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| Source: rich_alfonso |
On December 4, the IndieWire Honors Winter 2025 ceremony will celebrate the creators and stars responsible for crafting some of the year’s best films. Curated and selected by IndieWire’s editorial team, IndieWire Honors is a celebration of the filmmakers, artisans, and performers behind films well worth toasting. In the days leading up to the Los Angeles event, IndieWire is showcasing their work with new interviews and tributes from their peers.
Ahead, Jim Belushi tells IndieWire about the many qualities that set our Maverick Award winner, “The Chronology of Water” writer/director Kristen Stewart, apart from the crowd.
As told to Anne Thompson. The following has been edited and condensed for clarity.
I got a call from my agent. They said, “We want to send the script over. You have an offer to play Ken Kesey, and Kristen Stewart wrote it and directed it.”
“I don’t need to read it. Just tell her, ‘yes.'” I read it, and was quite intimidated by the complexity and the beauty of this woman’s story. And then I read the book [by Lidia Yuknavitch]. Wow. There’s a whole category of Academy Awards for screenplay adaptation that I hope someone pays attention to, because [Kristen] did an unbelievable adaptation of this book.
I always approach working with women as, “This girl is my sister, and I love my sister.” All my life, I’ve always known how to be loving to my sister, to make her feel strong and good. All those traits that my sister taught me, I take on with other actresses or producers. There’s a connection and a love that goes way deeper than that of a male/female relationship. I look at Kristen as my younger sister. And within five minutes of talking to her: “This girl is way older than she is.”
She has the mind of a writer and the heart of an actor, but she has the soul of a director. She knew every breath between every line of dialogue. She felt it, she wrote it, she saw it. She’s a true auteur, and I don’t know how she did it, but she got my best performance in years out of me. When she looked me in the eye, she looked right through my pupils and right into me. She stared at me with such love and respect and full knowledge of who I was and what I was doing in those scenes that I just dropped and flew with her.
When I got on the set, I went to the producer and said, “She wrote this. How locked in is she to the words?” The producer said, “She’s pretty locked in.” Because I studied this character for three months. I saw everything that Ken Kesey said, in lectures, in interviews, and he was quite an amazing man, quite articulate. And he had a huge sense of humanity, but there were some gems of things that he’d said.
The first scene, when I meet all the students, I did the first take, the second take, I said, “I might add a little thing right here.” And she just looked at me, and I did it. And once I did it, her eyes opened up, and [she] gave me a little wave, like, “Go ahead, go ahead.” I started ripping out all kinds of dialogue that came out of Ken Kesey’s mouth. And she was: “Oh my god, I got chills, Jim.” She made me feel so knowledgeable about my character, and I just flew with it.
It took her eight years to get this movie made: talk about fearless pursuit. She did not give up on his film, and she did it within a low budget, and she worked hours and hours and hours. This girl did not stop. I couldn’t even pretend to be tired after watching her all day. It’s like, “I can’t be tired. I got to go for coffee. She’s still working. I’m not tired. ‘You want to go home?’ ‘No, I’ll stay for another shot. Come on. Let’s do another shot.'”
The main line for me in the movie has actually changed me since I’ve shot it: “No one is big enough to hold what happens to us.” I have forgiven everybody who didn’t understand me in my life because of that line. Of course. Why did I expect people to understand, to be able to hold the terror or the struggles that I’ve had? Nobody’s big enough to hold that … For the lead character [Lidia, played by Imogen Poots], it’s in her hands to write it. “Maybe someone will be able to hold what happened to you.” Kristen was able to hold what happened to me in my life, and understand it in order to bring it out in my performance, and for that, I feel like I was in the presence of a shaman.
She was a shaman. That’s how much humanity she carried for this girl in this movie. I don’t know where she got this experience in her life to have such depth. I don’t believe in reincarnation, but she must have reincarnated six or seven times, because she shocked me with how smart, articulate, and knowledgeable she is. I love her.
When Kristen walked on a set, you could feel around her for a good six to eight feet, this presence, this power. If she stopped and started talking to you, it was like you were in this dome of something special. She has this quiet plane, and she weaves between fragility and fierce introspection with every glance and gesture that she makes. She would just stare and watch me, and she made me feel so good about everything I did.
The material itself is so complicated an exploration of grief, the acting out of unresolved grief and trauma. Death is a complicated subject to film, to act. She understood it. Finally, you see someone who gets the depth of death. How does this 35-year-old girl carry solid knowledge of deep concepts, and capture it in that film in such a creative way? I worked with Michael Mann, Oliver Stone, Woody Allen, David Lynch, Roman Polanski. I’ve worked with some great directors. I’ve had that honor, and she is right in that line. She’s going to be a very special director one day, if not this day.
I have a standing offer with her that whenever she needs her car washed, I will be there with a bucket, brush, soap, and water. I will do anything for this girl. I’d work with my little sister any day. She’s a fearless artist, fearless in her pursuit of authenticity, and she is unafraid to challenge the boundaries of storytelling. That’s the example in this film. I hope she gets all the recognition that she deserves.
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