Showing posts with label The Challenger. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Challenger. Show all posts

Thursday, September 3, 2026

Kristen, producer Christina Vachon and director Brydie O'Connor talk 'Barbara Forever', and more, with Vulture

Experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer made more than 90 movies over the course of her five-decade-plus career, most of them centering on lesbians — their bodies, their histories, their relationships, their sex lives. From the 1970s on, Hammer was celebrated for her explicit, avant-garde work about a population that had rarely, if ever, seen themselves represented onscreen. The results are sexy and funny, strange and gorgeous, personal and political, unconcerned with taboo or traditional structure. They’re nonlinear and free-associative, focusing on pleasure, on beauty, on authentic depictions of gay life, and often feature her own naked body — sometimes having sex with her partners (until she met her spouse, Florrie Burke, who didn’t like being on-camera). Later, Hammer filmed her body’s visible decline from a long battle with cancer, concluding with her death in 2019 at age 79. Yet despite how prolific she was, her career longevity, and all the critical acclaim she received, Hammer’s work is still relatively unknown beyond niche queer audiences.

Barbara Forever, a fantastic new documentary from director Brydie O’Connor (and produced by Christine Vachon’s Killer Films and Kristen Stewart), aims to introduce the filmmaker to a wider audience with help from Hammer herself. The film is narrated with Hammer’s voice — pulled from decades of audio diaries — and features interviews with Burke as well as footage from Hammer’s massive personal archive, including previously unreleased material. It traces Hammer’s evolution as an artist, from 1974’s Dyketactics, a four-minute short full of women frolicking and fucking in nature, to her first feature film, 1992’s Nitrate Kisses, a documentary about repressed lesbian histories that showcases real gay and lesbian couples having sex onscreen.

The documentary clarifies just how radical Hammer’s work was, and how it inspired many of the queer artists and filmmakers who came after her. Some of those artists have gone on to work with Vachon, who has produced movies like Go Fish, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and all of Todd Haynes’s films. Another one of those filmmakers is Stewart, who said she wasn’t aware of Hammer until she was promoting her 2025 feature Chronology of Water and an interviewer mentioned that Stewart’s dreamy, erotic treatment of female bodies and natural landscapes mirrors Hammer’s distinctive style. And another, of course, is O’Connor, who has spent nearly ten years working with Hammer’s archive and has become so close with Burke that she officiated O’Connor’s wedding. The three of us talked about encountering Hammer’s work for the first time; how lesbian filmmakers are still fighting an uphill battle; why Harriet the Spy is a gay root; and Stewart’s upcoming lesbian-exploitation film, which she says is a “hats off” to Hammer and may be too wild for theaters.

What was your first encounter with Barbara’s work?

Christine Vachon: Well, my first encounter was really with Barbara herself. There was a time that predates both of your births, probably, where the New York independent-film world was very segregated. You either made very experimental movies or you made Hollywood narrative films, and then there was a thin sliver of people who made personal narrative movies. The very experimental movies tended to be almost aggressively anti-narrative, and they showed at places like Collective for Living Cinema. The last vestige of that is the Anthology Film Archives. For example, Todd Haynes’s infamous short film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story was rejected by the Collective for being “too entertaining.”

That was a direct quote?

Vachon: Yes. “This film is too entertaining for us.” So Barbara came along and she really was making work that was personal, experimental, and entertaining. She was one generation older than me, but we’d heard tell of her — obviously this was pre-internet. She showed up at Sundance with Nitrate Kisses in 1992. She kind of had an air of punk around her that felt wholly original. There was something about her that felt like, Okay, this is different. This isn’t just somebody proving that a movie can just be a bunch of scratched images onscreen, but somebody who has a personal story to tell, and who’s telling it in a very specifically original way. 

And then I’d see her at the New York Film Festival. When she was in New York, we’d end up at the same venues, usually celebrating Pride or New Fest or whatever was showing her work, which was usually showing mine.

Kristen Stewart: I was at Cannes in 2025, and somebody I was speaking to about The Chronology of Water was convinced and enthusiastic about my clear and distinct nod to the influence of Barbara’s movies and visuals. Some of the layering and the organic shapes and the flood of the female orgasm relating to the rocks and the beach — how we’ve always been here, and the corrosion that happens when you really fuck properly and come properly. I was like, “I don’t know her!” Multiple Orgasm was the first piece of work I saw after that.

Brydie O’Connor: I did my thesis on queer cinema, and I typed in “lesbian films by lesbian filmmakers,” and of course Barbara Hammer was at the top of the list. I reached out to her because I couldn’t see her films anywhere — it was 2016 and I was living in D.C. So I emailed her from my student email and asked, “Can I buy your DVDs?” And at first she gave me such a hard time. [Laughs] “If you’re really faculty instead of a student like you say you are, my films would be much more expensive for you.” So I said, “Barbara, I promise I’m a student, $30 for a short film is a lot for me!”

Vachon: You have to understand, for a long time, there were so few queer films of any kind available: narrative, nonnarrative, neo-narrative, you name it. We tended to try — me and other gay women — to see whatever we could.

Stewart: She’s made 90-some-odd movies, and they’re all so hard to get your hands on. It should be the most ubiquitous thing that this person spearheaded lesbian avant-garde in a way that was initially deemed contradictory. But it’s like, how can you tell a queer story in a straight line? What the fuck are you talking about? I need 50 layers, something that feels like an internal experience that is completely unaware of how it’s going to land on others. The authorship, the self-revealing, the exhibitionism, being so proud. Who the fuck did that before she did? She didn’t even have an example of that! She’s the source.

O’Connor: Learning about how she approached her practice — she was nearly 30 years old and decided to point her camera at things that were interesting to her. I thought to myself, I could try making my own work. And when I was making my first film in January of 2019, I wrote to her. I didn’t realize how sick she was at the time. I said, “Barbara, it’s me, I’m the girl who wrote her thesis on you, I’m sure one of 200. Just this year.” I asked if I could take her for coffee, get her advice, and she wrote back, “I’m at the very, very end of my life. Best of luck with everything in your career.” And she died two months later.

And when did you meet Florrie, Barbara’s spouse and the executor of her estate?

O’Connor: I reached out to Florrie just to share my condolences. When I moved to New York and was a PA on whatever I could get, I was also going up to Yale to visit Barbara’s formal archive. And I was reading, honestly, her love letters. So when I met Florrie, I said, “I’ve been reading your love letters.” We started spending a lot of time together from there. Florrie didn’t want to be documented. That was my burning question to Florrie. I said to her, “You were the love of her life, you were together for 31 years. And Barbara was the lesbian lover filmmaker.” She documented so many of her relationships — Double Strength, Superdyke Meets Madame X. I was like, “Where are you?".

How did the documentary itself come about after that?

O’Connor: When we first met for coffee, I asked Florrie if she’d be open to collaborating on a short film together. So I made a short film with her about their relationship, narrated by Florrie, and I released it in 2022. In that process I realized just how much material there was outside of Barbara’s more than 85 films — all of her outtakes, so many hard drives in her home and studio, nearly 40 hours of audio recordings. I was digitizing and finding all of this material, and I said to Florrie, “Would you be interested in talking about another iteration of a Barbara Hammer project, one in which she narrates her own feature?” She loved that. Florrie says sometimes she’d tell Barbara, “Okay, enough!” But I think that’s why they worked so well together. When I pitched it to her, she said, “That’s so Hammer.” She still calls her Hammer, even to this day. “You’ve gotta make it. Do whatever you want and show me when it’s done.”

Had she turned down other people who wanted to make a doc about Barbara?

O’Connor: She said she’d had some reach-out prior to me, but I think it was too soon and Barbara was very sick for a very long time. She said the reason she responded to me is because, in her words, I was very well researched and because I’d been going up to the archive. I think Barbara felt very invigorated by the new generation of queer artists and lesbian filmmakers, and Florrie was really excited about this idea of bridging that intergenerational conversation of queer cinema. When I reached out to Florrie, I was 23, and she just wanted to see what I would come up with.

When and why did you come on, Christine?

O’Connor: It was very early on. You were the first notch of support. I can’t credit you enough. This was my first feature, and it’s hard to sell the idea of making a film about a lesbian experimental filmmaker. You saying, “I believe in this film and I believe in you” was so huge.

Vachon: We really believed in the film and the storytelling. Killer Films doesn’t come on to that many documentaries. It makes me think about Todd Haynes’s Velvet Underground. He was faced with an issue: Almost everyone in the Velvet Underground was dead, and there was almost no existing footage of them. When we put out the call for footage, we thought, People will open up their attics and find things. Not really. But he set out to make a movie — and I know this isn’t about Todd, but there’s a correlation — that was, What is the Velvet Underground experience?”And when you see the film, you’re immersed in that.

