Kristen's interview with Numero for 'The Chronology of Water'

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Interview with Kristen Stewart

Issue: The Chronology of Water is your first feature film as a director. It feels like it's a long-standing endeavor for you.

Kristen Stewart : I've wanted to cross over—one way or another—ever since I started making movies . So, since I was nine. I'm 35 now. I really thought I'd become a director when I was younger, but I guess it just wasn't the right time. You have to wait for the triggers. Even if the desire is there, it doesn't materialize immediately. If the machine is ready to go, you still have to find the key.

Was Lidia Yuknavitch's autobiographical novel the trigger?

Not all books can be turned into films. This one swept me away. I immediately wanted to make it a collective experience.

The story is very difficult: it's about a woman abused by her father who becomes a writer. The film evokes trauma on one hand and creativity on the other.

Some things can live inside the body, joyfully, fully. Others need to be evacuated. What Lidia Yuknavitch 's text tells me made me feel like it needed to be shouted from the rooftops, so that the skeletons we all have in our closets would start to come out. Of course, what happens to this woman is quite extreme. But the abuse, the things that are stolen from us, the feeling of suffocation, the hiding of what we are going through, all of this is so palpable for almost everyone... 50% of the population is affected!

Was it your goal to represent trauma?

At the very beginning of the film, we see blood flowing. Almost clumped, it sticks. We understand that it can only come from one place: not a wound, but an orifice. This blood comes from far away inside this woman's body. So, I show it. I wanted my film to be like a crackle in the wind, a scream that becomes hysterical laughter. The way this woman organizes the events of her life is not haphazard or fractured. What she goes through is brought together with such a great emotional connection that the story becomes almost a living organism. We feel the tissues connecting together. The only possible way to make cinema out of it was to bring together very different talents. I had to listen to myself a lot. Say no, constantly. Say yes, but to the right people.

Your film is primarily made up of fragments. Did you shoot a lot, even if you didn't include everything in the final cut?

I shouldn't say this, because the producers might never want to make something like this again, but the only way to get to the end was to shoot a lot and then cut half of it. The film had a life of its own, its own memory.

A feminist and radical vision

Even though the story isn't yours, The Chronology of Water feels very personal. How did you find the right distance?

I wanted to see things on screen that would move me. Thinking about this, I hesitate to use certain words because I'm afraid it might become a sensationalist headline. And that tires me a little...

Not my type.

You never know. But I'm at the point where I let it happen. Go ahead, take what you want! In The Chronology of Water , we see a female ejaculation. The heroine's hand is completely covered. She says to herself: "I didn't know a girl's body could do that. " This dialogue made me feel very good. Usually, women are forced to hide. We are asked not to tell anyone that we are in pain, not to tell anyone that we are pregnant for several weeks, to keep things to ourselves. A woman is supposed to live with all of this. It is not healthy to keep the experience of pain inside. We must release it to better understand it and reformulate it.

Is this one of the important themes of the film?

My film is about birth, death, and rebirth, but it simply addresses the issue of living in the open. This may sound like a cliché: I think women are capable of absorbing a lot. We create life from what we put into our bodies, while many of the things we let into our bodies kill us. If we don't get rid of that deadly part and let the good live, it doesn't work. For me, The Chronology of Water was the perfect opportunity to address this subject.

You just mentioned the female ejaculation scene, a subject related to pleasure, only to immediately shift your focus to the question of pain. Why?

One of the film's themes is reclaiming pain and transforming it into pleasure. Certain things are imposed on us since childhood, even if we don't experience scenarios as terrible as the one experienced by the film's heroine. This can be a male experience, of course. But the world we live in, the images it produces, all of this prevents young women from feeling ownership of their intimate space. Life emerges and imposes itself on us.

How does this transformation take place?

As we get older, the desire for strange things takes over us. We wonder why. Then we realize it's related to what everyone wants to take from us. Pleasure is then linked to pain. There's a crack. Before we can safely release it, we go through a state of extreme vulnerability, we're open to dangerous things. The creative process is about not letting the things that hurt linger inside us. We redefine them through words and actions.

Cinema as a tool for emancipation

Do you advocate emancipation through art, like your heroine who starts writing?

Whatever our history, we can change it. It's vital to remember that. We can also look at it from a different perspective. We can use our shame. The feeling of shame is inherent to the female experience. That shame and pain can even be quite arousing. There's something sexy about it, it's our animal nature to indulge what hurts us. It's linked to the architecture of our bodies; we're open. It's not an opinion, it's a fucking fact. The Chronology of Water is a film of two faces: it hurts, it feels good; it's funny, it's sad. When you get that far into the pain, when you're completely free of it, when you're done sobbing, there's nothing left to do but laugh.

“I felt like I wasn't the right actress for the role.” Kristen Stewart.

How did you develop your vision as a filmmaker?

