Showing posts with label executive producer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label executive producer. 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.

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Friday, May 8, 2026

Kristen, and her production company Nevermind Pictures, has joined as executive producer on documentary 'Barbara Forever'


Kristen Stewart and her production company, Nevermind Pictures, have come on board Brydie O’Connor’s documentary “Barbara Forever” as an executive producer as Strand Releasing acquires all North American rights to the film, which had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival followed by its international premiere at the Berlin Film Festival.

The film, which chronicles the life and career of filmmaker Barbara Hammer, was produced by Space Time Films with Christine Vachon and Killer Films serving as executive producer. Stewart has also joined as an executive producer, alongside Dylan Meyer and Maggie McLean, with their company Nevermind Pictures.

“Their involvement reflects a dedication to Barbara Hammer’s radical legacy of experimental and inherently political filmmaking that defiantly reshapes the way we look at cinema, queerness and ourselves,” said Strand.

Nevermind Pictures said in a joint statement, “Barbara’s work has left an immeasurable imprint on us as artists and as people. She struggled to find the acknowledgement she deserved in life, and we are sick with pride to be able to help shine a spotlight on her now.”

The distribution deal was done between Jon Gerrans of Strand Releasing and Isadora Johnson of Cinetic on behalf of the filmmakers.

“We’re thrilled to be working with Brydie and the team, this is a very special project as Barbara Hammer was a dear colleague of Strand’s as we did her first theatrical release, ‘Nitrate Kisses,’ during our formative years. Barbara was and will always be one of the artists who helped define our company,” said Gerrans.

“Strand has long been a home for the kind of bold, independent, and intimately personal cinema that Barbara helped define,” said O’Connor. “We’re so excited to be partnering with a team that not only sees the vision of the film, but understands how vital it is to bring Barbara Hammer’s artistic legacy to audiences now.”

Strand Releasing and Killer Films have previously collaborated on such acclaimed films as Nigel Finch’s “Stonewall,” Cindy Sherman’s “Office Killer” and Bruce Wagner’s “I’m Losing You.”

“ ‘Barbara Forever’ is a perfect film for Strand Releasing and Killer Films to be reunited on, it weaves together so much history that has occurred during the formation of the New Queer Cinema and our long-term friendship. ‘Barbara Forever’ captures the spirit and soul of Barbara and her legacy,” said Marcus Hu, co-president of Strand Releasing.

Strand plans for a national fall release launching with a theatrical run at Film Forum in New York on Sept. 4, before going wide.

“Barbara Forever” won the Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award at Sundance and the Teddy Award for Best Documentary at Berlinale, and has gone on to screen at major festivals including Thessaloniki, Full Frame and Hot Docs.

It was produced by Elijah Stevens of Space Time Films, O’Connor and Claire Edelman of Killer Films. The film was co-produced by Kartemquin Films and co-executive produced by Kathryn A. Taylor and Marcela Davison AvilĆ©s of TomKat Media.

The film is represented for international sales by MetFilm Sales, who will present the title to buyers at the MarchƩ du film at Cannes.

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Sunday, June 23, 2024

NEW PROJECT: Kristen to play astronaut Sally Ride in 'The Challenger' for a limited TV series

Kristen Stewart will make her TV series-starring debut in The Challenger, a limited series in which she’ll play Sally Ride, the astronaut and physicist who became the first American woman to fly in space. She did this as part of a NASA space shuttle astronaut class of 1978 that was the first to be diversified and not comprised of all white men.  

Kyra Sedgwick’s Big Swing Productions developed and brought the project to Amblin and is executive producing with Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Partners and Stewart through the latter’s Nevermind production label. Amblin’s Darryl Frank and Justin Falvey are also exec producers.

Maggie Cohn will serve as the writer and showrunner; her credits include American Crime Story, The Staircase and Narcos: Mexico. This has been the hot property on the TV auction block this week, and Amazon is close to tying it down.

The series is based on The New Guys, a book written by Meredith E. Bagby, who partners with Sedgwick and Valerie Stadler in Big Swing. They are also executive producers.

