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“Slime Everywhere”: Grace Glowicki and U.S. Girls’ Meg Remy on Dead Lover
Dead Lover A lonely woman, solely referred to as Gravedigger, has never known romance due to the putrid scent she absorbs from her occupational namesake in the latest feature from director, star and co-writer Grace Glowicki following 2019’s Tito. One fateful night, Gravedigger’s lucky stars align when a handsome nobleman (co-writer Ben Petrie, Glowicki’s husband/frequent collaborator) becomes infatuated by this “fetid creature,” whose smell has the unexpected effect of turning him on. The film, however, is entitled Dead Lover, clearly alluding to the tragic conclusion of Gravedigger’s whirlwind romance. Desperate to rekindle their passion, she takes her lover’s only remains—a formidable ring finger with a rouge nail—and decides to revive him by way of the myriad corpses that rest in the graveyard.
Clearly riffing on Frankenstein while asserting a singular creative vision, Dead Lover is a veritable tapestry of influences—from avant-garde theater to German expressionism—that nevertheless hews closely to the filmmaker’s personal brand of off-color humor, gross-out vulgarity and, above all, enormous empathy for repellent central characters. Even more palpable is the spirit of collaboration that invigorates the film. Cinematographer Rhayne Vermette (a filmmaker in her own right, having helmed the excellent Ste. Anne from 2021) lends her exquisite eye for lighting and color, while Meg Remy (widely known for her indie music moniker U.S. Girls) composed the synth-heavy and theremin-inclined score. The obvious adoration Glowicki and Petrie have for one another even made its way into the interview, as the latter tried several times to call his wife from Berlin, where their latest effort as co-stars recently premiered.
Glowicki and Remy, both based in Toronto, joined me on a Zoom call to discuss their unique touch and particularly fruitful collaboration on Dead Lover, which will have its Texas premiere at SXSW on March 9. Below, they reveal the feminine ubiquity of Gravedigger, the prospect of incorporating Smell-O-Vision and how Remy’s music became integral to the film’s fabric.
Filmmaker: Grace, how did the project originate for you and Ben? Was it always clear you would write it together?
Glowicki: I knew I wanted to be super collaborative and make a comedy in an unconventional way. So it started with myself, my friend who’s a therapist, Ben and two other filmmakers basically having conversations on the phone, just spitballing ideas for different characters and scenarios. Someone would tell me about their dreams or we’d be like, “Oh, I knew this girl in sixth grade who had this weird thing she would do.” Through these conversations between these four buddies and I, the story kind of just started to emerge. I then took that story to three theater makers in Toronto in a dance studio. One’s a clown, one’s a dancer and the other one does expressionistic cinematic theater productions. We workshopped it and kind of redrafted it on its feet. Then Ben and I actually penned the screenplay together. So that’s how it was conceived: very free associatively. I was just thinking, “Who do I actually have the most fun talking to and who do I love giggling with?”
Filmmaker: In terms of creating all of these different characters, do you and Ben utilize improv at all, or were they solely fleshed out through writing?
Glowicki: There was some improv. All of the sailor characters were kind of neglected in the rehearsal process. We never quite knew what we were gonna do. And then the morning of, I was just like, “Okay guys, pick your characters.” Leah’s family is Jamaican, and she was like, “I’m just thinking of my grandpa Reggie.” I was like, “Do Reggie!” Ben was kind of mumbling and Lowen did this high voice thing. So some characters came moments before shooting, but for the rest we were stumbling around in the rehearsal hall trying to find things. I don’t think I found my character until I had the costume and makeup on maybe two days before shooting. I knew the gist, but I didn’t know how she moved or spoke until I had that costume on. It was a combination of preparation, inspiration and being spontaneous.
Filmmaker: That’s super interesting because the way your character speaks is so intentional. I’m surprised you didn’t write out how she sounds in the script.
Glowicki: I think when we were rehearsing at one point I was like, “What if she was cockney?” Everyone was like, “No,you can’t do that, your cockney accent is so bad.” I even remember telling people three weeks before shooting, “Guys, this could be a musical,” so we were holding things pretty loosely.
Filmmaker: Speaking of that spirit of collaboration, how did you and Meg get connected on Dead Lover?
Glowicki: Basically, we just emailed Meg. I’m a big fan of her work and I thought there was something, texturally, that just made sense. I didn’t have too clear of a reason other than a strong intuition that it would work. We had a Zoom and we were both game. It was kind of perfect for both of our schedules and it somehow worked out.
Filmmaker: What reference points did Meg get for the score?
