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.
The first time most of us saw IndieWire Honors Maverick Award winner Kristen Stewart was in David Fincher’s 2002 thriller “Panic Room,” as the terrified 12-year-old whose mother (Jodie Foster) whisks her to safety as an intruder terrorizes their home.
We watched Stewart grow up onscreen, playing a diverse range of teenagers and young women, from the tough older sister in Jon Favreau’s space adventure “Zathura,” and hard rocker Joan Jett in “The Runaways,” to winsome Jean Seberg in “Seberg.” But it was her 2008 role as Bella Swan in the first installment of the “Twilight” saga that turned her into a global movie star.
Stewart went on to complete four more Twilight movies: In the end, the vampire saga grossed $3.4 billion worldwide.
After that, while the actress took on three big-studio roles in “Snow White and the Huntsman,” “Charlie’s Angels,” and Ang Lee’s “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,” Stewart has been choosy about the parts she wants to play, often preferring to collaborate with international directors, including Brazil’s Walter Salles (“On the Road”), France’s Olivier Assayas (“Personal Shopper”), and Chile’s Pablo Larraín (“Spencer”).
That’s how she became the first American actress to win a César Award, for her supporting role as an actor’s assistant in Assayas’ 2015 “Clouds of Sils Maria” — and after becoming the youngest person to take home the BAFTA Rising Star Award at age 19.
The camera can’t get enough of Stewart’s open face. She is fearless. She understands intimacy, the dynamics between the sexes, as well as violence. She can convey calm, vulnerability, and the strength of a smart woman, but stays believable even in outrageous situations. She held her own with Oscar-winner Julianne Moore as her mother in “Still Alice,” plumbed the depths of real-girl Bella Swan’s love for a vampire in “Twilight,” and acted for David Gordon Green (“Undertow”), Doug Liman (“Jumper”), Greg Mottola (“Adventureland”), Kelly Reichardt (“Certain Women”), Barry Levinson (“What Just Happened?”), and Rose Glass (“Love Lies Bleeding”).
With “Spencer,” after two decades in the business, Stewart earned her first Oscar nomination as Best Actress for playing the beleaguered Princess Diana in Larraín’s critics’ favorite. Even as she moved her mouth to manage plummy British vowels, Stewart’s performance pulled us in, made us cry, and took us by surprise. It’s hard to believe she was only 31.
For the past eight years, while making shorts and music videos, Stewart has been developing her adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir, “The Chronology of Water,” willing it into existence against considerable resistance. Stewart’s European ties helped to push the project forward with her as writer/director. The film stars British actress Imogen Poots as Lidia, who survives a traumatic upbringing in Washington, Texas, and Florida via competitive swimming, addictive behaviors, and compulsive writing. The movie debuted at Cannes 2025 in Un Certain Regard to strong reviews.
As we sit down to talk on Zoom, Stewart and her wife, Dylan Meyer, whom she married on April 20, are hosting Thanksgiving the next day, with Stewart’s father on hand. She’s planning to have breakfast with her mother in the next few days. “I’m back and forth between,” she said. “I see them fairly a lot when I’m not completely crazed with releasing my first movie.”
Stewart has taken a slow road to maverick status. Early on, as a child actor from 1999, she understood the importance of pleasing adults. “You reckon with the way that you present as a nine-year-old going on auditions for the first time, knowing that the only way that you can break into visibility is to alter the way that you are. And that’s also the way that you inhabit the world as a young woman. Every young girl does this; everyone turns into something that wants to be appealing and chosen. And in my experience as a kid, I wanted to work so badly. I never betrayed myself. [But] to be successful, girls have to behave a certain way. That means being smiling and light and not very thoughtful, and someone who doesn’t ask too many questions, and somebody who’s ‘chill,’ somebody who goes along.”
