Religious devotion comes in many forms.
For the title character inSaint Maud, it involves levitation.
Sticking nails in your shoes as a form of penance will do that to you.
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And with this, I was like, ‘I think I could do this well.
I think I understand her in a way that maybe other people wouldn’t quite.'"
“So it was very illuminating and sad to talk about all of that.
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She needed to be freed from that.”
For viewers, it’s more than a little unnerving; for Clark, it was only natural.
None of it felt ever silly or performative.
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It made sense to me."
“Quite quickly,” the filmmaker says, “the voice in her head turned into God.”
And then things got physical.
“There needed to be something tangible about it.
I wanted their relationship to have this physical nature to it.
I just always had to know exactly, specifically, what is actually happening.
Like, she’s not just levitating for no reason.
That’s God lifting her back up from the depths.”
Both Glass and Clark were raised Christians, but both also say they were never particularly religious.
“[Christianity] was never something that was forced on me,” the filmmaker recalls.
“I remember asking lots of questions like, ‘Why do they believe in God?
I want to believe in God,’ but I just didn’t.
I think my lack of faith made me really fascinated by it.”
Connecting to Maud so strongly eased the burden of what could have been a relentlessly daunting task.
But Clark’s confidence in the material and her interpretation of the character carried her through production.
“I never felt like that with Maud.
This character that Rose created was so complete that I didn’t feel unsure about what I was doing.
That gave me a lot of strength to do a much bigger part than I had done before.”
It all felt familiar….
It had an element of scraping together a performance in drama school.
We were all newbies.
It felt very relaxed, but with an intensity of possibility and excitement."
This feels familiar, just being on set and directing.’
She’s very tiny and powerful.
She’s like a tiny giant, I’d say."
“Tiny giant” might also be an apt description ofSaint Mauditself.
It runs a slim 83 minutes, and as Clark notes, is a fairly small-scale indie.
“I still feel closer to having just filmed it than it coming out,” she says.
That brings me much more joy and satisfaction because there’s no neuroses about myself in that.
To really be in an ensemble piece that everyone shone in has been really wonderful."
Clearly, someone prayed to the right god.
Saint Maudis in theaters now, and debuts on Epix Feb. 12.
