Wednesday, February 19, 2025
Tuesday, February 4, 2025
Kristen and Steven Yeun's interview for 'Love Me' with Indiewire
For Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun, the A.I. indie romance “Love Me” is almost indescribable — and that’s partly what makes the film resonate the most.
“Love Me,” which marks married directors Andy and Sam Zuchero‘s feature debut, premiered at Sundance 2024 and is now in select theaters. Stewart and Yeun play a disembodied couple over the course of a billion years: Stewart is a buoy named Me who then adopts the physicality of since-deceased Instagram influencer Deja in a post-apocalyptic world. Yeun is satellite Iam, who takes on the role of Deja’s husband Leo as the duo re-enact a series of YouTube videos.
Yet even the two lead stars couldn’t classify exactly what kind of film “Love Me” is.
For Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun, the A.I. indie romance “Love Me” is almost indescribable — and that’s partly what makes the film resonate the most.
“Love Me,” which marks married directors Andy and Sam Zuchero‘s feature debut, premiered at Sundance 2024 and is now in select theaters. Stewart and Yeun play a disembodied couple over the course of a billion years: Stewart is a buoy named Me who then adopts the physicality of since-deceased Instagram influencer Deja in a post-apocalyptic world. Yeun is satellite Iam, who takes on the role of Deja’s husband Leo as the duo re-enact a series of YouTube videos.
Yet even the two lead stars couldn’t classify exactly what kind of film “Love Me” is.
“I think the movie itself is just, in a very cool way, really hard to pin down,” Stewart said, citing the various transformations of her character. “I think that’s the point. It’s very hard to define. It’s hard to do interviews about it. It was hard to talk about on set. We were always wondering if we were having the same conversation, like existential spiral stuff, and that’s, like, totally why we make movies. I just thought it was kind of a breath of fresh air.”
Stewart called the Zucheros’ script a “beautiful diving board” to portray how “desperate” people are to connect. And the best way of showing people struggling with that was to have the two leads be, well, not people.
“I wanted to be in a movie that starts off as just a lonely voice, and then finally sort of breaks away into some silly cartoon — which being a human often feels like — and then you go a little further, and you have weird makeup on,” Stewart said of why she joined the project. “You’re sort of doing an odd, human impression, and by the end, we’re shooting in 35mm, and we’re touching each other for real. I thought that was just such an interesting kind of experience to have. […] It just really prods at what it is to connect and how desperate we are to do so, with all of the shape-shifting we do in order to get close to each other and our own sense of self. It felt so daring to me, acknowledging that the truth is so transient instead of trying to make some groundbreaking statement.”
Production came with a few surprises for Steven Yeun once he realized just how abstract the film would be. An actual buoy and satellite were built by Laird FX for the film, with both Stewart and Yeun also having scenes in motion-capture suits for the animated portions. “Sims” and “Where the Wild Things Are” were among the inspirations for how the animation was later created.
As co-director Sam Zuchero told IndieWire in 2023, both actors were filmed for a month on a soundstage, which Yeun now recalled having some trepidation about.
“I remember getting into setting up my character, and I didn’t consider this until I got there, but there was already a set of limitations that existed for my particular character and as the actor,” Yeun said. “I was like, ‘Wait, how come I’m limited to these particular wardrobe choices and these particular constraints?’ Then I was like, ‘Oh, because so is Iam, and so is Leo.’ He’s limited to these constraints because he’s a part of this tandem in which there’s a dynamic happening. There was just this meta that kind of spilled out in this beautiful way. This is an exploration that keeps going. It doesn’t pin itself down, and I feel like it’s just this eternal mirror that hopefully just keeps resonating, but in the meantime, I’m still trying to figure out what it all means.”
Both Yeun and Stewart, though, assure that “Love Me” does not mean to make a statement about the politics of artificial intelligence.
“I don’t want to get too much into the weeds of some sort of like statement. I don’t think we’re planning on making that,” Yeun said. “If anything for me, I’ll just say personally, as a reflection of going through a project like this and just kind of seeing the world change, I don’t know if you can co-sign AI. I think if anything, AI feels like something that’s revealing to me what we embody. We embody AI most of the time. I think that’s what it’s revealing to me, and what was so fascinating and fun and scary about exploring the topic that we were in this movie is that what is ultimately human will spill forward. I really just think it just becomes this mirror.”