What I felt Brydie did was say, “How can I tell a story about the creative experience that doesn’t just focus on an artist who made a great body of work, but just by the nature of that work, was not widely seen?” How do you make people understand this is something they should care about? At film festivals, you get the most interesting audience — they want to like the movie, and they’re also kind of like, What’s playing at 8? I never would have decided to see this, but thank God I saw that. So many people stepped out of the Barbara Forever screening at Sundance and said, “I don’t know that I would have decided to see this movie, but it was so moving, and it manages to step out of that narrow box of a specific film about a specific person at a specific time.”

Would you have come on to any doc about her?

Vachon: No! As I like to say, if we’re really lucky, we’ll make tens of dollars on this movie. [Laughs] We have to think about, as my partner, Pam Koffler, always says, our opportunity costs. If we’re working on that, we’re not working on something else. It wouldn’t have been any movie about Barbara. It was Brydie and Claire Edelman, who works with us at Killer, who brought it to our attention. The fact that they were both so young and it meant something to them, that was meaningful to me. This idea that a whole new generation is figuring out who she is and what she means to them, that’s the astonishing part.

I hadn’t actually seen anything by Barbara until Kristen mentioned Multiple Orgasms in the New York Times about a year and a half ago, which is embarrassing to admit because she is so completely in my wheelhouse.

Stewart: Oh, get out! Cool. Fuck yeah.

O’Connor: After Sundance and Berlin, we reached out to Kristen, saying, “We saw this in the New York Times.”

Vachon: We had a relationship with Kristen. We put her in one of her first films, The Safety of Objects, when she was 10 or 11 years old. I think she’s gotten a little tired of us saying we put her in her first film. [Laughs] And she’s in Still Alice as well. So we’ve kept in touch with her over the years. When Kristen said in the Times what she said about Multiple Orgasms, like 10 people texted it to me and 100 people texted Brydie. And then we were off to the races.

Stewart: These guys reached out and said, “Hey, would you want to just give us a hand, smack your fucking name on it and do some interviews and pictures?” It’s really hard to get movies like this visibility, in the same way that Barbara had a hard time getting visibility for her work late into her life.

What do you remember about The Safety of Objects, Kristen?

Stewart: Getting mic’d by a sound guy, and he was rubbing my sternum and saying “Wow, buddy, you got a strong chest!” And I was like, “Fuck!” [Laughs] But I worked with director Rose Troche, man. I’d been auditioning for two years, and I think that very day I said to my mom, “You know what? It’s not gonna happen. It’s all good. I don’t want to make you drive me around anymore, it’s getting embarrassing, fuck it.” But it was the day I got my first job. I was 9. And they were really cool gay women from Brooklyn. I was like, “Who are you people? I want to be you people.” I wouldn’t have kept acting if that movie didn’t happen.

So this is in many ways full circle. What does it feel like to be in the position of lending your name to something and knowing you’re going to create a whole different life for it?

Stewart: I would love it if we created a whole new life for it. But it’s reciprocal. It’s like, thank God I talked to this person at Cannes who let me know there was this whole emotional circuitry happening with my work and her. And the only reason is because she really connected to mine. We’re all in this huge ocean of each other. I get so much from bouncing off the right people. I don’t take it for granted. It’s sick.

You must get requests all the time about attaching your name or promoting something or being part of something. What goes into making that decision for you?

Stewart: To make really authentic work, you have to come from places in yourself that are kind of unsafe. I know what it takes to reach in and pull something so delicate out of the depths of yourself and put it into an environment that is the polar opposite of that. When I connect to something and its speaks to my insides, I go, Oh fuck, your heart’s out there walking around. We have to go help protect it.

I had two back-to-back meetings the other day. One with a really high-profile, good, cool director man. And that movie is a big deal. I bet everyone wants to do it. It’s very good, impeccably well written. I’d love to go see it in a movie theater. Then right after was a meeting with a young woman who’s made one movie and has a script that’s ludicrous. It’s so impossible and audacious because it doesn’t look like anything else. It requires a process that you’d have to be Christopher Nolan to support. It would take a really creative and really solid, large group of people kind of believing in magic and in redesign and repossession to make it happen. After the first meeting, I was like, “We should totally do this, this is a great movie!” And after the second one, I was like, “This is why we’re here, this is the mission!” This person needs help, even if it does seem like the path of much greater resistance. I would love to have anything to do with engendering new tonalities coming out of new mouths and voices and places in the body. Radical cinema is absolutely resurging and waiting in the wings. We’ve really just allowed ourselves to be diluted by sameness. Isn’t everyone fucking bored? I want to do shit I haven’t seen before.

In the Times, you were described as “embracing your status as a millennial queer icon.” How does that sit with you, hearing that?

Stewart: I am queer and I am here. [Laughs] I love my community. Like, a lot. When I step outside myself, it’s weird. Not weird. It’s pretty remarkable. It’s a warm place to be. Because it’s totally reflected back, and I feel that. I’m also fiercely protective. I’m so fucking mad at everyone right now. I know it’s not a productive emotion. But that’s not true. As women, we’re just told not to be angry. It’s a very productive emotion. I have a whole movie coming out of it. It’s bonkers, absolutely ludicrous, people are going to think I’m fucking out of my mind. But right now, we’re experiencing slippage, this full corrosion of any type of assurance or idea that we were kind of on an upward path toward being chill and okay and safe in this country being queer or trans or anything adjacent to the heteronormative sitch. Which I know now is a word that rubs people the wrong way, but I’m old, so I get to use it.

Brydie, how hard was it to get Barbara Forever funded?

O’Connor: It was an uphill battle. As one of my mentors said to me, “Brydie, you’re making a movie about a dead lesbian experimental filmmaker.” One question we were asked in nearly every single meeting was, and it was ultimately a reason we got so many passes: “Why now? What’s the relevance of Barbara Hammer now?” We’re still in that phase, pitching and finding ways to talk about the film, fundraising for awards and release. Just two weeks ago, I cold-emailed like 40 lesbians who work outside of film. And now I’m getting responses like, “Hi! I don’t know how you got my contact. This sounds like a great project. But I’m not going to fund it.” And I’m like, “Well, we’re coming to San Francisco, so you should go check it out in theaters!” Even if they’re not going to give us money, they might go see it.

Just any lesbian with any amount of money.

Vachon: [Laughs] You can’t build a financing plan on a bunch of lesbians who don’t work in the business. But you can, on a project like this, figure out a way to get to them and make them understand that this is something relevant.

Is it harder to make a gay film now than it was 10 or 15 years ago?

Vachon: There’s no question that the film-financing world is a lot more risk averse than it was. Does that mean that a really terrific script centered on gay or queer life won’t get made? I’m not even sure. Club Kid obviously was the sale out of Cannes. Does that say we’re in a good place? I haven’t seen the movie. I think we’re in a world of, as the French would say, “The more it changes, the more it stays the same.” We’re having the same discussion about getting queer films made now as we did in the ’90s.

That’s really surprising to hear, actually. How so?

Vachon: Well, in the ’90s, if you made a movie like Barbara Forever, the community was so starved for anything that they were gonna show up. It was very easy to be like, I’m gonna go find the community, because there are these four bars. They weren’t spread out over the internet. You just went to those bars and were like, Hey, here’s my flyer. And that bar migrated to your screening, they really did. Maybe you had a float at Pride. Now, of course, you have to locate people online in a way that’s a lot more challenging. Especially for someone my age.

A thread Barbara returns to a lot in her work, and in her autobiography, is this idea of lesbian history, and lesbian cultural history, specifically, being erased or suppressed, and her work acting as a corrective to that.

O’Connor: I kept asking myself when I was making this movie: What is it about Barbara and her practice that I really want to convey? I needed the movie to have a perspective rather than just being an overview of someone’s work. This idea of Barbara using experimental, lesbian avant-garde filmmaking as her method of alternative history-making, and as her way of conveying what it feels like and means to navigate the world as a lesbian — that was what was interesting to me. Creating records of experiences at the margins of mainstream culture.

When I started to understand my own sexuality, I was a teenager in Kansas in a very Catholic community, and I’d never met a gay person. I didn’t have a language for my queerness until I watched Orange Is the New Black. Archiving and history-making is an intellectual way to think about her, but it’s also really emotional. As a lesbian, if you don’t see all of these myriad lives, and pick pieces that resonate for you to create your own, you’re kind of winging it.