In some ways, this has the tapestry to tell the successor story to The Right Stuff, which was based on Tom Wolfe’s book about the culture clash that occurred when the cockiest world’s best fighter pilots jumped into the space race that America was engaged in with the Russians. Bagby tells the story of a group that was called by their predecessors ‘The F*cking New Guys,’ as NASA sought to diversify its pilots and crew for the space shuttle program. Ride was the first woman and the first member of the LGBTQ+ community to fly into space. Also in that program was the first Black and Asian American astronauts, and a married couple. They passed all the rigorous tests to become top of the class, and egos, ambition and romance were part of the cultural clash. They were also quite brilliant.

In 1983, Ride became the first American woman to fly on the space shuttle, and became an instant celebrity. That joy was short-lived, however, when three years later the space shuttle Challenger blew apart 73 seconds into its ascent, killing all seven members of the crew. Ride then became the only astronaut to become part of the Rogers Commission, a presidential commission to investigate the disaster, and it later came out that she pinpointed the problems with O-rings that became stiff at low temperature, and that turned out to be the reason for the explosion. Ride died from cancer at age 61 in 2012, a true American hero.

The hope will be to get this ready to time the series in proximity of the Challenger disaster anniversary. That happened 38 years ago, on January 28, 1986. For Stewart, this continues a career evolution which started after the Twilight Saga films, in which she has established herself as a most watchable actress with range.

In a moment where not a lot is selling in the marketplace, how does a plum package like this happen? Sedgwick explains this was a truly homegrown project, and not one that happened overnight:

“This is something we’ve worked on at Big Swing since 2017, me, Meredith and Valerie, about this new class of astronaut recruited by NASA in the early 1970s,” she said. “Sally Ride was among them, and the focus is this newly recruited wild, feral group of astronauts who were all very diverse. And then on an Oppenheimer track, it also tells the story of the Rogers Commission that investigated the Challenger disaster that Ride took part in. Growing up in Florida, Meredith Bagby was obsessed with space and the shuttle, and she also watched the Challenger explode. Meredith got hundreds of hours of interviews with the members of that class, and we have relationships with all those living astronauts and they will be part of our brain trust on the show.

“She wrote the book and it went on the bestseller lists,” Sedgwick told Deadline. “We wanted so much to tell this story as a limited series. Our goal at Big Swing is to tell familiar stories with a new perspective and point of view. I had a relationship with Maggie Cohn, and she fell in love with the book. Valerie had this dream of having Kristen Stewart, and after more than a year of trying to get Kristen this book through back channeling, she read it and she fell in love. Getting Kristen and Maggie was incredible, for a company nobody really knows yet. We are three girls with a dream.

“Then we thought, what better than to bring in Steven Spielberg to help tell this awe-inspiring story of the astronauts who inspired space travel for a new generation? They helped us prepare the pitch that went out to the marketplace, and it has been extremely competitive and we are close to a deal.”

Making Stewart the centerpiece was also interesting in that TV was not an obsession for her.

“She has never done television, but when she read this she became obsessed with telling the story of Sally Ride from her own unique perspective that I won’t even try to paraphrase because she is so eloquent about it,” Sedgwick said. “She was so stunning in these pitch meetings and that was a huge part of why it has been so competitive. She’s so compelling and was so rabid about telling this story about an American hero who had to hide who she was, in that time.

“Who better to play Sally Ride than one of the great actors of her generation? As they say in Hollywood, passion wins the day. Her passion for being an executive producer is vast. As dogged as we were about getting the script to her, she has been that dogged about getting it sold in the marketplace.”

Even though Sedgwick herself is most closely associated with the role of the closer, it was Stewart who played that role in the pitch process.

“Right now when everyone is saying that nobody is buying anything, she would not listen and nor would we because if we had listened to all the times we were told this would be too hard, we would never have gotten this off the ground. Amblin spoke first, Maggie was great, and then they passed it to me, I was the one to pass to Kristen and was the one who got to kvell about her because I’d just seen Love Lies Bleeding. We were all in it to win it.”   

Auction was brokered by WME (which reps Stewart and Amblin) and CAA (which reps Sedgwick, Big Swing and Cohn).

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Thursday, October 19, 2023

Video: The "Living for the Dead' cast talk about Kristen with Too Fab




'Living for the Dead' producers talk about Kristen with the Daily Beast

 

You may have watched ghost-hunting shows in the past, but you have never seen anything quite like Living for the Dead.