I wanted to depict things that would make me laugh. The film is a bit harsh, but it's also a thrill ride. It's a lot of fun to see this heroine fall and get back up again and again. I wanted to create frustration in the audience. Normally, we're used to characters who win; we want to follow winners. But what does winning mean? In the film, Lidia talks to an audience about her trauma when she wrote a short story. She seems to have won something, but right after, she relapses. That's how it is.

How did you approach this point in your film?

The film I wanted couldn't give us too many rational explanations about this woman. In the end, she arrives somewhere, but her journey has been messy. She thought she'd win, lost, and died. Now she manages to float. Besides, to continue the maritime metaphor, this film was a shipwreck. We kept hitting walls. I really thought several times that we'd messed everything up. Then I understood that each loss, each mistake, was exactly what we needed.

Why did you choose not to star in The Chronology of Water  ?

I would love to star in a film I'm directing. It should happen very soon.

Good news!

That's nice of you to say. But this time, I felt like I wasn't the right actress for the role. Yet, I had a connection with this girl. I spent my days watching someone else play her, making it a rule not to tell her what I would do in her place. God knows, at times, I thought, "You do it like this. Ah, that's funny, because I..." I forced myself to stop talking! I forbade myself from peeing in Imogen's pool, basically (laughs).

Imogen Poots is flamboyant and striking. She takes a lot of risks.

Imogen is truly a brilliant actress who embraced the role. We're so different. She had the perfect body because she's powerful, like a mermaid. Plus, she reads a lot. When we started talking about the original book, I realized she's a literary type. She could be a teacher. She's one of the craziest girls I've ever met. She's intelligent, open, fearless, with lots of cracks to open, as gentle as a forest animal.

Why was she better suited for the role of Lidia?

If I had been in her shoes in the film, I would have danced in the middle of the fire non-stop, as if it were my comfort zone. When you see her, you wish she would stop touching the flames, it doesn't suit her. Imogen transports you with her charisma. When I first met her, I thought to myself: "Fuck, I'll follow you to hell." Plus, she has blue eyes. And I have green eyes. Her gaze goes better with water, a central element of the film. This answer makes no sense, have fun with it (laughs).

As an actress, you've worked with great filmmakers like Kelly Reichardt ( Certain Women ) and Olivier Assayas ( Sils Maria , Personal Shopper ). Did that help you mature your vision as a director?

Olivia Assayas was very important. When we shot Personal Shopper with Olivier, the way he extracted elements from our lives was fascinating. I had never seen anything like it. He taught me that you can say a lot with an image, without having to explain. If you need to, it's because you're not working well. He also raised the question of dreams. For him, cinema is the simplest and most direct way we've found to externalize our dreams. A film is like the collages we make of our life experiences when we go to bed. I don't know if you're a fan of lucid dreaming, but it can be close. When I was shooting The Chronology of Water , I spent a lot of time editing the film in my head at night. It was unproductive and pointless, yet the images imposed themselves on me.

What references did you draw on for The Chronology of Water  ?

Only male films, I realize. Thank you, John Cassavetes , for really seeing your wife ( actress Gena Rowlands ). Thank you, Taxi Driver . Our film has a very present voice-over, but it doesn't guide the narrative. It's there, holding our hand. Thank you, Martin Scorsese , for making me understand that this was possible. It just so happens that my heroine is a woman. Our voices have an echo, we're not just telling our little story that no one listens to. Confessional women's literature is as important as the rest and I'm inspired by it.

Why do you think female directors are not always listened to?

Women have been destroyed by a modernist idea of ​​art, which would have it that personal stories cannot be heard, as if we absolutely had to detach ourselves from our bodies to analyze the world and comment on it with the authority of professors. We have to put everything back in the body. Fuck the form. When I say that, it's not lightly. I think women have to come back in force to penetrate the form, pull off a heist, and remix everything. This is true in literature and cinema. If we don't do that, we'll stay at the castle gate forever, damn it! When I see men's films, I tell myself that I want to do that too! But I want to do it my way. Let's look inside ourselves.

Her future projects

What are your plans for the coming months?

I'm in the movie The Wrong Girls , which I also produced. Dylan Meyer ( Kristen Stewart's wife since April 25th ) directed and wrote it. It's a stoner comedy with Alia Shawkat , who is kind of a genius! The movie is positive about lack of ambition, about female friendship, with these two girls who are still growing up at 35 in a world that doesn't really welcome them with open arms.

How did filming with Alia Shawkat go?

Alia taught me so much, especially since it was my first comedy—by far, the scariest and most difficult work I've ever done. It was a hell of a trip working with Dylan and Alia in Los Angeles. For me, this is one of my most important projects. We're here at Cannes, we're talking about serious films, but this comedy is about deep things. The central idea is that you have to be chill and not become jerks or bitches. That's so important (laughs).

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