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The actress has found her voice as a director in 'The Chronology of Water' and talks about making peace with her past as a megastar with the 'Twilight' saga: "It was a beautiful time in my life, but it was also difficult to endure."
Last May, at the Cannes Film Festival, Kristen Stewart (Los Angeles, 35 years old) presented her first film as a director, The Chronology of Water . It received applause and positive reviews, but in the subsequent discussion, she seemed both satisfied and nervous about releasing to the world a project that she feels is both personal and collective. She shifted and readjusted herself in her chair, snapping her fingers. “It’s crazy, but I think for the first time I feel like people are looking at me and treating me with respect, as if I had a brain,” she says, happy, but also with a touch of bitterness and surprise.
She had been to that festival many times before, and to many others, but it was the first time she walked that red carpet as a director that she felt a different kind of gaze upon her. And that is precisely what her debut film is about, “the oppressive gaze of half the world toward the other half, women,” Stewart explains . “The film speaks of self-recognition and the recognition of your desires. Feeling robbed, having your voice questioned, wondering if your instincts are right, and letting yourself be guided by shame instead of what you believe is not an exclusively female experience. I won't say this is a film only for women because we can all have wounds… But it is a little more difficult for us,” she states.
The Chronology of Water is an adaptation of the memoir by writer Lidia Yuknavitch , which Stewart first read in 2017 and which became her creative and emotional guiding light during the seven years she worked on the film, writing hundreds of script versions along the way. She had long been searching for a story that would allow her to find her voice as a director, and in this text, she found the vehicle for her obsessions and passions. “There are certain things that unlock you… There are certain texts, or relationships, conversations, films, whatever, that open you up,” she says of this difficult and painful book in which Yuknavitch revealed the abuse she suffered as a child, which led her to a self-destructive life of addiction, from which she emerged through writing and swimming. “When I read this book, I was impressed by the uniqueness of his voice, but even more so by what he was saying about the malleability of our realities and how art puts them in our hands and turns them into something that allows us to rethink the things that hurt us into things that are pleasant and joyful.”
Her film speaks of the healing power of art and making peace with the past, ideas that resonate with Stewart after a lifetime in front of the cameras. A child prodigy, she was 11 when she rose to fame as Jodie Foster's daughter in Panic Room; a teen megastar thanks to Twilight, since 2012, after the saga ended, she has struggled to carve out a niche for herself in other kinds of stories and perspectives far removed from Hollywood. Although she doesn't deny what she experienced during those years. "It was a beautiful time in my life, but it was also difficult to endure. I don't know who I would be without it, but I only have my memories..." she reflects. She distanced herself from that by working with a different kind of director: Olivier Assayas (Personal Shopper), Pablo Larraín (Spencer), Rose Glass (Blood on the Lips), Cronenberg (Crimes of the Future)...
It's no coincidence that these are the same directors she cites as influences in her leap behind the camera. “I've spoken with all the directors I've worked with about the fact that I wanted to make films. I'm an actress, this isn't a change of direction, I'm not new to this, I've been here all along,” she points out. “When I worked with Cronenberg, I made that film, it's mine; he couldn't have made it without us, and he's a fucking master, revered for the right reasons, like Olivier and Pablo. When you work with them, you share the same body and mind, that's why they're so good. That's what I tried to replicate with my actress, Imogen [Poots]: it's her film as much as it is mine. It's her body, her soul, her whole life, her skin…,” she says in her usual torrent of emotional discourse. And suddenly she remembers how worried she was about the actress at the first screening in Cannes. “I felt I had to be with her, protect her. Actresses are treated like garbage,” she says, speaking of her vulnerability and the pain felt by her actress and her protagonist, through whom she wants to address her own pain and that of many others, especially women. “The film is very specific; it deals with a real rape. There’s an extreme experience that not everyone goes through. I haven’t suffered it, and I feel fortunate to say so, but it’s also a metaphor. Women experience horrible things all the time. This was a beautiful opportunity to talk about how to reclaim your body and your orgasm through understanding and a kind of rethinking. It’s vital to do so, to witness the ugliness, to live with the shame, and to emerge from it knowing that your body and your story belong to you.”
According to Stewart, The Chronology of Water “is an invitation to stop hiding,” and it’s not that she’s been hiding—“I’ve put a target on my back, on my stomach, on my vagina,” she says of herself as a queer and female icon—but she hadn’t yet brought out her creative self. “Write from your own voice, disappear into your ego,” her character says. Did she manage to do that in her own process? “Oh, I love this as a last question because I have a real answer,” she laughs, “I know I have a very healthy ego because right after filming, when I hadn’t even started to piece together the puzzle, I thought I’d ruined everything and I could have sunk, turned into a monster, a horrible person, but I didn’t… Sure, it wasn’t easy living with me at that time, but it wasn’t so bad… Trust the process. Especially if you’ve designed it yourself.”
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