What were your Orange Is the New Blacks, Christine and Kristen?

Vachon: Harriet the Spy.

Stewart: One hundred percent. I never read it. I watched the movie.

Huge one for me too. Such a gay book. And I know Louise Fitzhugh was also gay.

Vachon: I met this woman years later by chance who’d been one of her best friends, Sandra Scarpettone, and they’d written a few picture books together. I’d read them when I was 13 or 14, and they always had some allusion, very careful — because it was published by big YA imprints — to somebody not being straight.

Stewart: Harriet the Spy, for sure. Titanic. I was just like, “Oh, both. Mega. Big time. Both.” Now and Then. Christina Ricci taping her tits in the beginning? And just being … am I allowed to say she’s hot? She was fucking 14. She is hot now, and at the time I was even younger. But I’m a Cheerleader. And ChloĆ« Sevigny was in If These Walls Could Talk 2, and she wore these Levi’s and looked like James Dean. And it was just like absurdity. Even now I’m like, Wow, that’s crazy.

Kristen, do you find yourself more drawn to making stories about queer people at this point in your career?

Stewart: Naturally, yes. I don’t want to blow my load and talk about stuff that doesn’t exist quite yet, but we’re pitching a show about the queer experience right now. Have you seen Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma yet? It’s my favorite fucking movie. That pitch meeting in the movie in the car. It really fucking hits. I don’t just want to make movies that are changing things or struggling in the face of adversity. I want to wallow in our details. We’re not a minority. We’ve just let men design the story and the structure and the modes and the models, and even the way we form our relationships and family and measure our success and try to provide ourselves security. All of this is based on the fact that we’ve been literal possessions until five fucking seconds ago. And our movies feel like that, too.

The boring answer is: I want to make queer stories that are also full of joy! It’s not that. I want to make queer stories that are behind closed doors. Barbara really did sort of paint an internal kaleidoscopic experience of what it’s like to come alive while connecting to yourself because of being seen by another. Girls do that really well. That’s a magic, cinematic experience. So absolutely I wanna do a bunch of gay shit.

In the film, Barbara talks about the need to create and preserve queer history in real time — saving receipts, saving lists, saving photos. And she did that with her work. Do you feel that there’s still this need to create a sort of constant living record of gay life?

Stewart: I can’t hold onto my own ass. I cannot be laden. I hate people holding onto ticket stubs. I’m like, “Get it the fuck out!” I’m like, “I’ll remember!” But then you don’t. I guess my footage. Anything that I’ve ever shot. I have a freezer full of 150 reels of film. I want to keep playing with the work.

Vachon: I wonder if, in 30 years, somebody is going to make a movie about gay life in the mid 2020s. I really subscribe to this theory about New York, that every wave of young people who come to New York always gets told they just missed the good New York. I came back from college in the early ’80s, to the time everyone reveres the most right now. I lived in the East Village, and people were like, Yeah, you kinda blew it. Now it’s meh. People were living in squats, and the Tompkins Square riots, and all of that. But you never know until later what your era will be remembered for. I’ve been making movies for so long that I’ve seen some of my movies get forgotten about. And then suddenly, for whatever reason, 10 or 15 years later, they bubble up to the Zeitgeist again. Young people are talking about them. So I have an optimism that there’s a way now for things not to disappear.

Barbara talks about how she was losing grants because of the explicit content in her films, specifically the sex scenes. How did you decide how explicit to get with this documentary?

O’Connor: We have two very direct lovemaking scenes in the movie. We made a really specific choice with the first one; it’s a scene from Dyketactics and it’s over 60 seconds of a sex scene. In Dyketactics, it’s over the jingle, which is a little silly and upbeat and fun. We decided in Barbara Forever, especially since Florrie gave us the creative go-ahead, to make our version of that scene silent. So it’s a 60-second silent sex scene. One fear was that women coming to see it might be uncomfortable, like squirming next to a colleague, but I’ve actually had a handful of people being like, “It made me look at my own internal biases in terms of how I feel looking at lesbian sex or a nude woman’s body.”

Vachon: Especially right now, the movies that make people talk, those do well. The movies that are more controversial — all controversy means is discussion. I don’t think the movie says or does anything particularly controversial, except that it’s about an artist who loved putting her life and her sexuality on celluloid in a way that is bound to make people uncomfortable.

Barbara liked to talk about her films “converting” straight women. Do you think this might do it?

O’Connor: Letterboxd is definitely saying that’s happening. Unless you think you’re coming to a Barbra Streisand movie. Some people walked out at Sundance saying, “I didn’t know what Barbara this was about!”

Who do you see as her successors?

Vachon: Look, the first lesbian movie I made was Go Fish. Rose Troche and Guinevere Turner; I believe they were at the same Sundance as Nitrate Kisses, but you’d have to check that. [Editor’s note: It was two years later, in 1994.] I remember the experience of showing Go Fish to a mostly lesbian audience at the London Film Festival, which was not the case at Sundance. But at the London festival, the response was so explosive. It made me think, Wow, there is an audience that is desperate to see itself on screen. So without even saying who she influenced, it’s more, Who are all the filmmakers coming out of that tradition?

Looking back at Go Fish and up until now, how has lesbian cinema changed?

Vachon: I guess I don’t say “lesbian cinema.” I would say, great movies by so-and-so. All through the late ’90s and early aughts, I was called a lesbian producer. And for a long time, I was like, “Just call me producer!” And now I’m like, “I don’t care. Call me a lesbian producer.” [Laughs] But it becomes so difficult to parse out the stories: This one’s lesbian, this one’s queer, this one’s gay, this one’s LGBTQ+. I resist that a bit because I think it gets away from the point, which is that I love to tell stories about underrepresented communities.

O’Connor: I also think you like to make movies about people who live against the grain. Queerness is a way to do that.

How has spending all of this time with Barbara’s work changed you personally and as an artist?

O’Connor: It’s made me want to take creative risks and go for it. To be okay with trial and error, to pair things together in a flow I wasn’t sure was going to work.

Stewart: She’s done things I’ve tried so hard to do. I need to get an optical printerAn optical printer allows filmmakers to re-photograph their film; Hammer often used one to scratch or layer her footage.. You can’t touch your film now the way she touched it. I was even trying to organically incorporate that in our credits, at the end of Chronology, in some kind of physical, tactile way. I talked to five different companies, and they were like, “No one does that.” Everyone is so convinced that they can run it through a filter or program that they can get close and create “false artifacts.” False Artifacts is the name of a movie about people who are full of shit. I don’t know why you want to distance yourself from your medium. I don’t know why you don’t want to touch it. I want to fucking eat it!

And I think living your life every single day so faithfully sure that’s why you’re here. And not being pulled off your path by default expectations that have nothing to do with what you want and desire. And touch other people. That’s it. I’m constantly telling myself, if I’m in a superficial drama or wasting my time doing something not for the cause, it’s like, “What are you doing? Barbara Hammer, dude!”

What are you working on now?

Stewart: I’m getting ready — this is so crazy — to make a show called The Challenger for Amazon about Sally Ride, the first woman in space. It’s this gargantuan job and it’s crushing me and I can’t believe we’re doing it. I’m also writing two things I want to have done yesterday. One is pretty reliant on the seasons, and it’s very much an L.A. film. The other is an exploitation film. And it’s a pretty committed exploitation film. You might not be able to put it in a theater.

What’s that one?

Stewart: Do I tell you? It’s called Get Fucked. Or, in the non-explicit title, which we’ll need if we’re allowed to put it in a movie theater, which, I don’t know, but it’s I for an I. I want them both finished by the time the Amazon show is done in February. By that time I hope to be prepping one. I hope the screenplays will be done. They already exist, the people are real, they talk to me all the time. They want to live really badly. I’m a really impatient, impulsive motherfucker, so it’s kind of nice to have six months and be like, No, you sit and make sure it’s completely ready before you start breaking ground. But I think one might take four weeks to shoot and the other might take two years, because it’s a more meditative experience. I’ve already started shooting one of them myself.

This exploitation film is the one you’re channeling your anger toward?

Stewart: Yeah. It’s more about violence toward women. There’s a queer love story in the center of it, because I need the power to come from somewhere I can really feel and not just anger. It has to also come from feeling good. A good exploitation film has to come from revenge, but these girls are ethical and thoughtful and PC and really woke. So they’re going to do it the “right way.” I try to chill. I used to be way crazier when I was younger. Right now, I just can’t look at these men in charge and I can’t listen to them talk. The poison and vitriol is so contagious. If I could just pitch you the entire movie right now, you would totally understand it, but that’s not what this interview is about!

