Love Lies Bleeding star Katy O’Brian has revealed that Kristen Stewart made a last-minute tweak to one of the romantic thriller’s most pivotal scenes – and explained why it fit so perfectly with the film’s gory, campy tone.
When talking to GamesRadar+ about what it was like to be directed by Saint Maud helmer Rose Glass, the actor, who has previously appeared in the likes of The Mandalorian and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, recalled one day on set when she asked the filmmaker to describe her directing style.
“She was like, ‘Really? It’s hard, I don’t know.’ But she said it was very intuitive, and now that really makes sense to me,” O’Brian notes. “It was a lot about finding the moment there, in the scene, and we got to play with a lot of options.
“For example… I’m not sure how spoilery I can get… but there’s a murder that occurs in the movie, that’s a surprise, and Kristen’s character’s reaction on paper, originally, was like, ‘What did you do?!’ But her gut feeling at the time was that it should be, ‘I don’t want my girlfriend to think I’m cheating. Change it to ‘No, no, baby! That’s not…'” she laughs. “It was so on the fly but it just felt so right and Rose loves that. It wasn’t regimented, which is often the case with indie filmmaking – you gotta be able to go with the flow a lot of the time. It was really cool and I was chillin’ most of the time minus, you know, the turmoil Jackie goes through.
Set in the late ’80s, Love Lies Bleeding follows O’Brian’s ambitious bodybuilder Jackie, who falls for reclusive gym manager Lou (Stewart), as she passes through the latter’s small New Mexico town on her way to a competition in Las Vegas. But the loved-up pair’s whirlwind romance is soon put to the test when they get caught up in Lou’s crime family’s dangerous affairs. Jena Malone, Anna Baryshnikov, Dave Franco, and Ed Harris round out the supporting cast, while Glass penned the script with Baby Reindeer’s Weronika Tofilska.
“Because [Rose] was the co-writer and director, she had such an intimate vision of what she wanted the final product to be,” says O’Brian. “Anytime we needed a question answered, she’d be there. We all would get together and do readings of the scripts on the weekends or whenever we had a second just to make sure that we were on the same page.
“In the weeks before [shooting], she gave us a bunch of films to watch to understand the tone she was kind of looking to achieve, and they were a little bit all over the place, which adds up,” she smiles. “Showgirls was one of the big, big examples. It was all so helpful.”
Love Lies Bleeding opens in select UK cinemas on May 3, before opening wide on May 10. For more, check out our picks of the biggest upcoming movies heading our way.
