Kristen talks 'The Chronology of Water' and 'Love Me' with EW

 

Do you want to be the next Kristen Stewart?

Then she might have a gig for you: The Spencer actress, who's currently in the thick of major awards buzz for her role as Princess Diana in Jackie director Pablo Larrain's lauded indie drama (out Nov. 5), is branching out into directing with an adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch's harrowing memoir, The Chronology of Water.

"I don't want to be in it," she tells EW of casting the long-gestating project. "I want to find someone a little younger." So — someone like herself maybe? "Yeah, I need to find the next Kristen Stewart, basically," she jokes, eyes rolling playfully. "Just please describe the look on my face while I'm saying that." But it's necessary, says the 30-year-old L.A. native, since the book "takes place over at a really fast period of time."

Stewart, who calls Yuknavitch "incredible, she's like my favorite contemporary author," has been working on bringing the Oregon-based writer's award-winning memoir, which explores themes of sexuality, grief, and addiction, to the screen for almost five years. "It's a lot of ground to cover," she admits. "It's a whole life, but my favorite thing about this book is how it externalizes her inner life."

"I read it and felt like I was allowed to have a voice. You know what I mean?" she goes on. "Not that it was the only key to that lock, but... This woman finding her voice was just sort of the most violently physical thing I've ever experienced in a book. I mean I cannot wait to visualize this. And

I can't wait to throw somebody into like the deepest, coldest, scariest water," she says of her future casting choice, laughing. "See what happens to them, yeah."

In addition to what is sure to be a long season of awards campaigning over the coming months, Stewart is also shooting the sci-fi film Love Me with costar Steven Yeun, which she describes as "a love story between a satellite and a buoy."

"It's hard to explain," she admits. "I hope I don't botch it, because it's a really revolutionarily written script. Just a really, really brilliantly conceived idea." (The project came to her at the same time as the upcoming David Cronenberg horror film Crimes of the Future, which she recently wrapped shooting in Europe with a cast that includes Viggo Mortensen and Léa Seydoux.)

Love Me, she says, is set "after we're all dead. It's like the earth is freezing over, and the trace that we have left behind is the internet. And the overriding idea behind the movie is that this buoy, myself — Me is the name of the character — is everything we left behind. Which is kind of just, 'Look at me, look at me, love me, love me, love me,'" she explains. "So this satellite pings, and we connect. And I'm just trying to give him all the information I have of what we as humans have left behind."

"Every version of a person, and every avenue that we try and connect to each other with is represented. There's a lot of visual transformations," she teases of the film's fluid roles. "I rifle through being a boy, a girl, really ambiguously gendered, different races. [Steven] does the same thing. There's a lot of fighting and loving and sex. It's basically that we are all so starving for attention. And we don't always know how to convey ourselves truthfully, in order to get a validating form of true love."

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