Well, it is in that we’re tracing Barbara’s influence up until now.

Stewart: It is true. When you see the movie, you’re gonna be like, Oh my God, you are literally full hats off to Barbara the entire time they were fucking. I want to make some serious, Barbara Hammer, self-celebratory cinema, within something quite fucking ugly.

Source

Wednesday, June 3, 2026

Will Arnett joins the cast of 'The Challenger'

 

Will Arnett will star opposite Kristen Stewart in the upcoming Amazon Prime Video limited series about NASA astronaut Sally Ride and the Challenger shuttle disaster.

The series was officially picked up at Amazon in March with Stewart attached to play Ride. The show is ispired by Meredith E. Bagby’s book “The New Guys.”

The official logline for the show states:

“‘The Challenger’ tells the gripping story of one of the most defining moments in space history, both the unprecedented events leading up to the tragedy, and the shocking investigation that followed. As the members of the 1986 Rogers Commission interrogate the complex inner workings of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to find what, or who, was responsible for the Challenger’s doomed fate, the show explores Commission member Sally Ride’s (Stewart) personal journey. We follow Sally, and the rest of the diverse Astronaut Class of ’78, through the ranks of the shuttle program, through initial recruitment and training, professional and personal highs and lows, until Sally’s historic glass ceiling moment as she becomes the first American woman in space.”

Arnett will star as George Abbey, who is described as “the influential NASA official often referred to as the architect of the modern astronaut corps.”

Arnett’s recent TV credits include “The Madison,” “The Morning Show,” “Twisted Metal,” and “BoJack Horseman.” He is a seven-time Emmy nominee, including sharing in two nods for “BoJack” for best animated series. He was nominated four times for guest starring in “30 Rock,” as well as one more time for his role in “Arrested Development.” Arnett’s feature credits include “Is This Thing On?” both “The LEGO Movie” and “The LEGO Batman Movie,” and “Despicable Me.”

He is repped by CAA and Sloane Offer.

Maggie Cohn is creating the series in addition to serving as executive producer and showrunner. Kyra Sedgwick and Valerie Stadler will executive produce for Big Swing Productions, where the project was initially developed. Bagby is also an executive producer, as are Stewart, Dylan Meyer, and Maggie McLean under their Nevermind production banner. Darryl Frank and Justin Falvey will executive produce for Amblin Television. James Hawes (“Slow Horses,” “Black Mirror”) will direct and executive produce.

Source

Monday, May 18, 2026

Video: Kristen and Woody Harrelson talk 'Full Phil' and more with Deadline at Cannes

 

In Quentin Dupieux’s Full Phil, Kristen Stewart had to a eat a lot on screen — without a spit bucket.

In an interview for Deadline’s Cannes studio, Stewart said, “I only puked once. It was when they had filled this cauliflower mash with butter and they were like, ‘There’s no butter. It’s all vegetal oil.’ And I was like, ‘Vegetal oil?’ Woody’s vegan and I was like, ‘You can smell the butter.'”

“I’d have had a spit bucket,” co-star Woody Harrelson said. “I wouldn’t care.”

In Full Phil, Harrelson and Stewart are a father and daughter who’ve taken a trip to Paris in an attempt to reconnect. As his daughter consumes more and more delectable food from room service and a dinner at a restaurant, Phil finds himself in a symbiotic nightmare, feeling the effects of everything she eats and drinks.

“They had a very talented and willful French man making the food,” Stewart explained. “Our process means that I have to eat all day long. They wanted it to taste really good and reflect the French cuisine. And I was like, ‘I’m going to die. I’m not supposed to actually perish.'”

However, she embraced the challenge in terms of how it informed her process. “The eating’s cool because it’s nice to have obstacles,” she said, “like kind of hurdles that you don’t think about when you’re running lines… It’s a metaphor. It’s very symbolic. She’s a voracious bottomless pit, eating her feelings.”

Dupieux said he was inspired by the fact he himself has an 11 year-old daughter. “She’s quite someone, ” he said. “But it’s nothing like the movie. It’s not like that. But I guess it’s almost like a nightmare version of what I’m living with my daughter. I’m living a dream with my family and my daughter… It seems obvious that I may be talking about me and my daughter, plus I’m getting fat.”

I don’t think since I saw Ruben Ɩstlund for the first time — I hadn’t really seen anyone with whom I thought, ‘Whoa, this guy is his own master.’

Harrelson said of Dupieux, “I think he’s got an extraordinary sense of humor, but he also just has a way of shooting things that just heightens or magnifies the experience for you. I don’t think since I saw Ruben Ɩstlund for the first time — I hadn’t really seen anyone with whom I thought, ‘Whoa, this guy is his own master.’ And ‘Whoa, OK!’ He is a true maestro and I think his vision is extraordinary. And if you don’t like the film, there’s only one guy to blame. He’s the writer, the director, the cinematographer and the editor, but he’s great.”

Dupieux explained the philosophy behind the film thus: “I was just making fun of Americans visiting Paris, my version of it, because what you see in Emily in Paris, for example, is not real. I don’t want to say too much, but no, there’s no message. It’s just like I’m making fun of humanity.”

Harrelson said he’d met Stewart some years back when they were considering working together on another project that ultimately didn’t pan out. “I met her when she was about 17. She had just worked with Sean Penn and he was raving about her. And then I saw the movie and she was great in that. And then we hung out.”

“It was love at first sight,” Stewart said of first seeing Harrelson in White men Can’t Jump. “I was just a little guy going, ‘God, he’s f–king cool.’ He took me to a vegan spot in the valley and we totally bro-ed down and then never got to make the movie. And so when this popped up, I was like, ‘I’ve wanted to work with this guy forever.'”

With regard to what she’s doing next, Stewart said, “I’m writing two movies right now and I’m going to go shoot this Amazon show called The Challenger. I have some balls and they’re all in the air and I think I can hold them all. I want to make two movies basically by the end of May next year, I want to be figuring out what festivals they’re going to. And they’re really different. They’re really cool. I want to make an exploitation film and I want to make it for nothing and I want to distribute it myself. I want to make something teeny-tiny and let it trickle and just not be a part of a system that doesn’t behoove me.”

Harrelson said, that in addition to upcoming Apple TV series Brothers with Matthew McConaughey, he has Jason Bateman’s Netflix film Cackling of the Dodos.

Source

Friday, March 20, 2026

'The Challenger' has been greenlit at Amazon Prime Video


Amazon Prime Video has officially greenlit a limited series about Sally Ride with Kristen Stewart attached to star.

The series, titled “The Challenger,” was first reported to be in the works at the streamer back in June 2024. It is inspired by Meredith E. Bagby’s book “The New Guys.” Maggie Cohn (“The Staircase,” “American Crime Story”) is creating the series in addition to serving as executive producer and showrunner.

Kyra Sedgwick and Valerie Stadler will executive produce for Big Swing Productions, where the project was initially developed. Bagby is also an executive producer, as are Stewart, Dylan Meyer, and Maggie McLean under their Nevermind production banner. Darryl Frank and Justin Falvey will executive produce for Amblin Television. James Hawes (“Slow Horses,” “Black Mirror”) will direct and executive produce.

“Meredith, Valerie, and I at Big Swing have been passionately developing this project since 2017, and we are thrilled to be partnering with Amblin and Amazon MGM Studios,” Sedgwick said. “There is no one better than Maggie Cohn to bring to life the complex story of the Challenger and the new class of astronauts recruited by NASA in the early 1970s, all through the eyes of an American hero, Sally Ride.”

The official logline for the show states:

“‘The Challenger’ tells the gripping story of one of the most defining moments in space history, both the unprecedented events leading up to the tragedy, and the shocking investigation that followed. As the members of the 1986 Rogers Commission interrogate the complex inner workings of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to find what, or who, was responsible for the Challenger’s doomed fate, the show explores Commission member Sally Ride’s (Stewart) personal journey. We follow Sally, and the rest of the diverse Astronaut Class of ’78, through the ranks of the shuttle program, through initial recruitment and training, professional and personal highs and lows, until Sally’s historic glass ceiling moment as she becomes the first American woman in space.”

“Sally Ride’s courage and brilliance changed history, and we couldn’t imagine a more powerful actor to bring her story to life than Kristen Stewart,” said Peter Friedlander, head of global television for Amazon MGM Studios. “’The Challenger’ is an inspiring story about breaking barriers, and we’re thrilled to collaborate with Big Swing Productions, Amblin Television, Nevermind Pictures, Maggie Cohn, and James Hawes to share it with our global Prime Video audience.”

