On Saturday afternoon, when I met up with Kristen Stewart on a balcony at the Cannes Film Festival, she had a confession to make: She was midway through the happiest day of her life.
The night before, her directorial debut, “The Chronology of Water,” had made its premiere here, the culmination of a very long effort to make her first feature. “I’ve had this movie in my head for years,” she said. And after so many false starts, financing issues and radical creative re-imaginings, she could barely believe that she had pulled it off.
“I just thought it was potentially dying every day,” she said. “It was like a shipwreck, we had to put that boat back together. It was shocking.”
Adapted from Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir of the same name, “The Chronology of Water” stars Imogen Poots as a competitive swimmer struggling to outrace a traumatic childhood marked by sexual abuse. Stewart tells the story elliptically, skipping through time as her lead struggles to make sense of a difficult life and channel her pain into an affinity for writing.
The film has been well reviewed, which Stewart was pleasantly surprised by. “I’m totally willing for people to come for it,” she said. “I’m almost wanting it.” Maybe Stewart, with her avid gaze and punky ombre hair, craves that conflict because she’s used to it: “The Chronology of Water” took eight years of fighting to make. Now, she’s curious about what her career as an actress and director will look like.
“I don’t think it’ll ever be this hard, and when I say ‘hard’ I put it in air quotes because I’ve never been happier in my entire life,” she said. “But when you really care about something, the weight of dropping it every day is like you’re dropping it on your toes and screaming.”
Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.
Does this really feel like the happiest day of your life?
Yeah, absolutely. I’ve had so many days that resemble this, where you’re on the balcony here having great conversations but they’re almost not yours to have [as an actor for hire]. I am always hoping to find the vocabulary to honor someone else’s endeavors, but if you don’t have answers to questions, you just start generating stuff that you pull from the ether and you’re like, “What did I just say?”
But today, ask me anything. I’ve wanted to talk and have this emotional Heimlich for so long, to open the floodgates of what I’ve been working on for eight years. The conversations are indicating to me that people engaged with the movie and they’re not rote. And I finished making it five minutes ago. I sprinted to the airport from our final [quality control] screening. I had never seen the movie on a big screen with sound or color.
So why not see it for the first time that way at its Cannes premiere? No pressure.
I’m like, “You’re such an idiot.” [Laughs.] I felt once I dislodged this piece from my actual person, it had its own volition and it looked me right in the face and went, “Dude, you better protect me.” And I was like, “OK, at all costs.” And my inexperience definitely contributed to me thinking that I could get it done in this time frame.
But you did.
Yeah, but it’s not done.
You want to go back and tweak it a little bit?
It’s fairly picture-locked [meaning the visual edit is done]. I would say that there are four lines that I want to put back in and it’ll land much harder, even though I’m happy to come here with this version and it’s kind of fun to pull your skirt up and let people in. I don’t want to control it too much. I really think it kind of exists on its own now, so it’s definitely OK for people to see it in a kind of adolescent state.
Are you reading reviews and reactions?
Yeah, but everyone’s been so nice! I’m like, “What?” It’s marginal work for sure — that’s why I wanted to make it — so I thought if maybe some people didn’t get it or thought that the character was annoying and difficult it would be like, “Yeah, but you’re emphasizing all of my points” [about what made her difficult]. And nobody’s emphasizing my point.
You kind of crave that narrative to push up against.
I know, I’m like, “Can you just come for me a little bit?” But I’m sure it’s going to happen.
You spent years trying to get the movie off the ground. Did financiers ever tell you they’d be willing to make it if you played the lead?
It’s funny, I must’ve been protected from that specific conversation because I always said, “It’s just not what I want to do.” So nobody brought it up.
You knew from the jump that you didn’t want to star in this?
I would have been depriving myself of the coolest exchange that a director can have, which is with their star. I don’t want that with myself, I want that with someone else. It’s like seeing somebody do something that you couldn’t have thought of. It’s so much more fun to be mirrors of each other ves. just staring at yourself in a mirror.
Would you ever direct yourself going forward?
I definitely want to do that. I think that there’s a version of that in the future, but for this one, Imogen was born to play this part. When I watch it, I’m completely in awe, knowing that she was living a moment in her life that gave her the desire to crack open in the way that she was able to. We all just came together at the right time, even though it took eight years and I threw public temper tantrums about not being able to make the movie. We made drastic, late-game decisions in order to get there.
Like what?
You have to do a very un-female thing, which is break things and listen to your impulses against reason and practicality. We ended up tossing six weeks of prep and free-jazzing the movie that I had thought about for eight years, instead of trying to control every image and flash [image in a montage] that were written into the script. What ended up happening were these ephemeral moments that I could never have planned for started relating to one another across time and the movie had a life.
There was no way to do that without the kind of psycho audacity it takes to make a movie, which is also very male in a beautiful way. Anyone else would have been like, “That’s not possible, we can’t really do it under those circumstances.” And I was like, “We just kind of have to die trying.” And we made a movie. I think it’s a pretty pure film.
That willingness to do things that are thought of as “un-female” is a theme that recurs in the movie. It’s even a theme that recurs in your visits to Cannes. The festival loosened its red-carpet rules requiring women to wear high heels because you continually flouted that dress code.
I know. And what an interesting thing lately, right? I mean you have to put your [breasts] away [because of a new rule banning nudity on the red carpet]. I’m like, “Excuse me? You don’t ever tell me what to do with my [breasts].”
Now you’re thinking, “Hmm, another convention to break.”
To be honest with you, last night I was like [she mimes pulling open her jacket]. … The movie did it for me.
The movie felt like you were baring your chest, in a way?
Yeah. I was like, “Kristen, calm down. You’ve done it. You’ve said what you wanted to say.”
Now that you’ve said that, what happens to that weight that you have been carrying for years?
I don’t know. I’m like, wait a second, who am I if I’m not trying to make “Chronology of Water”?
As an actress, do you think you’ll at least have a different relationship with your directors now that you’ve done it yourself?
Definitely. I’ll never question anything again. I’m like, “I’ll do whatever you want! I am yours.”
And you just starred in “The Wrong Girls,” which is your wife Dylan Meyer’s directorial debut.
Both of our movies reflect us. She had such a different experience. I was so impressed by the elegance in which the movie fell out of Dylan. I had just literally honey-badgered [my directorial debut], I had been so crazy. She had witnessed such mania!
Kyle Buchanan is a pop culture reporter and also serves as The Projectionist, the awards season columnist for The Times.
The post Kristen Stewart Thinks the Critics at Cannes Are Being Too Nice appeared first on New York Times.