Stewart, however, admitted she is afraid of the lengths AI could go to.
“Artificial intelligence is smarter than us. I don’t know that we have the capacity to contemplate it enough. I certainly don’t have a grasp on its potential,” Stewart said. “I know it scares me. I feel like it’s listening now. I don’t even want to mention it.”
She continued, “I feel like it’s so egotistical also to sort of deem what is alive. We’re just growing out of the earth. We are like fucking organic material, and I don’t really know where the line is between what is natural and unnatural. It’s really not something I think the movie actually touches on in a literal sense. I feel it’s so much more emotional and human than that. I think the movie is totally a metaphor. It’s a kind of elaborate hypothetical that gets us onto an interesting thought process that is self-reflective. And, in terms of the AI thing, the movie actually brought me more into my body and less into the idea that we are becoming computers or that we might be melding or how we integrate. Blah blah blah blah blah.”
Stewart did know, though, that there were bound to be memes made out of “Love Me.”
“My friend, after they watched the movie the other day, said that we definitely won’t escape a certain [scene]. They predicted that a meme would be created for ‘I’m not even a buoy anymore!’ It’s so, so serious and earnest at the end and super emotional. Like, ‘Oh my God, what the fuck is this movie?'”
And that viral influencer dupe actually brings Stewart “great, great joy” to watch.
“The two of us [with Yeun] looking like that, it’s such an uncanny valley experience,” Stewart said. “It’s not wrong. I don’t know, it looks like AI. It looks like someone did that to us. And I’m like, ‘Oh, what a glimpse into an alternate reality. How weird. It could have been.'”
Yeun added that he’s actually been steering clear of the internet’s reactions to the film.
“I actually haven’t seen any of that,” he said. “I’ve been trying to be off [social media] for a while. Luckily, my kids are too young to send it to me because they’re not on it, but I am cringing at the thought of this, but also, kind of, maybe it’ll be cool. I have no idea.”
After “Love Me,” Stewart is focusing on getting her feature directorial debut, “The Chronology of Water,” which shot in summer 2024, into a festival. Stewart adapted the film from writer Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir about her transformative experiences as a swimmer; Imogen Poots leads the indie, with Scott Free Productions among the backers. “The Chronology of Water” has been in the works since 2018.
Yeun has another long-awaited film finally out as well: Bong Joon Ho’s “Mickey 17,” led by Stewart’s fellow “Twilight” alum Robert Pattinson.
“I love director Bong,” Yeun said. “I’m just excited for people to see his giant dive into the deepest depths of creative consciousness, you know, the things that he pulls out, the things that he lets go of, the way that he surfs … where he’s able to like put his touch and then also just completely leave his hands up … It’s truly admirable. I’m excited for the world to get to see this.”
Yeun also stayed mum about a possible return to “Beef” or a cameo for the upcoming Season 2, which he’s executive-producing.
“Season 2, I’m more hush-hush about that,” Yeun said, adding that he would love to work with creator Lee Sung “Sunny” Jin again. And Stewart.
“I say that now like because you’re on the call and also because I really feel that way, Kristen, like that’d be so fun to do another one [together],” he said.
Stewart agreed, saying, “I’m not being performative, but … I have a shortlist. I’m coming for you, like, we’re gonna fucking work together. We have work to do.”
Sunday, February 2, 2025
Kristen and Steven Yeun interview with CBR for 'Love Me'
In this interview with CBR, Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun get very metaphysical about their approach to their performances in this complex but, ultimately, sweet film. Directed by Andy and Sam Zuchero, the movie uses a hybrid of live-action and animated scenes. The Buoy and the Satellite are practical props, built by Laird FX. As the film progresses, the two characters occupy a digital space. As the characters evolve on their journey of identity, the animation reflects this by becoming sharper more, for lack of a better term, realistic. Finally, by the end of the film, Stewart and Yeun play their characters in live-action, signifying they've reached a level of being indistinguishable from humanity. How they get there is the interesting part, and it's equal parts funny and heartbreaking. Their answers have been lightly edited for clarity.
