Click on images for full view.
The Chronology of Water, a film directed by Kristen Stewart presented in Cannes.
At 35, Twilight star Kristen Stewart has long since shed her good-girl image. The reason for her presence at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival was to present her directorial debut.
Inspired by Lidia Yuknavitch’s autobiographical novel of the same name, The Chronology of Water follows a heroine, played by English actress Imogen Poots, as she tries to recover from the trauma of sexual abuse. This free-spirited film about a wounded woman maps both impressionistic moments and the course of the protagonist’s life thanks to virtuosic editing.
Before its release on October 15th, 2025, the 35-year-old filmmaker met us at the Palais des Festivals in a full Chanel look, embodying effortless chic without compromising her free spirit and intensity. Our sharp, at times far-fetched, conversation revolved around the process of creation.
Interview with actress and director Kristen Stewart
Numéro: The Chronology of Water is your first feature film as a director. It feels very personal…
Kristen Stewart: As soon as I started acting, I knew I wanted to step behind the camera one way or another. So, since I was 9. I’m 35 now. I really thought I’d direct sooner, but I guess it just wasn’t the right time. You have to wait for the trigger. Even if the desire is there, it doesn’t materialize immediately. Even if the machine is ready to run, you still have to find the right key.
Was Lidia Yuknavitch’s autobiographical novel the trigger?
Not every book can become a movie. But this one swept me away. I immediately wanted to turn it into a collective experience.
The story is quite harsh… A woman is abused by her father, and eventually becomes a writer. The film tackles both trauma and creation…
Some things live inside the body in a joyful, full way. Others need to be expelled. What Lidia Yuknavitch’s text conveys gave me the feeling that it had to be shouted from the rooftops, so that the skeletons we all have in our closets might finally start coming out. Of course, what happens to this woman is quite extreme. But abuse, things that are taken from us, the feeling of suffocation and hiding what we endures – all that feels deeply relatable for almost anyone. Fifty percent of the population is concerned!
Was portraying trauma you main goal?
At the very beginning of the film, we see blood flowing. Thick, almost clotted, it sticks. You immediately sense it could only come from only one place. Not a wound, but an orifice. This blood comes from deep within this woman’s body. So I’m showing it. I wanted the film to feel like crackling wind, like a scream turning into hysterical laughter. The way this woman arranges the events of her life is anything but random or erratic. What she goes through is held together with such a powerful emotional thread that the narrative almost becomes a living organism. You can feel the organic tissues connecting. The only way to translate this on screen was to bring together a very diverse range of talents. I had to listen to myself a lot. Say no, constantly. Say yes, but only to the right people.
Your film is first and foremost made up of fragments. Did you shoot a lot, even if it meant not using everything in the final cut?
I probably shouldn’t say this – producers might never want to work this way again – but the only way to get through it was to shoot a lot and then cut half of it. The film had its own life, its own memory.
A feminist and radical vision
Although the plot isn’t based on your own story, The Chronology of Water feels deeply personal. How did you find the right distance?
I wanted to see on screen the type of things that move me. When I think about it, I’m trying not to use certain words because I worry they’ll end up as clickbait headlines. And honestly, I’m a bit tired of it…
That’s not my style.
You never know. But I’m at the point now where I just flow with it. Fine, take whatever you want! In The Chronology of Water, there’s a scene of female ejaculation. The main character’s hand is completely covered. She says to herself: “I didn’t know a girl’s body could do that.” That line brought me so much joy. Women are usually forced to hide. We’re told not to say anything when we’re in pain, not to tell anyone we’re pregnant until weeks in, to keep everything to ourselves. A woman is expected to carry all of that. But it’s not healthy to internalize the experience of pain. You have to release it in order to better understand it, and then rephrase it.
Is that one of the central themes of the film?
My film is about birth, death, and rebirth too. But above all, it’s about the act of living out in the open. This might sound cliché, but I think women are capable of taking in so much. We can give life to what we allow into our bodies, even though so many of the things we let in also harm us. If we don’t expel that deadly part to make room for what is vital, it doesn’t work. For me, The Chronology of Water was the perfect opportunity to explore that idea.
You just mentioned the scene of female ejaculation, a topic linked to pleasure, then immediately shifted to the theme of pain. Why is that?
One of the themes of the film is reclaiming pain and turning it into pleasure. Some things are imposed on us from childhood, even if we haven’t lived through the kind of trauma the heroine has. It can apply to men too, of course. But the world we live in and the images it produces, it makes it almost impossible for young women to feel ownership over their intimate space. Life comes at us and imposes itself on us.
How does that transformation happen?
As we grow older, we start to crave strange things. And we ask ourselves why. Then, we realize it’s tied to everything others have tried to take from us. Pleasure becomes linked to pain. There’s a crack. Before we can safely free ourselves from it, we go through a phase of extreme vulnerability, we become open to dangerous things. The creative process is about not letting harmful things fester inside us. We reshape them through words and actions.
Cinema as a tool for emancipation
Are you advocating for emancipation through art, like your protagonist when she starts to write?
No matter what our story is, we can change it. That’s something vital to remember. We can also revisit it with a new perspective. We can use our shame. Shame is an inherent part of the female experience. That shame, and that pain, can even become something quite thrilling. There’s something sexy about it. It’s in our nature to surrender to what hurts us. It’s part of our body’s architecture, we’re open. That’s not an opinion, it’s a fucking fact. The Chronology of Water is a two-faced film – it hurts and it heals, it is funny and sad. When you go that far into pain and truly let it go, when you’re done sobbing, there’s nothing left to do but laugh.
