Leap of faith
Writer/director Rose Glass made her feature debut with the sensational Saint Maud. Here she writes exclusively for Total Film about the agony and ecstasy of the film’s journey to cinemas…
In the very beginning of lockdown, I think, if I am honest, I felt rather sorry for myself and royally pissed off by the blatant, cosmic injustice of it all. Didn’t the universe know I had been wanting to make a movie my whole life and that it was very important I now be allowed to fly around the US promoting it? My producers and I had been days away from said flight. I had been bricking it but had psyched myself up sufficiently (I’d had a whole bloody day of media training FFS!) for it. Saint Maud was going to get a wide theatrical US release. “This never happens with a tiny UK debut!” I was told repeatedly. This all feels completely unreal! OMG how amazingly, unbelievably… SMACK. Within 48 hours - Travel ban. Trip cancelled. Cinemas closed. Everything closed. Release pulled. Stay at home… Oh.
It is weird writing about that time now. I imagine everyone’s prelockdown life feels quite far away. At the time, it seemed such unbelievably, unfortunate timing from a personal perspective. Now, I’m just relieved at how silly it all seems, really; living through history-book pages certainly helps put your own bullshit into perspective, not to mention the fact that this version of ‘living through history’ has mostly involved loafing around in my pants all day and drinking too much. In the end, any stuff going on with Saint
Maud has just been a lovely distraction from reality. It has been great to get on with writing too and escape that way.
As far as releasing a film ‘in these strange times’ goes, we’ve had about as charmed an experience of it as is possible so I’m mostly just left feeling incredibly lucky; our festival run happened before lockdown so we already got to experience seeing the film in a few packed cinemas, and we still got a theatrical release! I know other filmmakers whose festival premieres either got cancelled or moved on to VOD, or whose theatrical release only preceded lockdown by a week and therefore got completely lost. If anything, we got an extra-warm reception from the UK because, when we did finally release, it ended up being the same week Cineworld closed all its cinemas, and James Bond has just legged it to 2021, so suddenly the state of cinema became a bit of a story and we were one of an increasingly small cluster of films out there to talk about.
I think the coolest thing to come from it all is people perhaps identifying a little more with Maud than they might have done in more usual circumstances; moping around at home in your pants and fretting about the state of the world is a pastime a lot of us have gotten rather good at… RG
SAINT MAUD IS BACK IN SELECTED CINEMAS THROUGHOUT THE UK.