CBR: Kristen, in the beginning of the film, the buoy imitates an influencer named Deja to convince the satellite that she's alive. This imitation then leads to her developing her own identity. Did you approach this performance as different characters, the same character or some mixture of the two?
Kristen Stewart: There's like a congruency that ties us all together, like even the people that would seem to be coming from totally different sides of the earth. And so, I think that the buoy can be nothing other than me. And when I say 'me,' I really mean me, because my character is also called 'Me.' But it's just I can't be anyone else other than myself.
I think that [the Buoy] is able to look around and sort of be jealous of certain things that make living easier, make people like you. I think that all of us do that. All of us, undeniably, all the time. Even if you're self-assured or self-possessed. We don't exist without each other. I wouldn't know how to be unless I watched other people 'be'; in some way. And then I kind of chose my own path. So, all the characters are super congruent. I think they have a lot of overlap.
CBR: That's really lovely, and it ties into the message of Love Me, especially considering that films with influencer characters tend to mock them. The film treats Deja as sincere, and she inspires the Buoy to become that better, more complete version of herself.
KS: Yeah, we were trying to not be so scathing about our influencers, because they're just so [vulnerable]. It's like she is the Buoy. [Deja is also] desperately trying to connect, even though she's not being the most honest. There's an honesty in that.
CBR: Steven, your performance as the Satellite was so nuanced. Early in the film, you capture the tenor of an AI assistant. Which lessened over time as the Satellite becomes more aware of his own identity. Did you approach playing the character as he was always sentient and just didn't know it?
Steven Yeun: I don't know.
KS: Like awareness of the 'awareness.' (Laughs)
SY: I think. I didn't try to ponder too much about it. If anything, the experience itself as we shot sequentially was kind of revealing as it went. And I don't know if I got to understand what consciousness and awareness is from that angle, but I did think at first this satellite is pure function. And it thrives on being [just] 'function.'
It's almost as if it is glad to surrender to just being a necessity or a thing that is required of it. In that way it's in some sort of peace, actually. because it doesn't have to refer to itself at all. Its life is 'I just do this thing and that's what I do.'
CBR: So, it's like awareness is inflicted on the character against its will?
SY: To then be pulled awake by [seeing his own] reflection is its own jarring, crazy experience. [When he meets the Buoy] it's like, 'Oh, you know about me? Define me, please. Help me know who I am.' But then it's like, 'Wait. I don't think that that's who I am?' And then he wars with that, then comes to understand that the [the Buoy] actually freed him and pulled him out of his stagnation, in that way.
So, I don't know if it was this conscious step-by-step thing. If anything, that's what was so fun about playing with Kristen. It just fell forward and revealed itself, and the exercise was almost getting out of the way of the film, making itself in that way and so. That was a trip.
KS: It's like you need to be jostled out of his overtly defined existence. I don't know. Typical man! (Laughs) I'm just saying, dude is someone who just needs to say, 'Cool. I do this thing. I have a job. I'm very valuable and functional.'
CBR: Well, without getting into spoilers, the Satellite never actually stops doing his job, right?
SY: Yeah, I came back to understanding the beauty of that function, too. There's just a symbiosis with the paradox of function and identity, and I think to me, what I love about our film is that it doesn't really [definitively take a stance].
[The film is] the entire image. Especially because our world right now feels so literal and binary. It feels refreshing to experience something where you don't really know. I'm flexible, and I'm equally rigid as I am flexible.
KS: It's like when you encounter certain people in your life, and you suddenly feel kind of rocketed back to kindergarten. In which you are essentially fundamental to your own being, but also totally undeveloped. You're like, 'Oh, f---. Possibility' or, more like, 'I feel young around you.' I feel like these two people — because the movie is symbolic and a metaphor and obviously not based on reality — they go, 'Oh, we needed to find each other in order to sort of dislodge [from being just functional].'
