Rose Glass has certainly made a name for herself with her debut feature film, the psychological horror Saint Maud.
The film follows a religious nurse named Maud (Morfydd Clark), who becomes dangerously obsessed with saving the soul of her dying patient and hedonistic dancer Amanda ( Jennifer Ehle ).
However, as the film unravels, so does Maud's dark past and events soon begin to spiral dangerously out of control.
With the film receiving special commendation after competing at the BFI London Film Festival 2019, Oscar-winning director Danny Boyle has said that Glass is "an extraordinary talent and powerful storyteller" and a "true original", going on to describe her film Saint Maud as "a genuinely unsettling and intriguing film. Striking, affecting and mordantly funny at times, its confidence evokes the ecstasy of films like Carrie, The Exorcist and Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin."
Having gone on to win a £50,000 bursary backed by the BFI and the Swiss watch manufacturer IWC Schaffhausen for her work, Glass has now been named by The British Academy of Film and Television Arts ( BAFTA ) as one of 2019's BAFTA Breakthrough Brits, in partnership with Netflix, which names twenty of the UK’s most promising future stars of film, games and television.
Speaking exclusively to Mirror Online, director Rose Glass discusses making her acclaimed horror Saint Maud, what's next for her career, and also what it means to be selected by BAFTA as a Breakthrough Brit and joining past winners such as Tom Holland, Letitia Wright, Florence Pugh and The Crown star Josh O'Connor.
"It’s incredibly flattering and very exciting and quite weird," says Glass of her Breakthrough Brit status. "BATFA always seems like this very lofty, far-off and important element of the industry and I’ve been watching the BAFTAs on telly since I was little, so it’s a little weird to be mentioned in the same sentence as it now."
On filmmaking being her childhood dream since growing up in Chelmsford, Essex, Glass explained: "It’s all I've ever wanted to do since I was very young; a pre-teen messing around with my parents’ video camera and doing little stop-motion videos and shooting stupid films with my friends at the weekends as a teenager.
"It was always a thing I've enjoyed doing and since then I've been pretty one-track minded since going to university and the National Film and Television School and then getting films off the ground and shooting things. It’s been the thing I've been trying to do my whole life and now it’s finally happened."
But what types of tales does the director hope to tell?
"The stories I've always been interested in telling are about the versions of ourselves we present to the world and the gap between that and what’s going on inside our heads," reveals the director, who worked as a cinema usher alongside her studies before her success with Saint Maud.
On how to explain her directorial debut feature, Glass says: "I always found it a difficult one to pitch to people…so it feels slightly surreal that it’s worked."
She adds: "In the beginning, it was about a young woman who hears the voice of God in her head and it was a two-hander of her and this voice, which develops into a weird relationship, but it’s a bit different now.
"I've always liked weird, intimate, claustrophobic, paranoid, psychological stories but then told on quite a grand scale.
"Film and literature also give you this uniquely voyeuristic way of stepping into someone else’s mind for a bit."
One of the central parts of Saint Maud is played by a face that has been long-recognisable to audiences.
On casting Jennifer Ehle in the film, the director said: "We offered her the role straight out and she really liked the script and we spoke on the phone once - she just wanted to check I wasn't a lunatic - and then she was on board which was very exciting."
However, the real find of Saint Maud is its star Morfydd Clark as Maud, a Welsh actress of stage and screen who is already making waves.
"We saw quite a lot of people for that role and so much of the film’s success hinges on whether on not you buy into this young woman and care about her, but Morfydd is an absolute chameleon," describes Glass.
The director adds of Clark: "She was in three films at London Film Festival in four different roles - she has two roles in the new David Copperfield film and was also in Eternal Beauty - and I heard people saying they saw her in these separate films and didn't realise it was the same actress.
"She’s an amazing comic performer as well and it was important for me that the film didn't descend into this angsty, overly-earnest territory. It’s quite dark, some of the stuff that happens, but we needed somebody who was sort of funny and relatable and she’s all of those things."
On her cinematic inspirations, Glass revealed that she tends to draw on particular movies rather than hero-worship a director.
"It’s usually individual films that I've become obsessed with rather than a director’s entire body of work. On Saint Maud particularly there’s lots of inspiration from sixties and seventies cinema.
"Taxi Driver was a bit of a reference, I sometimes think of Maud as this young Catholic female version of the Travis Bickle character but in an English seaside town.
"And I went to Film School so I’m sort of a pretentious film student, so I’m a big Ingmar Bergman fan and particularly some of the visual language and tone of the film came fro that kind of cinema and Roman Polanski’s stuff like Repulsion. Rosemary’s Baby is probably my favourite film of all time.
"I liked watching films growing up that I felt like I probably shouldn’t be watching and I like the idea of a teenager watching Saint Maud and getting the same kind of feeling out it - that’d be pretty cool."
But what next for the rising British director after the success of Saint Maud?
"I've got two ideas I’m working on but I’m afraid I can’t go into any detail on what they’re about," she revealed.
"I am co-writing something with a fellow NFTS graduate called Weronika Tofilska which I’ll also be directing and I’m teaming up with the same producers as Saint Maud and one of them is Oliver Kassman, who is also a Breakthrough Brit this year and we’re doing that with Film4.
"And then I've got another one which I’m writing and I’m working on a body horror idea."
Glass is quite the busy bee, so we should definitely watch this space!
Saint Maud was shown at the BFI London Film Festival 2019 and will be coming soon to UK cinemas.