‘Women carry our power in our holes’: Kristen Stewart talks about her bold film debut | Kristen Stewart

‘T“The film has to be eaten alive and remetabolized and come out different, from everyone’s perspective,” Kristen Stewart bravely says. The actor’s directorial debut, Water Chronology, has been making the rounds at film festivals, and when we meet in London, the reviews are coming. Stewart knows this is the film’s impressionistic collage—drawn from an experimental memoir about women’s pain and loss, and the elusive nature of memory. “And regain desire – it won’t be for everyone.” My favorite review on Letterboxd is: “Chronology of what I just watched?” But it’s important to her that people respond to it. “Whether it’s your least favorite movie or your most favorite movie, it’s not a lie, it’s real. And I’m very proud of that.”

Stewart sits next to the film’s star, the slightly more optimistic Imogen Poots. Watching Stewart talk, her leg jumps, and her ferocious vocabulary, you feel like you’re being hit by sand. It’s refreshing and strangely stimulating, but you can’t engage in a conversation with her while she’s half asleep. The same can be said about the film itself. “Language is a metaphor for experience,” says author Lydia Yuknavitch at the beginning of the book on which she is based. “It is as arbitrary as this mass of chaotic images that we call memory.”

Stewart first read the book in 2018, while filming JT LeRoy. She saw the visual potential in this mass of chaotic images and quickly decided that it would be her first feature film as a director. “Forty pages in, I was so driven and so insistent that no one else could make the movie but me,” she says. “It was so physical. So vivid. Such a penetrating secret. There’s a quality of discovery to the way it’s done.” [Yuknavitch] She talked about trespassing, and how to carve your desires into your body. As women, we have these birthplaces that are our openings, they’re where we have our power, but they’re also where we’re exploited. At this point, less than two minutes in, it’s fair to say it hasn’t become a regular promotional conversation for movie stars. “We’re all so gagged,” Stewart says. “And it felt like the gag was off. That’s the fun part. She’s got a loud mouth. And a big mouth wide open.” So I sent Yuknavitch an email.

“A very interesting email,” the writer says from her home in Portland, Oregon. “She was explaining to me why I could never let this book be an ordinary biopic, and how I had to let her make a piece of art out of it. I was immediately moved by the language she used, because it was not the language of an ordinary person.” Yuknavitch, a film nerd since she was five years old, was of course familiar with Stewart’s work. “I even wrote a novel with her in mind for a while. She was younger. She had just gone through the Twilight trials, and was moving toward indie art films, and I had her in mind when I wrote this novel.” It is called dora: head covering. Sounds like a scary connection, if she believes in that kind of thing? Yuknavitch answers that artists tend to find each other. “They run through each other’s work, and these threads or flows that we don’t fully understand touch each other. And I think that’s what happened.”

It was not easy to finance the film. Potts and Stewart, both major readers, engage in a heated debate about how confessional literature is taken seriously when it’s written by men, and “consistently belittled,” as Stewart says, when it comes from women. “There are a lot of examples in modern literature of men revealing everything, but once you do something openly personal as a woman, it becomes less serious,” Stewart continues. “We have just fallen out of modernity in the canon. It is as if we are not in it at all. This is ridiculous nonsense. You have to be Virginia Woolf to be considered a good writer.” Reese’s Book Club, that’s not it.

Did they encounter those situations when making the film? “Yes, because I think when people read it, it’s all about how to sell it,” Stewart says. “Okay, what’s up, incest and rape? Fun!” She admits that it was not easy. “It’s about manipulating desire, reframing it, and how empowering that is. In the slow lane, selling is really hard.” It took eight years of development before they finally broke ground, mostly on site in Latvia. Meanwhile, Stewart continued acting and directed smaller projects: two short films and a music video for the band Boygenius. The chronology faded into the background, sometimes unpromisingly, until it was finally pieced together somehow. Even Stewart’s longtime producer, Charles Gilbert (On the Road, Personal Shopper), told her he couldn’t finish the script. “And he’s not the only one,” she smiles. “He really encouraged me not to make this film.” “I was like: ‘We’re going to stop being friends if you keep saying that to me.’

Poots plays the adult Lydia with carnal desire. The film is a collection of fluids and fragments. Potts read Stewart’s script, then the book, and then sent Stewart “a really pretentious email in which she said: cabbage “She teases. Was she nervous about taking on a stark, scandalous role? It’s pulsating with sex, drugs and violence. The bleeding, the crying and the sadness wash over it. “Any actress I know would have wanted to play this part,” says Potts. In fact, Potts explains, casting her as the lead meant the film was more difficult. “If Christine had hired a huge movie star, it would have made the money much easier to come by.”