Saturday, February 1, 2025
Friday, January 31, 2025
Thursday, January 30, 2025
Kristen and Steven Yeun interview for 'Love Me' with Yahoo
The premise of the new movie Love Me is a unique one — Kristen Stewart voices a high-tech buoy that communicates with a satellite (Steven Yeun) after humans have disappeared from the Earth. To prove that she is a “life-form,” the buoy studies the species by watching YouTube videos of a lifestyle influencer and her partner, who are also played by Stewart and Yeun.
Love Me is the directorial debut of Sam and Andy Zuchero, a married couple who also wrote the film. It drew split reactions when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2024, but critics agreed for the most part that it was daring and weird.
The Zucheros started writing the movie in 2018, but it feels more relevant than ever in a world where humans have fallen in love with artificial intelligence and AI has become sophisticated enough to impact our everyday lives.
“I was always thinking about AI in terms of sentience, and I have kind of let go of that thought pattern and have started thinking about AI as a new form of life — and one that’s very apt at manipulating human emotions,” Sam told Yahoo Entertainment.
Andy added that “the movie is less about AI and more about us, and how two AI are seeing us and unpacking humanity and trying to figure out what it means to be alive and in love.”
The movie’s two stars filmed the scenes in which they played influencers first. To get into character, Stewart told Yahoo Entertainment that she “put some extensions in” and studied influencers, who had evolved in the years since the script was first written.
She said that at the time, she had a “surface impression” of what an influencer would be like, “which is just totally fake and selling an idea of life that is unachievable.” But she found inspiration from creators who were “pretty sweet and very revealing in their wooden deliveries.
Working alongside Sam, Stewart created the character of Deja, who is a “naive, sweet, overearnest, desperate version of the two of us” — if they were influencers seven years ago. Stewart’s buoy character tries to learn from her posts to simulate becoming a “life-form” as much as possible.
“I think it was cool to imagine the idea of someone trying to crack through artifice and affectation,” Stewart said. “I feel like we all do that. You’re not born as any sort of defined thing, so you choose. She’s becoming this amalgamation of a thing, and that’s what we all do. It’s a really human relationship movie.”
Though Stewart’s buoy character lied when she claimed to be that particular influencer, the movie reckons with whether she was technically lying when she claimed to be a “life-form.” At the film’s center is a thought experiment about what AI might glean from us if all it truly knows is what we’ve posted on the internet, Andy told Yahoo Entertainment.
“Even though you can say [what we share on social media] is a poor representation of who we are, there are ideals that we have that are present there and that go to the core of humanity,” he explained. “But then it’s flavored by making a bunch of money and creating [a] brand that is you, which is a massive gap between who the [real] you is ... [so there’s] a process of deinfluencing and pulling back the curtain of the pretense of what we put out there versus who we actually are.”
“I actually had no idea how it was going to go, but there were parts where I was like, ‘Wow, people are making a movie like this right now?’” Yeun said. “What attracts me [to roles] is just [thinking], ‘Who’s going for something? Who’s trying to say something?’”
Stewart said they started filming at the “tail end of COVID stuff” when they were “all locked up and experiencing the world through screens.”
“There’s a rebirth that happens in tragedy when we’re all locked away. It was like, I guess we can choose how we want to continue,” Stewart said. “I was reading the book Sapiens [by Yuval Noah Harari] at the time, and I was like, ‘Nothing’s real, but everything’s real!’”
Stewart explained that the movie was a “large, elaborate acting exercise” that made her think deeply about humanity and relationships.
“This is not the way to sell the movie, but [it’s like] — if you’ve ever done mushrooms and sat around [wide-eyed, searching] for deeper exploration in order to realize you’re never going to find the destination,” she said. “Being together and trying is definitely enough and kind of all that we have.”
Wednesday, January 29, 2025
Monday, January 27, 2025
Kristen and Steven Yeun talk to Moviefone for 'Love Me'
Appears this could be a video interview we will update post when available.
Opening in theaters on January 31st is post-apocalyptic romance ‘Love Me’, which was written and directed by Sam and Andy Zuchero, and stars Kristen Stewart (‘Love Lies Bleeding’) and Steven Yeun (‘Beef’).