The series will mark the first regular TV role in Stewart’s career. She has established herself as one of the most popular actresses of her generation for her roles in acclaimed films like “Spencer” — for which she earned an Academy Award nomination — as well as for “Camp X-Ray,” “Clouds of Sils Maria,” “Seberg,” “Love Lies Bleeding,” and many more. She made her feature directorial debut in 2025 with “The Chronology of Water,” which screened in competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. She achieved early success in her career with her leading role in the “Twilight” film franchise.

The deal for the series was brokered by WME and CAA, with WME repping Amblin TV and Stewart, while CAA repped Sedgwick, Big Swing, and Cohn. Stewart is repped by WME, McKuin Frankel Whitehead, and Viewpoint. Sedgwick is repped by CAA, Range Media Partners, Origin Public Relations and Schreck Rose. Cohn is repped by CAA, 360, and Jackoway Austen Tyerman. James is repped by CAA, 42MP, and Johnson Shapiro Slewett & Kole LLP.

Source

Friday, January 9, 2026

Kristen talks 'The Chronology of Water' with USA Today

Kristen Stewart fought for a decade to direct “The Chronology of Water.” So she's going all out for the movie's "rock show" premiere in Los Angeles.

“I’m going to wear a f------ bathing suit,” Stewart says conspiratorially on a recent Zoom call. “And then that’s it! Boom, done, move on.”

Stewart, 35, has traveled the globe promoting "The Chronology of Water" (in theaters Jan. 9) ever since it premiered at Cannes Film Festival last May. She's now finding it hard to let go.

“I’ve been fixated on this thing for so long,” says the actress, who makes her directorial debut with the expressionist drama. “This just felt like my own private thing for 10 years, so it's weird to have it traipsing around the world and living its own life. Everyone feels like a mama when they make a thing and call their movie their ‘baby.’ I know that’s a cliché, but it really feels like a first-time, fluttery mom feeling.”

Kristen Stewart shares why it was 'so hard' to make 'Chronology of Water'

“It sounds like a total platitude, but you just have to trust yourself," says Kristen Stewart, who directed and wrote her first movie "The Chronology of Water."

Based on Lidia Yuknavitch’s 2011 memoir, “The Chronology of Water” follows a woman (Imogen Poots) who survives an abusive childhood with the help of competitive swimming. But her Olympic-level talents are derailed by addiction, and she eventually finds healing through writing.

Stewart read the book in 2017 and announced her intentions to direct a movie adaptation the following year. The project sat in relative limbo until 2024 as prospective producers balked at the dark subject matter and nonlinear storytelling, deeming the movie unmarketable. But Stewart, who had directed short films and music videos, was undaunted.

“I really stayed on this squirrely path,” she says. “A lot of people that I trust and love were like, ‘I don't think there’s a movie here.’ ” Ultimately, it’s about “having faith that your thought process isn't so rarefied and dumb. If it works for you, it's going to work for other people.”

"As an actress, I sometimes feel that I don't fit certain places," says Imogen Poots, who stars in Kristen Stewart's new movie. "With this, I realized that's OK."

Stewart partially credits her Princess Diana drama “Spencer,” and 2022 best actress Oscar nomination, for helping “get eyes” on the project.

“The only reason I was allowed to make this movie was because 10 different financiers were like, ‘Oh, Kristen Stewart, maybe her taste isn't s---,’” says Stewart, who had her big-screen breakthrough at age 10 in 2002’s “Panic Room.” “One thing leads to another, since I was a little kid. I'm piggybacking on every last experience I'm having all the time.”

Kristen Stewart can't shake the 'mom feeling' of making her first film

She believes that she could have directed “Chronology” when she was younger, although it would have been a “very different movie."

“I don't necessarily believe in divine timing. I think everything's taking too long,” Stewart says. “At the same time, it was so hard to make this film, and I’m genuinely proud of my body and its ability to sustain carrying this beast. I don't know if I had that when I was 26 or 28.”

Kirsten Stewart will 'keep doing it her way' as both an actress and director

"I had so many people try and tell me to clarify things," Kristen Stewart says. "What I learned was to follow your instincts."

Critics have embraced “Chronology,” which has 91% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.

“People have been really nice about it,” Stewart says. “No one has slaughtered the film; I was expecting the movie to get battered.” She figured they wouldn't warm to its languid pace and surreal imagery: “I don't think people have a lot of patience for that, so I was surprised when people got it and felt passionate about it.”

Still, she gets frustrated by the patriarchal gatekeeping of women's stories; research shows female filmmakers continue to be widely underrepresented at both the box office and the Oscars. At a Hollywood women’s luncheon in November, the “Personal Shopper” star pointedly called out the “boys' club business model that pretends to want to hang out with us while … belittling our true perspectives.”

There’s a “mass gaslight that’s happening, as if it’s difficult to point at the fact that we’re not allowed to take up as much space,” Stewart says now. “Sure, a couple more ladies are allowed to make movies than they were 20 years ago, but it’s not going to change in my lifetime.”

Stewart laughs at the suggestion that if 2008’s “Twilight” had been directed by David Lynch, it would have been hailed as a strange, subversive masterpiece. Instead, the Catherine Hardwicke-helmed romance was immediately dismissed as a young-adult chick flick.

“Because teenage girls are dramatic,” Stewart deadpans. “I’m like, so is David Lynch!”

Even still, she feels encouraged by directors Lynne Ramsay and Mona Fastvold, whose new dramas are unapologetically emotional and heightened: “ ‘Die My Love’ and ‘The Testament of Ann Lee’ are absolutely radical movies that, if you don’t like them – and put this in print – you hate women,” Stewart says. “They f--- with form and fixate on certain things that are not overtly plot-oriented.”

After their experience collaborating on “Chronology,” Poots is eager to see what Stewart does next.

“She's going to keep making stories that are deceptively simple, but like any great artist, she's going to Trojan horse some pretty good notions into that,” Poots says. “She’s not interested in being cool, and that’s what makes her so cool. She’s going to keep doing it her way.”

Coming up, Stewart will star as astronaut Sally Ride in the limited series "The Challenger," as well as film "The Wrong Girls," written and directed by her wife, Dylan Meyer. She has her “fingers and toes crossed” that she'll film her next project in LA later this year: a microbudget movie that she plans to make very quickly with her friends. “It’s about the industry, but very peripherally,” Stewart teases. “I can't wait, I love it so much.”

After the long gestation of “Chronology,” she wants to just let her impulses guide her.

“(John) Cassavetes got something right,” Stewart says. “Pick up a f------ camera and say something to someone!” Maybe it’ll take three weeks or three years, but “what I’ve learned is to do it right now.”

Source 

Saturday, December 13, 2025

Video: Kristen's interiew with Collider she talks 'The Chronology of Water' and more


Kristen Stewart knew she wanted to be a director when she started her acting career at the age of nine. At 35, her feature directorial debut The Chronology of Water is out in the world, and now it’s up to audiences to digest, figure out how they connect with what she’s offering up, and sit with the experience. The story follows Lidia (Imogen Poots), a young woman in the 1980s who turns to competitive swimming to escape an abusive childhood. Throughout the years, Lidia explores sexuality and love, pushing the boundaries of addiction, and discovers her own voice while pouring her thoughts and feelings onto the page as a writer.

Stewart knew she wasn’t the actor to play Lidia, so she embarked on the process with Poots, whose performance she describes as “a revolution.” More than just director and actor, the duo were partners and collaborators in the creation of the art that they’re now sharing with others. It’s a process that excited Stewart so much that she is ready to jump back in and direct her next project as soon as possible.

During this one-on-one interview with Collider, Stewart discussed why she felt she had to bring the story of The Chronology of Water to the screen, feeling happy and lucky to get to do what she loves, how deeply she was inspired by Poots’ performance in the film, how she knew the film was ready to release into the world, her hope that she can direct again before returning to her next acting role (she already has a couple of those lined up too), her experience making Full Phil with filmmaker Quentin Dupieux, and believing she’s a better director than she is an actor. In addition, Stewart reveals her Prime Video series, The Challenger, where she will play astronaut Sally Ride, has been given the green light.

Collider: I’m going to be digesting this movie for a long time, so thank you for that.

KRISTEN STEWART: It is to be metabolized. Thank you for watching it and eating it.

I’ve talked to a lot of actors who have said that they wanted to direct, but that it had to be something they felt like they had to do. Why did you feel like you had to do this? What made you feel like it was something you could do?