Poots is a very secretive actress, and her performance here is tremendous, but I asked Stewart why she felt so loyal to her. “She’s my favorite actress, and everyone’s bad,” she shrugged. “There was literally no one else out there, and she was my favorite forever.”

“And we have the same teeth,” Potts says as he shows her off.

Stewart blinked at her in unison. “Because we have the same teeth, I thought: ‘That’s my daughter. A Pactooth tooth!’

The film also stars Kim Gordon, Thora Birch, and Jim Belushi, who plays the late One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest writer Ken Kesey. They’re a fun band of misfits. “What was really cool, and what you didn’t know about, was that these people, who were all at the center of these incredibly creative community movements, wanted to be involved in what you were doing,” Potts tells Stewart.

Did you get any services to get them involved? “No one did me any “Trust me, trust me,” Stewart says seriously. “In fact, we’ve been wiped out. In the face. Over and over again.” She stops. “Like a real woman!” She’s kidding. She says frankly that Belushi joined after two other actors dropped out. “I don’t think it was an easy yes. But the feeling of him supporting you, or the gentle pat on the back from Jim Belushi, can make you cry. He’s kind of extreme, and he’s a hippie, and he was perfect to play this role.”

Since the film deals with memories, it rejects any kind of traditional narrative structure. Men came in and out of Lydia’s life, meaning actors would come onto the set briefly and leave again, “like a conveyor belt,” Potts says.

“Or chapters,” Stewart suggests.

“These are insanely talented and wonderful actors,” Potts says.

“delusion Served “You are,” Stuart smiles. “It’s been incredible to watch male actors come in and it’s not about them. I would say, ‘Sorry, but we’re not actually going to shoot you. We’re just going to shoot her. But talk to her. You’re kind of here, but this is about her.’

Babbling Boots. Think this is not a typical experience? “Mmm,” says Boots. “For many reasons.” They both say they plan to make “a lot of movies” together.

A few weeks later, Birch called by video from her home in Los Angeles, her dog happily lounging in the background. “You can’t go into a conversation with Kristen Stewart without being primed and ready to go,” she laughs. “It’s scary!” Birch plays Claudia, Lydia’s older sister, in a brief but powerful role. In one of the film’s first scenes, a sobbing and grief-stricken Potts is held in the bathroom, following the death of Lydia’s stillborn child. “Imogen is just the most amazing, failed, British Academy failed actress if I’ve ever seen one,” Birch says brilliantly.

Birch and Stewart met at an event where they did some “mutual cheerleading.” A few months later, Stewart called and said she was going to shoot a movie. Birch signed on immediately, then read the script. “I’m not going to lie, it was a bit of a daunting process,” she says. “But I really trusted her.” She believes this is partly because they have some shared experiences. They both became famous when they were children. Stewart was 12 when she starred in Panic Room, while Birch’s series of films of the ’90s and early 2000s — from Hocus Pocus to Now and Then to Ghost World — defined adolescence for an entire generation of girls.

“I probably related to her because we’re both actors who started out very young, so we had a common language. I say she’s my spirit animal. She does a lot of the things I do, but she’s so much better,” Birch says. I have followed Stewart’s career from afar. “Different times, different generations, but the way I dealt with it [getting famous young]I was like: Dude, this is with self-confidence. You knocked it out of the park, because you held on to your individuality and point of view, which can be really hard to hold on to. She waves her hand. “But let’s not delve into that.”

In its boldness and experimental form, The Chronology of Water may come as a surprise to those more familiar with the movie star Stewart, who might not expect a film like this from her. “I kind of did,” Birch responds. “This is a very Kristen Stewart movie.”

She says she’s glad this is the story Stewart chose to tell. “You’re going to hate me for saying this, but I’m sorry, it symbolizes a female experience that not many people are ready, willing or even able to analyze and talk about.” Birch says the film covers some “heavy bullshit.” “We’re talking about menstrual blood, dead babies, and familial sexual abuse. No one wants to talk about these things, and yet she presents it in a way that combines imagination and poetics, but also with the human experience. It’s a punk rock film that’s like an unpsychedelic ayahuasca trip.”

It makes sense, then, that Birch had no idea how things would end. She just had to believe in what they were doing. “Then when I saw that, I said, ‘Oh, this What do you do. One reviewer said: A home girl can direct. And when I came from Los Angeles, I said: yeah, that’s it. Homegirl can direct. She knows what’s up.