Kristen covers Architectural Digest - March 2026

BTS and Outtakes

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“Making films is a political act,” says actor-director Kristen Stewart. “You have to decide how you want to wield your presence and your voice.” These days she is making hers heard at Highland Theatre—the 1925 Highland Park movie palace and onetime vaudeville performance space, designed by noted architect Lewis Arthur Smith, whose resume also includes the Vista theater in Los Feliz, the El Portal in North Hollywood, and the Rialto in Pasadena, all from the mid-1920s. Stewart recently purchased the noble yet dilapidated building, which closed its doors and dimmed its marquee in 2024.

“I didn’t realize I was looking for a theater until this place came to my attention. Then it was like a gunshot went off and the race was on. I ran toward it with everything I had,” she recalls. “I’m fascinated by broken-down old theaters. I always want to see what mysteries they hold.”

Stewart’s vision for the Highland goes beyond a straightforward restoration. “It’s an opportunity to make a space to gather and scheme and dream together. This project is about creating a new school and restructuring our processes, finding a better way forward. We want to make it a family affair, something for the community. It's not just for pretentious Hollywood cinephiles,” she explains. “I see it as an antidote to all the corporate bullshit, a place that takes movie culture away from just buying and selling. I think there’s a huge desire and craving for what this kind of space can offer.”

The original bones of the theater, including an extraordinary mezzanine and stage, remain partially intact, but the resurrection of the space will require a herculean effort. Nevertheless, Stewart is determined to recapture the glamour of Hollywood’s Golden Age while positing a new kind of social cinema experience: “There are so many beautiful details that need to be restored. I think there’s a way to bring the building back to life in a way that embraces its history but also brings something new to the neighborhood and something new to the whole LA film community. That’s the point—new ideas.”

A native Angeleno, Stewart grew up in the San Fernando Valley and moved to LA’s Eastside when she was 20. “I absolutely f**king love this city,” she insists. “There’s a kind of unified dissonance because it’s not really a city as much as a cluster of neighborhoods, but there’s unity in that. I like the spaciousness. You can decide how you want to fill it.” Asked if she’d ever consider abandoning Tinseltown for the mean streets of New York City, the actor demurs. “LA gets a bad rap for being unserious, but there’s so much art and culture here. I find something a little heavy about the East Coast. When I come back to LA, I can breathe.”

Still, Stewart has no illusions about the problems facing Los Angeles and indeed most major cities in our country. She is indefatigable in her championing of the Downtown Women’s Center, an organization founded in 1978 that was the first in the U.S. to provide permanent supportive housing to homeless women—a mission it continues to pursue to this day, in addition to a health clinic that exclusively serves women in LA’s Skid Row community and a drop-in day center, where women can receive three daily meals and access to showers, restrooms, mail, laundry, and telephones. “LA is drowning in inadequacy in our response to homelessness. The city is at odds with itself,” Stewart laments. “There has to be a way to unearth a tender, empathetic approach to getting people off the streets. I wanted to align myself with an organization and people who’ve been doing this work for decades at a grass roots level. Amy [Turk, Chief Executive Officer of DWC] spends every waking hour helping these women. I’ll do anything for her.”

Reflecting on the future of the Highland Theatre, the film industry, and the city at large, Stewart remains optimistic yet emphatic: “The narrow path that’s been forged has to be broadened, not by tokenized diversity but by doing things really differently. We can’t keep making the same movie over and over again. And we can’t turn our backs on the people who are most in need.”

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New "Clouds of Sils Maria" Interview w/NY Times

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A few years ago the actress Juliette Binoche got in touch with her old friend Olivier Assayas, the French director who had co-written the film “Rendez-Vous,” which slingshot her to fame three decades ago.

She told him they should make another film together — a female-centric movie with echoes of one of Mr. Assayas’s idols, Ingmar Bergman, about whom he had co-written a book. Ms. Binoche and Mr. Assayas had worked together on the 2009 ensemble piece “Summer Hours,” but Ms. Binoche wanted more. “It felt to me that we didn’t have the moment to know each other — we didn’t have this time where you could really smell someone, you know?” she recalled.
“Yes you’re right, Juliette,” Mr. Assayas remembered replying, “there is something missing in our relationship.”