Glowicki: It was pretty loose. In our first conversation, we realized that we were both down to use scraps of unreleased materials from Meg’s old hard drives. That was our initial guiding light, this commonality about being cool to reuse things that already existed. Then from there, Meg had the amazing idea of using wax cylinders from the public domain, so that became another little pile of stuff. I was really gravitating towards the first three albums that she made, so that was our next little pile. We basically just started to collage from that material and would throw the cut back and forth until patterns emerged. We were exploring and experimenting a lot. There was no initial direction or me telling Meg what we needed to do.
Filmmaker: Meg, did you have any ideas of how to approach this, as this is the first film score you’ve tackled?
Remy: Because it was the first and I knew that I couldn’t even front like I knew what I was doing, I was like, “I’ll just do whatever.“ I watched the film before agreeing to do it. The film is so great, I don’t think I would have done it if it wasn’t. I watched the film [without sound], and just watching the visuals was so informative. I was like, “This film works with no sound at all.” I’m following it and making meaning here. A big influence for me was also the time constraint. I came onto the project pretty late in the game, and it was a very hard deadline. We were being guided by limitations: time, budgetary, even my skill set. I had no outside influences, really. At one point, Grace brought up the film Daisies. To me, that felt like, “Okay, she’s down to get kooky.”
Filmmaker: Grace, you kind of went into the fact that you were already a fan of Meg’s work and her first three albums were a huge inspiration, but I want to dig deeper into what your relationship with U.S. Girls may have been before the project.
Glowicki: I remember I’d gone to one of Meg’s shows many, many years ago. It just left an impression on me. I just remember really enjoying her stage presence, depth of emotion and the sort of rebellion that I felt. Me and my husband have a couple of her records that we had different phases of listening to. Knowing she was in Toronto, you feel like you’re rooting for local musicians because they’re in your hometown. Once we started working together, I really listened to all of the albums. I read Meg’s wonderful book and was looking at her work and music from a different vantage point of the movie. I had spent time with Meg before by listening to her music, but in no intentional way other than being a fan. Looking at her stuff through the lens of the movie, there was a lot of commonality. Even though here I am making this wacky comedy film, it’s grounded in emotion and artistic texture. Weirdly, it just kind of worked.
Remy: Then you realized you were making a movie about me, remember?
Glowicki: I remember! We were struggling to figure out the process for the score. How do we make sense of it? I called Meg manically one night. I was just like, “Dude, you are Gravedigger!” The block I’d been having was separating Meg and Gravedigger, but in a way, Meg is Gravedigger because I am Gravedigger. Gravedigger is just a woman who has a lot of emotions and is trying to find love and herself in a crazy world that’s pushing against her.
Remy: I think Gravedigger is all women. I felt early on that she was very Amy Winehouse. Amy was this amazing, spunky, incredibly talented guitar player. Then people told her basically like, “You can’t play guitar, you need to be a pop singer.” They take her guitar away. And then what happens? She fucking disintegrates. They took her essence away.
Filmmaker: I want to expand more on the gendered themes, particularly the way it uniquely relishes in grotesquerie and eroticism. What felt important about connecting those two ideas, especially from a woman’s perspective of sexual desire or revulsion?
Glowicki: It’s always just kind of been my taste to have this strange fascination with sex for both its horniness and grotesqueness. There’s something about bodily fluids in this movie that kept coming up as both funny and sometimes sexy. As a woman with periods, there’s just so much that happens with our bodies. The same goes with having sex with men. There’s just something about that that is so unsexy yet sexy. I don’t really understand why sexuality comes out the way it does in my work. All I know is that it comes out as this Frankenstein of expressions. There are all these labels and boxes, but the truth is that sexuality is so nonsensical and fluid. When you let it be free, it’s just ridiculous. There’s all this slime everywhere.
Filmmaker: From a production standpoint, the lighting and color are really well done. How did you envision the colorful world of Dead Lover, and how did your team help realize it?
Glowicki: Because there were no backgrounds, I remember feeling that we needed to use color as something that could make people still stay stimulated and engaged with the piece. My DP is this incredible woman from Winnipeg, Rhayne Vermette. I had seen her film Ste. Anne, and there are some shots where there are characters falling to blackness. She uses a different color front light and different color hair light. I’ve just never seen a DP that’s so unafraid of color. So unafraid of lighting unconventionally and blackness, shoots on film and totally knows how to nail film texture. The film looks the way it does because of her and because of Becca [Morrin], the production designer. They just totally went with the experimental DIY theater thing and killed it with their own sensibilities.
Filmmaker: Meg, how did the film’s visual aesthetic influence your songwriting approach here? Have visuals influenced your musical practice in the past?
