“I can’t wait to make 10 more movies,” Kristen Stewart told AFP the morning after making what Rolling Stone called “one hell of a directorial debut” at the Cannes film festival.
Nor can film critics judging from the rave reviews of The Chronology of Water, her startling take on the American swimmer Lidia Yuknavitch’s visceral memoir of surviving abuse as a child.
All the producers who Stewart said passed on her script, saying its subject matter made it “really unattractive” to audiences, must now be crying into their champagne.
Variety called it “a stirring drama of abuse and salvation, told with poetic passion”, while Indiewire critic David Ehrlich said “there isn’t a single millisecond of this movie that doesn’t bristle with the raw energy of an artist”.
The fact that she has got such notices with what is normally a no-no subject in Hollywood − and with an avant-garde approach to the storytelling − is remarkable.
“I definitely don’t consider myself a part of the entertainment industry,” said the Twilight saga star, dressed head to toe in Chanel.
And those looking for something light and frothy would do better to avoid her unflinching film.
Stewart has long been obsessed with the story and with Yuknavitch’s writing, and fought for years to make the movie her way.
“I had just never read a book like that that is screaming out to be a movie, that needs to be moving, that needs to be a living thing,” she said.
That Yuknavitch was “able to take really ugly things, process them, and put out something that you can live with, something that actually has joy” is awe-inspiring, she added.
‘Book is a total lifeboat’
“The reason I really wanted to make the movie is because I thought it was hilarious in such a giddy and excited way, like we were telling secrets. I think the book is a total lifeboat,” said Stewart, who also wrote the screenplay.
It certainly saved Yuknavitch and made her a cult writer, with her viral TED Talk The Beauty of Being a Misfit inspiring a spin-off book, The Misfit’s Manifesto.
“Being a woman is a really violent experience,” Stewart said, “even if you don’t have the sort of extreme experience that we depict in the film or that Lidia endured and came out of beautifully”.
Stewart insisted there were no autobiographical parallels per se that drew her to the original book.
But “I didn’t have to do a bunch of research (for the film). I’m a female body that’s been walking around for 35 years. Look at the world that we live in.
“I don’t have to have been abused by my dad to understand what it is like to be taken from, to have my voice stifled, and to not trust myself. It takes a lot of years (for that) to go.
“I think that this movie resonates with anyone who is open and bleeding, which is 50 per cent of the population.”
Stewart − who cast singer Nick Cave’s son Earl as the swimmer’s first husband and Sonic Youth rock band’s Kim Gordon as a dominatrix − told reporters she was never really tempted to play Yuknavitch herself.
‘We are walking secrets’
Instead she cast British actor Imogen Poots, who she called “the best actress of our generation. She is so lush, so beautiful and she’s so cracked herself open in this”.
“She has this big boob energy in the film − even though she is quite flat-chested − these big blue eyes and this long hair.”
She described her movie’s fever-dream energy as “a pink muscle that is throbbing” and that Poots was able to tap into, channelling Yuknavitch’s ferocious but often chaotic battle to rebuild herself and find pleasure and happiness in her life.
“Pain and pleasure, they’re so tied, there’s a hairline fracture there,” Stewart told the Cannes Festival’s video channel.
Yuknavitch’s book “sort of meditates on what art can do for you after people do things to your body − the violation and the thievery, the gouging out of desire. Which is a very female experience.”
She said “it is only the stories we tell ourselves that keep us alive”, and that art and writing helped liberate Yuknavitch and find a skin she could live in.
Stewart said Yuknavitch discovered that the only way to take desire back was to “bespoke it… and repurpose the things that have been given to you in order for you to own them”.
“I’m not being dramatic, but as women we are walking secrets,” the actor said.