As long and successful and idiosyncratic as Stewart’s career has been, she’s only feeling her full maverick agency now. “It’s turning 35,” she said. “I’ve read a lot of feminist literature. I feel backed up by it. There’s certain programming, ideas that seep into your body, that do debilitate you and create insecurities that take a long time to get over. I love acting, but it is crushing. It’s like fitting yourself into someone else’s perspective in the most pure way. It’s a huge responsibility, and then that performance lives in another’s art. But then it’s consumed by media and the public, and sold as a product, and then you’re also meant to hold that idea up with your personality and your body and your clothes and your smile, and the way that you talk about the movie and the way that you gratify other people to know that you are grateful, that you know that it’s a really special position to be in, and that you bow to the public. It’s bizarre.”
Now that Stewart has directed her first movie, she sees the other side.
“As a director, you get to own ideas,” she said. “People project on actors that anyone could — and it’s absolutely true — do this job. It’s a rarefied position, because there aren’t that many jobs. As a filmmaker, you’re not talking to a puppet. But that doesn’t negate the fact that actors like Imogen directed this movie with me. Her whole body and mind and soul is in the movie, and it informs every decision, and so many of those decisions are hers.”
She continued, “But in terms of how you interact with the public or people that don’t make movies, I will say that actresses don’t get treated great. I don’t know how male actors feel when they sit in the seat and get talked to about movies that they work on, but as a director, it is the first time I’ve ever sat down and had conversations where I wasn’t feeling like I was being quizzed on the movie that I made, because they were wondering if I deserved to be there. I made the movie myself. I wrote it, I made it with my hands. From the ground up, every single cell of the movie is mine, and people know that, and so therefore it’s a very different interaction. And it has liberated me to feel like, ‘Oh my god. This is how you can be yourself.’ I’ve always tried to be myself, but you’re not really given the opportunity. For the first time, I felt like I was given the opportunity.”
After “Twilight,” for a time, Stewart and her agents adopted a one-for-us, one-for-them attitude. “You have to take the advice of your agents, because they’re a certain filter,” she said. “They’re the ones either giving you or not giving you certain things to read. And you can’t read everything. And, obviously, there’s baked-in advice-giving. But after ‘Twilight,’ there was a natural progression, because your work leads you to other artists. It was clear when I felt drawn to a project or a person or an idea, and so I followed my nose on that. Over the years, people have definitely wanted me to do more studio films in order to keep up the independent movies that I wanted to do. If you want to keep the independent train rolling, something’s got to keep it going. The only reason you get a movie financed is if you have international appeal and blah, blah.”
Stewart has come to admire the European cinema, acting twice for Assayas. When I worked with Olivier,” said Stewart, “I understood the potential impact of what a movie could do to bring you into other dimensions, essentially into your dream states, into your subconscious. Before I worked with Olivier, I did approach things in a slightly more exterior fashion. And then I was introduced to something unspoken that said so much more.”
Stewart envies European culture. “Down to the crews that cater and grip and costume and shoot the films, to the people who department head, to the people who write about the films, and even the public who consumes them straight up, there’s a certain historical, cultural pleasure in how alive and independent cinema can be,” she said. “It shows people that they can be themselves. It’s like the New Wave. I want there to be a New Wave in Los Angeles. We need it so badly.”
Indulging her indie taste enabled Stewart to make such renegade projects as Floria Sigismondi’s Joan Jett biopic “The Runaways” or Justin Kelly’s “JT Leroy.” Among the studio films, “there was a modicum of control and creative freedom on ‘Snow White and the Huntsman,’ where it felt isolated from a larger studio,” she said. “Then on ‘Charlie’s,’ it was inundated with a lot of voices in the room. I’m philosophically opposed to treating something like there’s a right and wrong. When you’re dealing with producers and executives, because of the hierarchy, there are people who know what’s going to do well, or know what’s funny, or know that the impulses of the artists who are responsible for telling the story are wrong. You start turning yourself into a pretzel to satisfy a large group of people.
