When asked about his influences, Klein
explains: "I was not thinking in terms [of influences.] I saw it more as a combination of cinema and theater. [It is] about a woman's desire to resurrect a dead love and who can not face the brutality of her present situation. The pain of living without your true love."
As for the controversy, Klein
counters: "The religious symbolism is not meant to denote anything negative, but represents the character's battle between the dark forces of this world and the spiritual salvation of the soul. Thus at the end of the film, she chooses to be a nun, and the reason her mouth and eyes disappear is because she is withdrawing her senses from the world of evil and going inward towards prayer and contemplation." He added that the scene in which Gaga ingests rosary beads was meant to represent "the desire to take in the holy."