So, over the next few years, between shooting his celebrated film about Carlos the Jackal, Mr. Assayas wrote Ms. Binoche a film, “Clouds of Sils Maria,” opening on Friday. Filmed in English, it tells the story of Maria Enders, an actress grappling with aging and grieving the loss of her mentor. Decades earlier, that mentor had made her a star by casting her in a play as a feckless ingénue, Sigrid, who drives an older lovesick woman, Helena, to suicide.

Ms. Binoche is Maria; Kristen Stewart is her American assistant, Valentine; and Chloë Grace Moretz is a fiery young American actress set to play Sigrid across from Maria’s Helena in a restaging of that pivotal play.

“I did not want to write a part for Juliette,” Mr. Assayas said. “I wanted to make a movie inspired by Juliette, using Juliette as a character.” He added: “And I went really all the way; one of the layers it kind of works on is the fact that you never lose touch with the fact that you are looking at Juliette Binoche, Kristen Stewart and Chloë Moretz. That’s part of the narrative in a certain way.”

Though the film is only now being released, it had its premiere at Cannes last year, when it earned accolades but no awards, and it was shown at the New York Film Festival last fall. (“Mr. Assayas’s touch is tender, and his direction brilliant,” Manohla Dargis wrote in The New York Times after its Cannes debut.) Ms. Binoche, Mr. Assayas and Ms. Stewart each sat down separately in New York to talk about the film.

While the plot of “Clouds” alludes to “Rendez-Vous,” which ends with Ms. Binoche’s character, a fledgling actress, poised on the cusp of stardom, Ms. Binoche said she didn’t share the near-paralyzing melancholy that grips Maria for much of the film. “There’s something about the past that she’s not in peace with somehow,” Ms. Binoche said over cappuccinos in a corner of the Crosby Street Hotel. “She’s trying to hang onto it; so there’s some kind of passage that she was not able to do where she feels stuck yet totally abandoned.”

Luminous at 50 (she has since turned 51), Ms. Binoche came across as a woman at ease with herself. “I’m not saying that aging is not difficult, but I love the present,” she continued. “Every period of time of my life, I’ve been really living it, so not avoiding it, so it doesn’t feel like I missed something.”

In “Clouds,” the core relationship, and a complicated one it is, is between the characters played by Ms. Binoche and Ms. Stewart, with nary a leading man in sight, something Ms. Stewart relished. “If you think about the typical relationships that you usually see in movies, even the title of relationships, there’s only a couple of them,” she said. “You’ve got friends, mother, father, boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife.” Maria and Valentine are, Ms. Stewart said, “like they’re all of those things — and none of those things — to each other at the same time.”
A finely tuned, highly alert presence, Ms. Stewart met to chat in a sun-flooded room at the Trump International Hotel on Columbus Circle, and gazed longingly at the leafy expanse of Central Park across the way. This was one of those days, she murmured, that she wished she could be outside. Of course, if any actress would be recognized in a heartbeat in that tourist-heavy corner of Manhattan, it would be her. This reality of Ms. Stewart’s, amplified by the tabloids’ insatiability about her life, imbued the role of Valentine — who acts as a gatekeeper for Maria, fending off zany, borderline demeaning work requests while helping her navigate the vagaries and vulgarities of celebrity — with a level of satisfaction that Ms. Stewart savored.

“I would have jumped at the chance to work with Olivier on anything,” said Ms. Stewart, who late last year won a César (the French equivalent of the Oscar) for her performance as Valentine, becoming the first American actress to win the award. “But the whole industry aspect of it, acknowledging the absurdity of it, I was giddy. I could barely get through the lines without hiding my glee.”
Working with Ms. Binoche kept her on her toes, Ms. Stewart said. “She’s like this eccentric, weird, kooky but brilliantly smart and heady, lofty strong woman — she’s rad,” she said. “She’s everything you would want Juliette Binoche to be.”

For much of the film, Valentine and Maria spend time in the secluded Swiss hamlet of Sils Maria, where Valentine helps a conflicted Maria prepare to play Helena, which had originally been played by an actress Maria long despised. Mr. Assayas came to know the area on a hiking trip, when he spotted the phenomenon of its clouds, which wind thickly through the mountaintops like a snake. “All of a sudden there was this idea of a landscape, where time was inscribed, which had this cloud which was both beautiful and also menacing,” he said last fall for this article.

In the end, after wrestling mightily with herself, as well as with Valentine, Maria finally finds a measure of peace, as she rehearses across from Ms. Moretz’s character and gives in to the younger actress’s interpretation of the role.

