Born in London, Glass grew up in Essex where she always knew she wanted to make films, cutting her cinematic teeth using her parents’ video camera. While attending the London College of Communication she worked as a runner on various film sets, and made her proper debut short film “Storm House.” She graduated from the National Film and Television School in 2014, where she directed the 1950s set short film “Room 55,” which played at several film festivals including SXSW in 2015.
Her films are portraits of women pushed to psychosexual extremes. Her short “Room 55” finds an uptight woman’s rigid self-discipline upended after meeting a mysterious woman while spending an unplanned night at a roadside hotel. In “Saint Maud,” the titular nurse finds herself lost in a web of religious fanaticism and repressed sexual desires while caring for a new patient. And of course, her new film “Love Lies Bleeding” sees how the collision of Stewart and O’Brian’s characters plots them on a course simultaneously towards earth-shattering violence and euphoric, larger-than-life romance.
For this month’s Female Filmmakers in Focus column RogerEbert.com spoke to Glass over Zoom about Elton John, the alien landscape of New Mexico, crafting visceral soundscapes, and the liberation of transgression.
When I first saw the title of your film, immediately my mind went to Elton John.
No one has asked about that song yet!
At what point did you realize that was a title you wanted to use for this film, and was the song the starting point?
I knew I wanted the title to be something melodramatic, that felt like it could be like the title of some hokey paperback novel. My mom is really into gardening, and I was talking to her about plants. And I saw this particular plant and asked her what it was called. She said, “It’s called love lies bleeding.” And it’s this kind of Amaranthus which has these amazing, big, kind of beautiful, kind of ugly red seed head things. I immediately enjoyed the fabulous melodrama of it, and the fact that you use its name as a phrase or words.
So then I was obviously googling it, and found out there’s more than one other film that’s been made with the title, and obviously the Elton John song. So I think for a long time when me and Weronika Tofilska, my co-writer, when we were writing it, we wondered if it meant that it had to be the end credit song, but it didn’t quite fit. I love the song, but it didn’t quite fit totally with that moment. It may be changing a bit now, but otherwise, anytime you Google “love lies bleeding,” you either get pictures of that plant or the Elton John song.