STEWART: I don’t think that I could direct a plot-driven, straightforward story. The directors that I’ve loved working for ask and never answer questions. And this book really invites you to consume it and to make it a part of your own body and your own story. The shape of it so lends itself to a cinematic language. It’s a dream state. It exists in a synapse neurological experience, like the way that you recall your life, the way that your memories live in your body forever, the way that you have to reorganize and sort them out in order to know who you are. The fact that who you are is actually in your hands to define is something that takes an entire life to figure out. You never really arrive at a landing point. I read the book and I was just like, “This is an opportunity to make a movie about every girl.”

Despite the synopsis and the details of what happened to Lidia Yuknavitch, there is an atmospheric oppression. Language wasn’t even designed for us, the masculine and feminine. It’s a pretty crushing thing to hold. Our systems were designed to alienate us and to keep us quiet. And so, whether or not you’ve had the horrors of certain trespass, certain abuse, there are aspects in the film that are particular to Lidia, but I think if you take out the detail, it’s infused with this invitation to know yourself and to get to know yourself and to listen to your inner voice in order for you to survive. When I read it, I was like, “This is Tarkovsky, this is David Lynch, this is Lynne Ramsay. These are all the filmmakers that make poetry.” There’s nothing prescriptive about this movie, other than it just gives you a hand to step into self and understand that selfhood is fucking yours. I don’t think we’ve all been raised to believe that.

I don’t know what it’s like to be an actor who decides they want to direct. But as a dancer, I knew that I didn’t ever want to become a choreographer, much like I’m sure there are actors who are happy acting and never want to try their hand at directing. Did you get to a point in your acting career where you felt very driven by that desire and need to try directing, or was it something that felt like more of a gradual decision?

STEWART: I’ve wanted to direct movies since I was nine years old. I became an actor because you can’t direct movies at nine years old. The reciprocal relationship that you have with filmmakers that really do it for the right reasons, they’re stunning actors and they’re scene partners. When it’s the best, you’re mirrors of each other. I don’t find a huge distinction between image creation and being the image. I’m so obsessed with process, as an actor, I always want to know where the camera is. I always want to serve the perspective. I’m not somebody who loses myself and I don’t know where I am, and then they call cut and I go, “Oh, right, we’re on a movie set.” I’m on a movie set all the time. It did take this particular piece to break the seal, but now it will never take me another eight years to make one film. I think there are certain barriers and fallacies in place to keep the grandiose, really macho bravado thing that surrounds the director’s status. I’ve wanted to do this forever. I’m probably not supposed to curse in this, but I feel like a pig in shit. I’m just rolling around because I’m so happy and so lucky to be here.

I can’t imagine another description, so swear all you need. Had you ever thought about playing Lidia, or did it always feel like someone else needed to play her for you to direct this?

STEWART: I didn’t want to deprive myself of that relationship. I didn’t want to have it just with me. I didn’t want to scream into an echo chamber. I wanted to meet someone. When I met Imogen [Poots], I felt like I’d known her my entire life, like, “Where have you been my whole life?” We’re both 35. We’ve both been acting for such a long time. I wanted to place my hand on her solar plexus and be like, these inner inklings, these things that we have twisted ourselves into pretzels to avoid because they’re not palatable, or they’re not the way actors, actresses specifically, are supposed to be. You turn a certain age, you enter your mid 30s, and you suddenly can hear yourself in a new way, and I just didn’t want to do that alone. I wanted to see someone crack themselves open and figure out how to breathe together.

All of this sounds really conceptual, but it’s the only way that I can think about it. Mutual recognition allows you to exist, and that is art. Until you say something, until you vocalize something, it just stays within this cage. I really wanted to set someone on that path of self-discovery and be inspired by it. And also, texturally, I’m not right for the part. She’s this soulful, sensual, stunning woman. I’m like the sharpest arrow. I was not the right person for the part. She’s a genius. I think her performance is a fucking revolution, what she did with her body, how she expressed herself, her lack of vanity, how stunning she is in the movie. She plays 17 to 40, and you believe her the entire time. She has such immense integrity. I can’t believe what Imogen was able to do in this movie. It blows me away every time. I could watch it every day.

Had you ever shared that kind of experience with a filmmaker, yourself, as an actress? It seems like this is such a singular experience.

STEWART: I feel the same way. I’ve had incredible experiences with directors. Like I said, when it’s great, they’re scene partners. They become siblings to you. But this felt like a seminal chapter in our lives. We make a lot of movies. Imogen has made a lot of movies. She’s the best thing in every movie she’s in. No movie is ever made the same. The process must change in order to have an identity. This one felt like we were making life memories. This was like a chapter. More than a chapter, it was like a tentpole. It’s like a stake in the ground. When I look back, it’s so defining. I think that me and Imogen will be talking about this in 25 years like it was yesterday. I don’t know. We gave each other keys to our own creative castles, and now we get to live there. It’s such a gift, an unbelievable gift.

When you finished this and had the cut where you wanted it, did you know you were finished? Was that very clear to you? Did you have to have someone pry it out of your hands?

STEWART: Oh, interesting.

How were you with that?

STEWART: At some point, you just run out of time. It’s like, “Okay, the movie is done.” But I will say, I didn’t want to submit to any festivals. I was really tooth and nail, like a psycho animal, holding onto this thing and not showing any of my producers. I wouldn’t let anyone in the room. I was on such a bizarre, squirrely path, creating this jigsaw puzzle of emotional connectivity. There’s no plot in the movie. Sure, things happen. She’s a swimmer. She suffers at the hands of her father. But it’s really not about any of that. It’s about writing, and it is about reiterating, and it’s about style as well.

At some point, the movie stood up, and it had a name, and it had a face. I felt like it was ready to go to school without me. It was like having a kid and being like, “Okay, you have to go out into the world now. I think I’ve dressed you right, but you have to speak for yourself.” It started speaking for itself. I just went, “Oh, man, the sentence is over.” Basically, we threw this movie at the Cannes Film Festival and actually got in by the skin of our teeth. It was shocking because, a week prior, I was like, “Festivals don’t matter. Nothing matters. The movie doesn’t even need to come out. It just needs to exist.” And then, it did. We got very lucky and ended up at the best film festival in the entire world. I’m still like, “I can’t believe we’re here.”

Do you know what you want to direct next? I know you said you don’t want to take that many years to do another one, but do you know what it will be?

STEWART: I’m champing at the bit.

Do you have more than one possibility in mind?

STEWART: Three. There is one where expediency is baked into its ethos. It needs to be buoyant, and it needs to happen fast. There’s one where the whole thing is not laden. It’s about the barriers that keep people from making films and from telling stories and from being themselves in every capacity. Therefore, I think that one will probably go first. And then, there are a couple of others. I’m holding all these balloons in my hand, and I’m like, “I don’t know which one is going to float away, but I think it’s this one.” I can’t tell you about it yet. I’m so bad at this too. I’m always like, “Can I tell you the title?”

You also have Full Phil, which I find interesting because Quentin Dupieux, is a unique filmmaker. I’ve spoken to him a couple of times and I find him fascinating. He also seems to have a very unique approach to his work. What made you want to do that film and play that character? What was it like to work with someone like him?

STEWART: Okay, so he’s more impatient than I am. We’re both Aries. He’s this very tall, hulking, big baby, but a genius. It’s so hard to keep up with him. He gets bored, like that. His movies are so astute and precise, but there’s just nothing precious. If something’s not fun, he’s past it. The one that I did with him is dialogue loaded. As soon as you say something, he’s like, “Moving on.” And you’re like, “I don’t know, maybe I could do that better.” And he’s like, “No, I want it to be fresh. We’re done.” I’ve never seen a process [like that]. He edits his films, he holds the camera, he’s his own DP, he writes, he composes. He was born to do this. Working with Quentin, he works with the same actors, and I’m really hoping I might get to be one of those people that’s entered the circle because it is an incredible summer camp to be a part of. His crew is just so connected and so reverential and so loyal. It just feels like, if he asked me to jump off a balcony, I would have done it.

His work is so interesting. And after seeing this film (The Chronology of Water) and then learning that you were doing that film with him and knowing that you’re teamed up with Woody Harrelson in it, I just feel like I need to see whatever that is.

STEWART: Oh, cool. I’m so glad to hear that. I agree. When I heard about it, I was like, “Please, me?” Charlotte Le Bon is in it as well. She’s a filmmaker and she’s now my favorite actor. We shot the movie over two and a half weeks, but it feels like such an immense, seminal [experience]. It was a biggie. On my list of films that I’ve gotten to help make, that one sticks out like a really beautiful sore thumb.

