Kristen Stewart thinks it’s time we got real. “We get prescribed stories just shoved into our faces, down our throats,” she said during a panel at the Deadline’s Cannes Film Festival studio.
Stewart was talking specifically about narratives around the female experience as portrayed in her directorial debut The Chronology of Water, which premiered at Cannes in Un Certain Regard this week.
The Chronology of Water was adapted by Stewart and Andy Mingo from Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir of the same name. Lidia (Imogen Poots) experiences horrific trauma and abuse, first beginning in her childhood home, while her older sister Claudia (Thora Birch) is forced to leave home “to save her own life” and escape their abusive father (Michael Epp).
Stewart said she was determined to show Lidia’s journey in all its rawness and to present Lidia’s story in a way that is rooted in truth. “The reason that I wanted to make this was to screw with form, because it’s not about what happened to Lidia Yuknavitch, it’s what happens to us all and how we can internalize that violence. I know it sounds dramatic, but it’s true. It’s incredibly violent to be a woman.”
She took aim at accepted norms within female representation on screen: “The imagery that we consume, the conversations that are not allowed, the fact that we can’t tell people when we’re bleeding, like it’s gross or something.”
Poots recalled coming to the role of Lidia after receiving an email from Stewart out of the blue. The two had only known each other peripherally and had never met. The email was just one line, Stewart revealed. It said simply, “Dude, do you want to make this movie with me?”
Poots was immediately gripped by the script. “You just don’t read things like that,” she said. “Or if you do read scripts like that, they’re not getting made. And so it was just this living, breathing document. It was just such a miracle that we ended up making this film. It’s extraordinary.”
But, as Birch pointed out, the fact that it took eight years for Stewart to get the film made is “absurd” and that telling these kinds of stories in a real way “should be normal.”
Stewart has hope for the future of female narratives, however. “We broke the seal,” she said. “Hopefully we can start flooding, gushing into view.”
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