How did your vision as a filmmaker take shape?
I wanted to stage things that made me laugh. The film is intense, but also kind of a thrill ride. It’s really fun to watch this character fall and get back up over and over. I wanted to create a sense of frustration in the audience. We’re so used to characters who win, we want to follow winners. But what does it mean to win? In the film, Lidia is speaking to an audience about her trauma after writing a short story. It looks like she’s gained something. But right after, she crashes again. That’s how it goes.
How did you address that issue in your film?
The film I wanted to make couldn’t offer too many rational explanations about this woman. By the end, she gets somewhere, but her path is messy. She thought she had won, lost, and died. Now, she manages to float. To stick with the nautical metaphor, this film was a shipwreck. We kept slamming into walls. I honestly believed, more than once, that I had screwed everything up. Then, I realized that every loss, every mistake, was exactly what we needed.
Why did you choose not to play in The Chronology of Water?
I’d love to play in something I direct. It’s going to happen very soon.
That’s great!
That’s kind of you. But that time, I felt I wasn’t the right actor for this role. And yet, I felt a deep connection with this girl. I spent my days watching someone else bring her to life, while forcing myself not to tell her what I would have done if I was in her situation. God knows there were moments when I thought: “Oh, so that’s how you’re doing it? Funny, because I would’ve…” I had to stop myself from talking! Basically, I would forbid myself from peeing Imogen Poots’ pool (laughs).
Imogen Poots’s performance is dazzling and striking. She takes a lot of risks.
Imogen Poots truly is an incredible actress, who took full ownership of the role. We’re so different. She had the perfect body for it. She’s powerful, she looks like a mermaid, and she’s a big reader. When we started talking about the original book, I realized she’s very literary. She could be a teacher. She’s one of the wildest girls I’ve ever met. She’s smart, fearless, open, full of cracks ready to burst open, and at the same time, as gentle as a forest creature.
Why was she a better fit to play Lidia?
If I’d played her part, I would’ve been dancing nonstop in the fire, like it was my comfort zone. But when you see her, you kind of wish she’d stop touching the flames. It doesn’t suit her well. Imogen carries us with her charisma. The first time I met her, I thought: “Shit, I’d follow you straight into hell.” Also, she has blue eyes. Mine are green. Her gaze fits better with the water, which is such a central element in the film. That answer makes no sense, have fun with it (laughs).
As an actress, you worked with major filmmakers like Kelly Reichardt (Certain Women) and Olivier Assayas (Clouds of Sils Maria, Personal Shopper). Did these experiences help shape your approach as a director?
Olivier Assayas was very important to me. When we shot Personal Shopper together, I was fascinated by the way he would pull elements from real life. I’d never seen anything like it. He taught me that you can say so much with an image, without explaining it. If you have to explain it, it means that you’re not doing it right. He also raised the question of dreams. For him, cinema is the most simple and direct way we’ve found to externalise our dreams. A film is like a collage of our lived experiences, what our brains do when we go to sleep. I don’t know if you’re into lucid dreaming, but it can feel like that. While filming The Chronology of Water, I spent a lot of nights editing the movie in my head. It was unproductive and pointless, but the images wouldn’t stop coming up.
What were you inspirations for The Chronology of Water?
All the films directed by men, I must say. Thank you, John Cassavetes, for truly seeing your wife (actress Gena Rowlands, ed.). Thank you, Taxi Driver. Our film has a strong voice-over, but it doesn’t drive the story. It’s just there, holding our hand. Thank you, Martin Scorsese, for showing me that was possible. My protagonist happens to be a woman. Our voices resonate, we’re not just cooking in the background when no one listens. Confessional literature written by women is just as important as anything else and it’s one of my many inspirations.
According to you, why female creators still struggle to be heard?
Women have been destroyed by a modernist conception of art, telling them that personal stories don’t count, that we must detach from our bodies in order to analyse the world and speak with the authority of professors. But we have to bring it all back into the body. Fuck form. And I don’t say that lightly. I think women need to come back strong and crack the form wide open, then bust the whole thing up and remix it. It goes for literature and cinema. If we don’t do that, we’ll stay locked outside the castle forever, fuck! When I see films made by men, I’m telling myself that I want to do the same! But I want to do it my way. So, let’s look inward.
Her upcoming projects
What are your plans for the next few months?
I will be in The Wrong Girls, a film I also produced. Dylan Meyer (Kristen Stewart’s wife since April 25th, 2025, ed.) wrote it and directed it. It’s a stoner comedy with Alia Shawkat, who’s kind of a genius! The film adresses the lack of ambition in positive terms, female friendship, and features two women who are still growing up at 35 in a world that isn’t exactly welcoming them.
What was it like on set with Alia Shawkat?
Alia taught me so much, especially since it was my first comedy. It was by far the scariest and hardest thing I’ve ever done. Working with Dylan and Alia in Los Angeles was a real trip. For me, this is one of my most important projects. We’re here in Cannes, talking about serious films, but this comedy tackles real, deep stuff too. At its core, it’s about staying chill and not turning into assholes. And that matters a lot. (Laughs)
Scans thanks to AdoringKS
No comments:
Post a Comment
What do you think of this?