Remy: In terms of the film, I just felt that it was so punk. I was like, “I don’t have to fear texture or things being distorted.” Juxtaposing things was also so fun. There’s a lot to play with when you have these bright, very colorful scenes or a really gross scene. The possibilities were open because of it. I also love theater, so I just felt at home within the visuals. They spoke to me and I was familiar with them.
In terms of music in general, I’m always taking in visual stimuli that’s affecting me. I’m a big reader, and that’s a visual activity that I’m constantly taking and putting into my music. But seeing films has always affected my music. If a feeling’s been evoked in me watching a film, I can evoke that same feeling in song. You can’t disconnect any of the senses from the other, which is why I imagine this film could have been Smell-O-Vision. Just to smell her would have been amazing.
Glowicki: People have been talking about it! Unfortunately with this film, it would be nasty.
Remy: The finger would definitely smell…
Filmmaker: Grace, I also want to talk about touchstones a bit more. As a text that’s been adapted before, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein certainly has a feminist slant. There’s been a gender-swapping fascination around it for a while, from Frankenhooker to Poor Things. But your film truly stands out for the way that it melds both the doctor and the monster while putting a very feminine slant on both. What was your thought process behind being in conversation with a storied text while also making it your own?
Glowicki: I’m afraid to admit it, but the truth is I’ve never read Frankenstein. In fact, Meg got me the book with annotations. She was like, “Maybe you can just read the annotations.” Why I wasn’t terribly concerned with reading the source material is because my process is revealing itself as pretty free associative. Being a contemporary woman in this world—I’m 36—I’ve ingested so many interpretations of this source text: through cartoons, movies, songs, through just people talking about Frankenstein. I remember when I made the switch in understanding that Frankenstein’s not the monster. Frankenstein’s the guy! Then realizing that a woman wrote it on vacation with her friends who were all trying to write horror stories, and she just wrote it quickly. I have seen Poor Things. I thought that what I soaked up as a person in the world from just hearing about this source material would actually be a more honest place for me to make art from rather than hyper-fixating on what the actual source material was. Not dissimilar to when an actor tries to not perfectly mimic the person they’re playing in a biopic and instead does their own interpretation.
I think my love of expressionism is part of why I haven’t read this source material, because I’ve ingested all these expressions of this infamous text. Just like how I’ve never read the Bible yet could tell you a lot about it. So that’s my hack answer as to why I haven’t read Frankenstein and yet I’ve made a Frankenstein film [laughs].
Filmmaker: Meg, do you have any interest in embarking on the film scoring process again?
Remy: Yes, I would love to score Grace’s next film! I’m interested in all aspects of filmmaking, and watching Grace through this process [made me realize that] I would love to make a film someday myself. I’m also interested in editing. I would love to just be a PA on set. I want to do all the jobs, because I think they’re really interesting. It’s so complex and there are so many roles. I would love to see how each role functions.
I have a record that’ll come out in the summer. I’m still doing music, but I’m open. I want to do everything. I’m hoping that I get to live a long life and probably become a painter at some point, maybe a chef, I don’t know.
Filmmaker: Very ambitious talk from someone with two two-year-old boys!
Remy: Fuck, they help me though. They keep me focused. Honestly, if I didn’t have art to make…not to say that I’d just be a mom, but the two roles really complement each other. I think I’m the right mom for them because I’m an artist. And I’m a better artist from being a mom.
Filmmaker: Out of curiosity, what specific films have touched you throughout your life?
Remy: Such an epic, massive question. I grew up in a family that loved movies, but just whatever was coming out. Like, “We’ve got to go see Wayne’s World when it comes out on Friday!” That was mostly what we watched and saw. We also got cable at a certain point. Seeing all kinds of random shit on movie channels, like Welcome to the Dollhouse, and being like, “I like this movie.” My mom loved it, too. That film signaled to me that there was something else out there. It completely changed my life.
Filmmaker: Yeah, something in the weird, wild world of suburban New Jersey!
Remy: It was signaling to me that you could be an artist and make really weird things! A teenage daughter and her mom could both agree that it worked. I think anyone can see it and get something out of it, even though it’s out there.
Filmmaker: Another project that you and Ben co-star in just premiered in Berlin. Can you share any details?
Glowicki: Honey Bunch just premiered in Berlin last night. It’s directed by Dusty Mancinelli and Madeleine Sims-Fewer. Jason Isaacs and Kate Dickey are in it, as well as some other awesome actors. It’s a 1970s movie; Ben and I play husband and wife, surprise, surprise.
I’m also trying to write my next movie. It’s not going anywhere, I think because I need to start talking to people and operating in the way I did for the last one. So I guess I’m taking a bit of a break, but gearing up to write the next one. I have no clue what I’m gonna do, but I’ll figure it out.