Do you know what you’re going to be shooting next? Do you already have something lined up, as far as acting?

STEWART: Oh, gosh. I’m scared of that. The pressure and responsibility of being an actor is so much more intense than directing your own thing, because it’s yours. You know what I mean. I know exactly where I’m going. I’m down for things to get sullied by fate, because you always pick up the pieces and find new gifts of surprise and experience and whatever. But working for a director that you love and being like, “I don’t want to drop your ball,” and they’re constantly passing it to you. So, yes, there are a couple of things that I’m attached to, that I’m terrified of, but that I’m excited by. Flesh of the Gods and The Challenger are the ones that are percolating and potentially going to pop off. I really hope they do.

The Challenger has gotten a green light, which is huge. I’m shaking in my boots. But I get to play Sally Ride, and the story is incredible. The team is just so inspired and trustworthy. I think I’m in the safest hands, but you’re not an actor because you want to be safe. I really think I’m a better director. I don’t know. Acting is so scary. Even that question, I was like, “Oh, God, yeah, I am attached to a few things, I guess.” And I really want to make my next movie. I want to make it before I go back to work as an actor. I like answering the call, but I want to make the call. It’s so much more fun.

Source

Thursday, December 4, 2025

Kristen in the Hollywood Reporter Magazine

Kristen Stewart loves to cook, but on this Thanksgiving eve, the last thing she wants to serve up is, well, a turkey. Which is why she’s been spending much of the day hovering over a desktop rather than a stovetop, reviewing footage from her long-in-the-making directorial debut, The Chronology of Water, a sexy, occasionally bloody, often elliptical drama adapted from Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir about a writer navigating trauma, addiction and the long, messy process of becoming an artist.

“People are like, ‘Oh, everything will get done at some point,’ ” she says over a Zoom call from the Los Angeles house she shares with her wife, filmmaker Dylan Meyer. “But I don’t think that’s true.”

It sounds a little strange considering that the film she is so meticulously fussing over premiered at Cannes way back in May — and opens theatrically in just a few days, on Dec. 5. The former Twilight star, now 35, laughs at the chaotic timeline, but it doesn’t slow her down. In her mind, the project is still very much a work in progress. “I want to put an hour back into the movie,” she says with a grin, presumably half-joking.

Stewart says she’s wanted to direct from the moment she first ventured onto a film set — which, in her case, was practically from birth. Her father was a stage manager; her mother was a script supervisor who later directed. They hauled her to sets throughout her childhood, where she absorbed shot lists and camera setups long before she understood what any of it meant.

At age 10, she landed her first screen role as Patricia Clarkson’s tomboy daughter in 2001’s The Safety of Objects, then spent the next two decades pinballing through the full spectrum of Hollywood fame: first as the mopey teenager in love with an even mopier vampire in the blockbuster Twilight franchise, then diving into work with auteurs like Olivier Assayas and Kelly Reichardt — including an Oscar-nominated turn as Princess Diana in Spencer and a CĆ©sar Award for her performance in The Clouds of Sils Maria (becoming the first American ever to win the French honor) — gradually carving out a reputation as one of the most adventurous actors of her generation.

Through it all, though, she says she’s been quietly running a parallel track, studying her directors — everyone from Catherine Hardwicke to Pablo LarraĆ­n — in preparation for the moment she’d step behind the camera herself. “There are certain actors that don’t know where the camera is,” she notes, “but I’ve never been unaware of the process.”

She seems to have been particularly aware of it during her Twilight years. Stewart recalls admiring Hardwicke’s ability to inject personality into a massive commercial machine — “That [first] Twilight movie is hers and reflects her; Catherine accomplished that, hands down,” she says — and noticing how quickly that personal stamp was squeezed as the franchise accelerated. “Being able to withstand and organize that many opinions, and still make something that feels like yours, is near impossible to do,” she says. “With so many voices in the room and with so much expectation, nothing feels personal.”

Stewart wonders whether sequel directors including Chris Weitz and Bill Condon “actually felt like they fully directed those movies,” adding that while working with them, she “felt bad for them and proud of them.” Their later Twilight films, she notes, “had personality, in spite of a really stifled process. They feel almost overtly, bizarrely, spastically themselves.

“You need to have an incredibly thirsty, hungry, brazen, deplorably narrow drive,” she goes on, mulling over the profession she’s finally joined. “You look at that and you get jealous of it as an actor. So then you go, ‘I’d like to form my own version of that.’ ”

As for directing Chronology, Stewart didn’t so much land that job as drag it into existence. She’d long been drawn to Yuknavitch’s memoir and pitched the author immediately after reading it in 2017, then spent years piecing together the financing. “People have a lot to say about how you do that,” she says. “It’s fucking hard, especially if you’re a young — when I say young, I mean inexperienced — actress who’s just demanded that she start making movies.”

Once she finally got the money together, actually shooting the film proved just as consuming. Stewart describes the production as a stretch of near total immersion — long days, little separation and the constant sense that she was guarding a very private vision from the usual swirl of outside opinions. She watched scenes back compulsively, trying to align each moment with the movie she’d been carrying around in her head for years. “All my initial impulses are so evident in the final product,” she says.

The actress at the center of the film — Imogen Poots, best known for her roles in 2007’s 28 Weeks Later and 2015’s Green Room — recalls that Stewart was always pressing for something deeper. “She’s on the quest, on the hunt … for more knowledge, more ways to identify something,” she says.

Even after its splashy Cannes launch, backed by critical acclaim, Stewart struggled to find distribution. “Everyone was like, ‘I cannot sell this,’ ” she says. “Everyone was really focusing on the negative.” To her, the material wasn’t “tough” so much as tactile and emotional, a sensorial character study. The small distributor The Forge eventually stepped in and is now mounting a scrappy awards campaign on the film’s behalf. “I look at this whole season as this big cruise ship, and we’re these Finding Nemo turtles, riding the little wave of the ship,” Stewart says. “At some point people are going to turn around and be like, ‘Hey, what are you doing here?’ ”

The film’s visual and thematic intensity, Stewart believes, speaks for itself — its “lush and girly and soft” textures, its vivid emotional logic, its grainy close-ups and to-hell-with-linearity narrative style. But the road to that point was longer in part because she refused to sand down any of its edges. “When you’re a woman working in this business, you make your perspective a little different in order to be heard — you twist yourself into a palatable shape. We are all walking pretzels,” she says. “Then [women] are shoved to the sidelines and completely tokenized in order to make people feel better about their guilt and their shame. And anytime a woman says something — if it lands — there are people coming in to take credit for that.”

In Pablo LarraĆ­n’s Spencer, for which she was Oscar nominated, Stewart plumbed the depths of Princess Diana’s psyche. Pablo Larrain/Neon/Courtesy Everett Collection

A version of that frustration resurfaced last month when Stewart delivered a fiery keynote at the Academy Women’s Luncheon — a furious dismantling of the myth of post-#MeToo progress — which went viral for a single word. “I knew as soon as I used the word ‘angry,’ that would be the pull quote,” she says now. Her larger point — that she isn’t “grateful to the boys’ club business model that pretends to want to hang out with us while siphoning our resources and belittling our true perspectives” — was more complicated, and more personal.

Stewart has little illusion that the larger system will shift anytime soon. Even so, her next job drops her squarely inside it: She’s prepping to star in her TV debut, The Challenger, an Amazon limited series about Sally Ride, the tennis champion turned astronaut. Stewart seems genuinely excited about the six-month shoot, if slightly bemused to be stepping back into a large-scale corporate production. “We’ll see how it goes,” she says. “These people and producers are not reptiles. But I am a little scared.”

She’s also eager to get back to directing. Her next project, she says, will be deliberately tiny: “I need 10 people to help make this movie with me in Los Angeles, and all the actors are my friends, and I don’t need to make any money — we can make it for absolutely nothing in four to six weeks. We will make this in the dead of night and nobody will know it. Fucking try to shut us down — absolutely not! That’s the way I want to make my next movie.”

It’s the opposite of a studio undertaking, which is precisely why she wants to do it.

But first she has to let go of The Chronology of Water — which is proving to be a decidedly difficult thing to do.

She’s still got the film’s images pinned up on the wall of her home office. This morning, as she was assembling a zine for her cast and crew, filled with unused images and moments from shooting, her computer crashed, then the power went out — almost as if the universe were hinting that it was time to move on. But she just relocated to another room, which at least on Zoom looks borderline monastic: A large upholstered chair and an art deco vanity appear to be the only furniture. As she talks, she absent-mindedly adjusts her Dodgers-themed Marriage Skateshop cap, a gesture that makes her look both focused and a little restless.

