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Warning: Major spoilers ahead.
I asked Glass as many of them as possible during our hour-long conversation.
at National Film and Television School, in 2014.
A couple of years later, I started writing the script.
I also wanted to make the kind of films that I like, which are very subjective.
You never really know whats going on in someone elses head.
How did it evolve from that point?Hours of angsting and changing and thinking about it.
And I started to realize that maybe her relationship with God could feed into her relationship with this woman.
Being led to do something as extreme as that is not the kind of switch that happens overnight.
Theres always a long complicated series of events.
I was surprised to learn that this was your first movie.
It feels like the work of somebody with a lot of movies under their belt.
What do you attribute that to?Fear.[Laughs.]
And I had incredible collaborators.
What were your short films like beforeSaint Maud?I didnt start making proper shorts until film school.
And then throughout my teens, me and a couple of really cool friends made silly little parody movies.
Even when I was doing that, it was quite heightened, silly stuff, spoofs and comedy things.
I want things to be fun and entertaining, but interesting.
I read an interview with you where you said, Women love messed-up stuff.
I was like, I wrote it!
Theres so much weirdness throughout history that has to do with women and their bodies, the paranormal.
Maybe we tap into that.
I cant believe men are asking you that.Yeah.[Laughs.]
And people like being shocked.
I wanted it to be a fun film.
That was my big takeaway after the first time I saw it I just had so much fun.
Tragedy and comedy go hand in hand.
Theres some kind of instinctual reaction between fear and laughter.
And Morfydd brought so much to it.
How did you find Morfydd?In a quite traditional audition process.
We started doing it about halfway through writing the script.
We started seeing a lot of people early on because the film hinged on finding the right person.
If you dont like her or the character, the whole film falls on its face.
And who has massive range, and is a really good comic actress.
She can really transform.
Her eyes are so incredible and frightening, these liquid blackholes.
Maud has the condition where you have different-colored eyes.
you’ve got the option to only tell she has different-colored eyes in a few shots.
I think some people even thought her eyes changed throughout the film.
But when she has a godgasm, we stretch her eyes out.
I wanted to find a different way of them communicating.
And it makes her feel really good.
As someone whos not religious, thats how I can get onboard with it.
I was like, Yes, that would be great, thank you.
To me, it felt too chicken and egg.
And his chest had this massive incision down the middle that had been stapled up.
And it all went up in her face, and he died.
Has she seen the film?Yeah.
What we show is probably much tamer than how it must have actually looked.
Medical stuff, in real life, is pretty fucking intense.
Did you talk about wanting to keep the audience guessing up until the end?Oh, totally.
So then you feel God, and hes communicating this to you.
We played it, in that sense, completely straight.
Watching the movie made me curious about your own religious background.I grew up with a Christian upbringing.
I was baptized and went to church with my family on special occasions.
And I also went to an all-girls convent school, and my teachers growing up were nuns.
So Christianity was just around a lot.
It wasnt forced on me; I wasnt particularly interested or connected to it growing up.
I found it a bit boring.
But because Christianity is familiar to me, I didnt really do any extra research or theological research.
Because Maud is sort of making up her own warped version of Christianity.
And she was English.
From the beginning, she was always a foil to Maud.
But hopefully quite quickly picking that apart a bit, and not being quite so on the nose.
But I wanted it to be the same as with Maud: Neither are entirely the protagonist or antagonist.
They both do bad things and misinterpret each other.
I wanted people to realize that in some ways, they have quite a bit in common.
But then it goes wrong.
But Ive seen that story quite a lot before.
Its much more ambiguous.
There is an element of physical attraction, but for me, its not about Maud repressing her sexuality.
Sometimes women bonding with other women can take on this almost romantic [tinge].
I think part of her envies Amanda and wishes she could be a bit more like her.
Their dynamic reminded me a lot ofPersona.Yes, thats another nurse-actress pairing.
I love that film.
On one hand, Amanda is in charge, the older and more successful whos employing Maud.
But at the same time, Maud is taking care of her body, and Amanda is physically helpless.
There are so many good body-horror moments, to that point.
The nails in Mauds shoes; the way she picks her scabs.
Somebody had drawn a diagram of it.
I saw it years ago, but it stuck in my head.
I did really enjoy filming that scene.
This whole team of professionals helping me film a girl pick a scab on her hand!
My dream has come true!
So it was a hint of how she dealt with her troubles before she found God.
Lets talk about the ending.
And then her brain basically defends itself against that reality.
That point is her slipping much further into psychosis.
In my mind, everything after that, barring the stabbing, is in her head.
I tried to resist the idea of her killing Amanda.
It makes total sense that shed kill Amanda!
She thinks shes the devil.
But there were versions of it where [she didnt].
Ultimately, the person shes the biggest danger to is herself.
It just felt a bit disingenuous.
Oh, maybe everythings fine!
To me that was the more important, genuine note to end the film on.
She ended up here, but weve slipped down there with her.
You realize how youd view that scene if you came to it cold.
What were the logistics of shooting that final scene with the alternating perspectives?It was quite intense.
It was going well but we were all knackered and it was freezing cold on the beach.
We needed to see that it was her.
It was like, Oh, its a stuntwoman.
So we did some pickups with the big close-up.
Did you anticipate the critical reception its gotten?No, God no.
I always thought itd be this tiny British movie, but I guess not.
Are you working on anything else at the moment?Yeah, I have a couple of things.
One is sort of body horror, I guess?
Even withSaint Maud, Im like, Is this a horror film?
