to constantly adjust to your body changing, and then it starts to give you like an unhealthy relationship with food.”
Love Lies Bleeding (A24)
The importance of our physical forms in general, and in the world of bodybuilding in particular, is all part of Glass’s interest in exploring this area. “We all share a same physical world, but we’re all trapped in our little brain bubbles experiencing reality very subjectively,” Glass says. “In a way, our body’s like a weird midpoint between the two things, between what’s in here and what’s out there and how what somebody does with their body or how they treat their own body can say a lot about their own mindset and how they see themselves and see the world.”
As she continues, “I’m interested in people pushing that to extremes. Like, I was really anorexic when I was a teenager — not to directly compare that to bodybuilding, but going through that level of tie between body and brain, realizing that that can get warped and distorted and unhealthy, and how your relationship with your body can feed a lot, positively or negatively, into the rest of your life and identity.”
This all ties back into Stewart’s Lou struggling with her addiction to cigarettes — something Glass ties to her own experiences. “I was a smoker from a very young age until post for this film, and was listening to the book of Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking, which is what Kristen’s listening to in the film, because it did come out in the eighties, it’s still, I think, the number one global bestseller quit-smoking book. I would urge anybody with any kind of addiction issues to check out Easy Way.”
Plus, Lou’s addiction serves as a good point of contrast with Jackie’s own dedication to her craft. “To put in as much work as someone like Jackie does into bodybuilding… The amount of work and discipline is insane, and yet some people manage that. Whereas for others, we can’t even stop voluntarily doing the thing which serves no purpose other than to slowly poison ourselves,” Glass says. “So I guess willpower is a funny thing. And it’s still something to do with the battle between our brains and bodies, and who’s really controlling what.”
Love Lies Bleeding made its debut at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, and O’Brian says that since then, “I’ve loved some of the feedback that I didn’t think about when I was making it. Like, some people said that it made them feel empowered, and that’s, to me, priceless. I think that’s so, so incredible. Some people said that it gave them gender euphoria. I just was like, ‘Oh, I’m just making a movie, doing the thing,’ and people are taking very real and very heartfelt things from, from it. And I think that that’s really cool. Because you never know who you’re going to reach, and if it matters.”
Love Lies Bleeding is now in limited release, and goes wide in theaters beginning Friday, March 15th.
Why Love Lies Bleeding Is a Movie About the “Battle Between Our Brains and Bodies”
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