She continued, “You homogenize the experience and make something that doesn’t have a real perspective, and it is actually painful. You’re stabbing the movie over and over. Especially on such a large scale, more people are going to see this rather than fewer. It doesn’t come from anywhere. It’s not coming from a person. It’s not coming from a self.”
Stewart’s takeaway: Work on projects where the director’s singular vision takes precedence. “It takes a crazy drive, a hungry, contagious thing that we know when one person has it. A good director does nothing other than create an environment in which other people want to want as much as they do, because it looks like it’s fun. As soon as you look over as director and you see that someone is now being driven by their own desires because of the path that you set them on, you go, ‘Hell, yeah!’ And you can take their stuff and put it in your movie, but it’s yours. As a director, you are creating the waves, and it’s the coolest fucking thing ever, and you cannot do that in a studio environment.”
But getting an indie movie made in LA is a challenge. “It’s a political act, and when you do so, you are met with an unbelievable barrier, like a chasm,” said Stewart. “But you can find workarounds. For me, a few of those, like little trap doors, have been through working with European directors, and then as a director, finding European finance, working in Europe to get it done, and then bringing it back to the States. I want to work in the U.S.”
Stewart is working on several new projects to direct. “It’s worth understanding that the ability to make something, regardless of scale, in terms of practicality, is in your hands,” she said. “I feel like I no longer want to be debilitated by expectation and a system that is not designed for me. And so, if Cassavetes did it, we could do it. I could take something tiny and make it feel huge, and that’s what I aspire to.”
Stewart has been open about her gay identity since 2017, when she came out on “Saturday Night Live,” saying, “I’m so gay, dude.”
“I wanted a whole life,” she said. “I didn’t want a sliver of being able to live my life. I do not want to live in a world that erases people. So there was no version of reaping the benefits of bending over backwards and negating not only myself, but a large number of people that would cease to exist without being acknowledged, because we live in a world that is so hyper-judgmental and aggressive and violent towards anything threatening. If you know you’re living alone in that world, there’s no way to speak up for yourself. And there must be a choir to join, or a cacophony that infiltrates, in order for you to step up and also do that. There’s so much life, if you don’t negate it. I never hid it. It just took a minute for me to start talking about it.”
When Stewart, who served on the Cannes jury in 2018, runs up the Cannes Palais steps barefoot, she’s having a bit of fun. “I’m commenting on the world that we live in, and feeling like I acknowledge that,” she said. “I jump out of it a little.” That doesn’t mean the Chanel brand ambassador since 2013 is giving up stiletto heels. “I would never wear them if I didn’t like them, but I couldn’t run out of a burning building.”
Next up, Stewart produced and stars in stoner comedy “The Wrong Girls” (Neon), written and directed by her wife Meyer (“XOXO”), the screenwriter daughter of director Nicholas Meyer, and co-starring Alia Shawkat and LaKeith Stanfield. “Oh, it’s so good,” said Stewart. “We just locked picture. I’m so proud of it. We suddenly found ourselves making this movie by the skin of our teeth as well. It’s about coming of age at 35, female friendship, and joy.”
Stewart is starring in a Quentin Dupieux-directed Paris comedy starring Woody Harrelson. And she’s dipping her toe into the miniseries arena with Amblin for “Challenger,” playing closeted gay astronaut Sally Ride. “I’m stepping into an incredibly high-stakes commercial studio environment,” she said. “A big swing. I do trust them to be able to shepherd this thing into a place of truth. But we’ll see.”
Panos Cosmatos’ “Flesh of the Gods,” written by Andrew Kevin Walker, is looking for financing. And Stewart is trying to shoot her second movie in Los Angeles in the next couple of months. “I want this thing to feel light as air,” she said. “I don’t want the heavy burden like ‘Chronology,’ which looks like a body that’s been through a lot. The process needs to be one that feels ephemeral, and I’m setting it up now.”
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