Moviefone recently had the pleasure of speaking with Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun about their work on ‘Love Me’, their first reaction to the screenplay, how they approached playing their unusual characters, and the difficulties of the human relationship that they form.
Moviefone: To begin with, Kristen, can you talk about your first reaction to the screenplay and Sam and Andy Zuchero’s unusual vision for this project?
Kristen Stewart: I thought it was one of the most experimental, weird, ambitious, bizarre things that I had read. I thought the endeavor was a little cuckoo because it doesn't profess to answer any of these unanswerable existential questions, and it doesn’t. I don't think it's something that's like, “Oh, this is a movie that takes place in the future and therefore has all these conclusions”. It was like an invitation to do a really elaborate acting exercise that would reveal us to ourselves and each other daily. It was a diving board. The script felt like the most confronting thing about it wasn't its setting or its characters, it was just how unfixed identity is. It can be scary if you suddenly find yourself responsible for determining those things. It holds a mirror just like a centimeter away from your face, basically. I just also watched a short film that they made that was equally as daring and I wanted to hang out with them. I was drawn to their curiosity and their earnestness and that's it.
MF: Steven, can you talk about your approach to playing these characters, both in live-action and animation, what was that process like for you?
Steven Yeun: Mine was probably a different experience in that my characters were largely reflecting off Kristen's characters. He was wanting to be, in some ways defined by it, but then also struggled with that tension. I was following and reacting and playing that mirror consciously, in a way. So, it was fun. It was also revealing of the character's own tension with wanting his own control or its own control. It's an exercise in surrender and control. It's just that tension between those two things.
MF: Finally, Kristen, while this is a story about two machines, they end up having a very human connection and relationship. Can you talk about that and the message of the movie?
KS: I mean, I guess instead of doing a movie where you have two isolated people that can't be affected by affectation or own individual experiences, if you were to just all of a sudden be dropped into consciousness if you were a matured person who could potentially write the storybook of your life with an intellect that didn't need to be acquired and that was never shaped by individual experience, is genuinely just the knowable universe, I think that immediately renders a person. Well, these people don't exist, right? This is all a metaphor. Buoys don't talk to satellites. I mean, they do, but not in this way. I think maybe just the opportunity to allow something that you immediately diminish as something that couldn't be alive, you must stay open. I mean, it's so presumptuous. It's like you only know what's going on within yourself. I think, playing babies in adult bodies or the idea of bodies. This was just a movie about unfixed identity, defining that weird friction and contrast between reality, what real is compared to everyone's own unique experiences and how they differ, reality doesn't exist. So, we all must define it for ourselves, and it just felt like a base look at that. I was down to being in a vacuous space with Steven trying to figure out what all that means.
Saturday, January 25, 2025
Video: Kristen and Steven Yeun talks 'Love Me' with Screen Rant
Kristen Stewart explains how her role in the sci-fi romance Love Me challenged her to explore new territory as an actor. The Love Lies Bleeding star revealed back in 2021 that she was soon set to appear in a quirky post-apocalyptic movie about a love story between a satellite and a buoy. Having premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, Stewart’s Love Me is set to release in theaters on January 31, 2025.
Speaking exclusively to ScreenRant about her romantic turn as the lonely bouy Me, and the attention-seeking influencer Deja in Love Me, Stewart discussed the unique challenge of creating characters who are very different from anything she’s played before:
It was fun. It was defining itself every day. The script is such a diving board, and it's so astute in terms of how it offers itself to you. I hope that the movie does that as well, even though we've kind of peopled it.
Stewart then went deeper into what she found appealing in Me/Deja, and the questions the characters raised for her about identity:
But it just felt like anyone could have played that part, and so it felt like such an invitation to [say], "Well, okay, maybe it can be you." You're like, "Well, what does that mean? Who am I?" The whole movie is about trying to figure that out; reckoning with our sameness, our individuality, and finding ways to express that understanding. It changes all the time.
Stewart elaborated further on why she saw her Love Me role as a unique and interesting opportunity:
Really, in terms of character, I thought it was a nice, open-ended opportunity to allow that to become anything - which is kind of everything. You're kind of playing everyone. You're playing somebody who just wants to be seen.