Or maybe just fixated. She may not be able to splice that extra hour into the film — or, this close to release, even an extra minute — but she’s still cooking up last-minute plans for Chronology of Water. She has visions of turning every screening into a kind of gallery, a way to immerse audiences in the film’s emotional logic. “I want to create this installation piece so you feel engulfed by the movie when you enter and when you exit,” she explains.

But she also knows, down deep, that she needs to stop “shredding this movie by the frame, down to its bolts,” as she puts it. “I want to make my next movie so badly. So I need to stop eating this one over and over and over and over.”

Stewart originally shot to fame in 2008’s Twilight as Bella Swan, opposite Robert Pattinson as Edward Cullen. FlixPix/Alamy Stock Photo

This story appeared in the Dec. 3 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. 

Source

Monday, December 1, 2025

Kristen's talks 'The Chronology of Water', her upcoming acting and directing projects with Indiewire


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 LarraĆ­n (“Spencer”).

That’s how she became the first American actress to win a CĆ©sar 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 LarraĆ­n’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.”

Source

Thursday, November 20, 2025

Kristen covers Cultured Magazine Artists on Artists Issue with an interview by Olivier Assayas


kristen-stewart-cover.jpgDSC03829.ARW_.jpgDSC03993.ARW_.jpgDSC04086.ARW_.jpg0A1658AF-C336-49AE-B9D9-7AB2E936C532.jpegIMG_0717.JPG

BTS

G7-6rRFXUAIAav6.jpgG7-6rOIWoAABaek.jpgG7-6rQzXcAM8SLU.jpg

Click on photos for full view.


Olivier Assayas didn’t read the screenplay for Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut, but he would have greenlit the project immediately.

“This is the movie of someone who needs badly to make a movie,” he tells Stewart over Zoom one morning in November. Assayas, who directed the 35-year-old actor-turned-filmmaker in 2014’s Clouds of Sils Maria and 2016’s Personal Shopper, knows a thing or two about a film made on one’s own terms at all costs. For Disorder, his own 1986 feature debut, he was offered the crew of the monumental French director Alain Resnais. Assayas turned the opportunity down, opting to continue working with his far less seasoned peers. “The foundational decision I made in filmmaking,” he continues, “was not to go the safe route.”

With The Chronology of Water, an adaptation of championship swimmer Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir of the same name, Stewart demonstrates the safe route is of no interest to her either. The Imogen Poots-led deep dive into the long shelf life of trauma refuses linear narrative or easy viewing. The reviews it received out of Cannes, where it premiered in May, testify to Stewart’s ability to successfully helm an unconventional project. American audiences will see for themselves when the film arrives in theaters Dec. 5, but Stewart has already proved her mettle to the audience member she cares about most—herself. The Chronology of Water spent almost a decade in development limbo, a period during which the actor became well acquainted with rejection. “Every producer in town was like, ‘So what’s it about? A swimmer who gets raped by her father?’” she tells Assayas. “That’s just a hard no.”

It’s telling that it was a little-known indie distributor, the Forge, that picked up the American rights for the film, reaffirming for Stewart that Hollywood is no petri dish for independent cinema these days. “You have to leave this country to do that,” she insists.

But Stewart isn’t done with the industry just yet. Next year, she’ll star in her wife Dylan Meyer’s directorial debut, The Wrong Girls, opposite Alia Shawkat. The film will be her first comedy, proof that even someone who has been a fixture onscreen since the age of 9 can still surprise us. She’ll follow that performance with her first TV series, The Challenger, where she plays a member of NASA’s first diversified class of astronauts in 1978. Also in the queue is Full Phil, where Stewart acts as Woody Harrelson’s estranged daughter on a Paris trip gone awry.

For this Artists on Artists issue cover story with Assayas, she sifts through the victories, obstacles, and lessons of a life spent on the screen.

Olivier Assayas: I can see the notes for your film on the wall behind you. Do you function like that?

Kristen Stewart: Well, I’ve only functioned once in my life, this being my first [directorial] project. It was necessary to see the movie as a body, because some of the fractured memories in the story needed to find a different circuitry.

Assayas: You are disturbing the logic of how a film has to be made because you have an intuitive knowledge of what it is, of what it should be. This film is adapted from a book you love, which is an excellent starting point. At the same time, it’s a self-portrait. I think it’s very close to the bone.

Stewart: I just wanted to be the person who got the ball rolling. I’m a really good follower. I’m such a faithful soldier, but it’s really fun to lead the charge. I thought this book really lent itself to adaptation because it lacks any kind of structure that makes it easy to digest or palatable. I was like, This feels so much more like a whole life, a DMT trip, or a dreamy recollection. This is a film about one person—but that doesn’t mean it was easy to make. We draw ourselves every single day. Sometimes that self-portrait’s hideous, disgusting, self-hating, lacerating. Other times, it’s cool. To attempt to say something true about yourself or a character is such a slippy, squirrely thing. Making movies is inherently embarrassing because it’s egotistical.

Assayas: I see it as a privilege. It’s about understanding the world in ways that are not open to everybody. You have to be constantly aware of that, and you must be up to the task.

Stewart: Which is why women don’t normally do it—we are not trained to accept that. It’s not our first instinct to fill that role. It’s audacious. That’s what the book’s about, too—her finding her voice. If it feels like a self-portrait it’s because, look, I’m 35 years old. I’ve wanted to make movies since I was 9. Why the fuck did it take me so long?

Assayas: Ultimately, it was an epic. It was a fight. It was a war. And you won the war.

Stewart: It’s just a way of relating to reality. It’s not fundable entertainment industry fare. The script was very hard to read. I guess now that I’ve done it—not to sound too dramatic or self-aggrandizing, but against all odds—there is the feeling that execution is inevitable. I’m not gonna sit around and wait for someone to pay for my movies ever again. I’ll just do them for fucking nothing. I will steal them. I will not wait another eight years to make a movie. I will just operate in Europe in complete liberated isolation, and then hope that some American distributor will buy it after we make it. Independent cinema in America is a farce. People are going to fucking quote that all over the Internet, but it’s true. I apparently make independent movies, and it’s like, barely.

Assayas: I wrote to you after watching the film. I was just so happy for you because I felt that you had the fight of your life and you won. It reminded me of how I started making movies. My first screenplay was not as abstract as the movie you made, but it was daring for the times. I remember a producer who told me, “You know what? I’m producing a film by Alain Resnais, the famous French filmmaker, and I’ll give you the crew. You will have an experienced crew that will guide you.” I wanted to make that movie with the guys I’d been working with when I made my short films, who were my age, who shared my taste. The foundational decision I made as a filmmaker was not to go with the seasoned professionals, but to trust the kids I’d started with. Sometimes, a film crew can be like a punk band.

Stewart: I’ve seen you talk about that first movie, and it genuinely encouraged me to avoid “studio musician” engineers that have been suggested to me. The times when the movie found itself about to fall apart were when people who were overly experienced were sinking the ship, and they needed to be removed. Our producers were not confident, thrilled, or happy with me at all.

Assayas: When you want to break the mold, when you want to make movies that open doors for yourself and for other people, it’s going to be tough. No one understands where you’re heading—not because you are so far ahead, but because you are somewhere else. What do you think art can do?

Stewart: It can make the world a much bigger or smaller place. We make art to get closer to each other, but at the same time, when you make really good art, the vacuous spaces that you find yourself inhabiting as an actual human become immense. What can art do? I don’t know. Keep a lot of people from offing themselves?

Assayas: I think art is a disease. You’re born with it, you know? I need to have my back to the wall to be able to make anything, because it comes from insecurities. When you’re acting, writing, or directing—there is pain. You deal with the pain, and art is the result. You also have to protect it—from the industry, from the boredom of modern droning. Movies are living proof that at least there’s one kind of art that can reach the mainstream. I started as a painter, a clumsy painter, but a painter. I dropped the idea of being a painter because I knew I would never connect with my times, whereas the power of movies is the fact that you can communicate with more people. Art is about proving that it can be done.

You can purchase a copy of the Artists on Artists issue, featuring this conversation and many more, here.

Makeup by Jillian Dempsey

Hair by Bobby Eliot

Project Management by Chloe Kerins

Photography Assistance by Dan Patrick

On-Set Styling Assistance by Kat Cook

Styling Assistance by Andrii Panasiuk 

Source 1 2