“The only future she can have is to change herself, and so because of that conflict she grows, and she separates from the past,” Ms. Binoche said. “It touched me so much. This separation, it’s always painful. What’s painful, actually, is the nonacceptance, the resisting is painful. And when we stop resisting, then the magic happens.”

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Kristen Confirmed as Lydia for "Still Alice"

EXCLUSIVE: Alec Baldwin, Kate Bosworth also on board in-demand drama for which Memento has secured several major deals with key territories.

Kristen Stewart, Alec Baldwin and Kate Bosworth are now confirmed alongside Julianne Moore in Memento Films International’s hot -selling drama Still Alice.

The project was one of the most in-demand at the American Film Market (AFM), with Memento locking pre-sales at the market and since with Curzon for the UK, Splendid’s Polyband for Germany, Icon Film for Australia, Frenetic for Switzerland, Svensk for Scandinavia, Baltics and Iceland, Sun Distribution for Latin America, Falcon Film for Middle East, Bir for Turkey, Golden Scene for Hong Kong, GreenNarae for South Korea to and Catchplay to Taiwan.

Moore will play a renowned professor of neuroscience who discovers she’s suffering from an early onset of Alzheimer’s disease. Stewart will play Lydia, her youngest daughter, who bonds with her mother during her illness in a way that was impossible for them before.

Quinceañera directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland will direct the adaptation of Lisa Genova’s bestselling novel of the same name, with production due to get underway in early March in New York City.

Backed by Backup Media and Marie Savare’s new finance venture BSM Studio, producers are Lex Lutzus, Pamela Koffler and James Brown in association with Killer Films. Maria Shriver will serve as executive producer. CAA reps US rights.

Memento’s slate includes BSM-backed Sundance entryCold in July from director Jim Mickle, Asghar Farhadi’s The Past and Natalia Smirnoff’s Lock Charmer.

Memento managing director Emilie Georges toldScreenDaily: “We knew that the project would be met with enthusiastic interest but the market response to the script and package has been incredible.”

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New 'Breaking Dawn' 2 Still of Bella

Source Via @Kstewartfans

Alex Pettyfer to join Kristen Stewart in 'Cali'

Hot off his starring turn in "Magic Mike," Alex Pettyfer is in final negotiations to play Kristen Stewart's love interest in Nick Cassavetes' gritty action pic "Cali."

Voltage Prods. and New School Media are producing the Michael Diliberti-scripted pic, which follows a pair of San Fernando Valley lovebirds (Stewart and Pettyfer) who sell a fake snuff film and ride off with a bundle of cash. Years later, Stewart's character must "return from the dead" to save the younger sister she left behind.

Craig J. Flores ("300") and Zev Foreman ("Killer Joe") will produce for Voltage, while Diliberti will also produce. His manager, Brian Levy of New School Media, will exec produce with Voltage co-owner Nicolas Chartier and Stewart, who will pick up her first producing credit on the project. Production is skedded to start later this summer.

Pettyfer, who previously starred in "I Am Number Four," "Beastly" and "In Time," is set to play a supporting role in Lee Daniels' "The Butler." He's repped by WME and attorney Steve Warren.

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Kristen will be playing small role in K-11

So excited for the talented Stewart family.

Via @RealJulesStew :)

#TheRunaways one of Rotten Tomatoes, Editor's Choice Favorite Films of 2010

RT Editors Choose Their Favorite Films of 2010!

Your friendly neighborhood RT staffers name their favorite films of the year.

 

It was a good year to be bored in LA. I loved the slow-burn narcissism of Noah Baumbach's Greenberg and Sofia Coppola's Somewhere, but nothing beat West Coast ennui better than a gang of pre-punk teenage girls with guitars in this hazy, Quaalude-stoned reverie for the city's hedonistic heyday. Beautifully filmed by debut director Floria Sigismondi, who paints a kind of lovesick valentine to The Virgin Suicides via Christiane F., The Runaways captures what most join-the-dots music biopics don't: the vitality of its subject. It's as though the film had been shot through a smear of glam rock facepaint by a camera mounted on platform boots -- catching that fleeting thrill of being 16 and defiant, before the world comes crashing back down. And Dakota Fanning's eerie-eyed, silent film miming to "Lady Grinning Soul" -- before flipping off the school assembly -- goes way deeper than any over-the-top, earnest Oscar acting.

The Runaways got 68%

Source : Rotten Tomatoes via @janehoon