From the brilliant minds of Kristen Stewart, her friend CJ Romero, and the folks at Scout Productions that brought us Queer Eye, Living for the Dead combines all the elements we know and love from the Netflix series (the heart, the humor and, of course, the hugs) with some spooky ghost hunting in some seriously haunted places.

“We always joked from day one that this is gay Scooby-Doo,” executive producer Rob Eric, who also worked on both the original and rebooted Queer Eye, told The Daily Beast’s Obsessed.

And the Scooby gang in Living for the Dead does not disappoint. Juju Bae, Alex LeMay, Roz Hernandez, Logan Taylor, and Ken Boggle make up what I’ve dubbed the Paranormal Five (a supernatural twist on the Fab Five). They all bring unique talents (as well as an abundance of compassion) to the investigations, whether it’s communicating with the spirits, manning technical equipment, or doing deep spiritual readings of those most affected by the spirits in the place.

The first season of the unscripted series, which premieres on Hulu Oct. 18, finds the gang taking their ghost-hunting talents across the Midwestern United States to investigate some legendary haunted landmarks like the Clown Motel in Tonopah, Nevada, as well as some lesser-known, reportedly eerie spots like the Palomino Club in Las Vegas.

Ahead of the premiere, executive producers Rob Eric and Renata Lombardo tell Obsessed how Stewart brought the idea to them, the moment they knew they found their amazing queer Scooby Gang, and why this ghost hunting show is unlike any other.

First of all, this concept is brilliant: Queer Eye, but for paranormal hunting. Love it. I know that this was an idea that Kristen Stewart and CJ Romero came up with, but how was this pitched to you?

Eric: We got a call that Kristen Stewart and CJ had an idea, and do we want to hear it? I’m like, it’s Kristen Stewart, of course, we wanna hear it! (Laughs) It was a seedling of an idea. They were at a brunch and somebody mentioned something about a gay paranormal show, like, why don’t we have one of those? And Kristen was like, “I would fucking watch that forever.”

As would I!

Eric: Kristen was very specific on how she wanted emotion and heart and humor. And so obviously they reached out to the Queer Eye guys. We started talking about it and developed the format with her, and sort of gave away some of our trade secrets of how we create emotion and heart and humor [in Queer Eye], and then shot the show. It was an amazing relationship. We’re still working together on other stuff, and she’s awesome. They’re both awesome.

Lombardo: We were excited about the Kristen Stewart call, but we had no idea truly the power of the celebrity of Kristen Stewart until she mentioned that she was developing the show with us in an interview. I think it was around Spencer, and it got picked up and there were so many articles that came our way. Everyone was like, “Is this you guys? What’s happening?” It just proved that there’s an undeniable stardom with Kristen.

You mentioned the heart and the humor of the show. At one point watching the screeners, I wrote down, “This is ghost therapy,” because it is such a unique and compassionate approach to the paranormal. Instead of going for scares you go in trying to not only heal the spirits, but those affected by them. How did you find this approach?

Eric: I think it was probably what we collectively—Kristen, CJ, and Scout [Productions]—bring to the paranormal, right? We’ve seen a million paranormal shows and for us it always seems like they go in and they sort of irritate the spirit in order to try to do something. We’re like, well, we should actually try to communicate a little bit more, like we do on Queer Eye. It’s not just going in and taking somebody and saying, “Hey, if you use this moisturizer to do this, you’re gonna be great,” and we walk away. There’s more interaction, there’s more character, and there’s more of a companionship between the characters—whether the character is a ghost or the person that’s trying to get rid of the ghost.

Much like finding the Fab Five, I’m sure it was a journey to find the Paranormal Five. Can you kind of walk me through the process of casting these five roles and what you were looking for in each role?

Eric: These were not people that we just pulled from obscurity and said, “Hey, you’re now a medium.” These were people that came to us. They were mediums, and they were people that were skeptics. Not only does Roz have her show about the world of paranormal, but she always is very clear [that] she’s a skeptic. We wanted that element in there as well, because I think the audience always approaches a paranormal show with a bit of skepticism, as well as interest.

Lombardo: We reference, from one end, it’s the heart [we were looking for], and on the other end, it’s like gay Scooby-Doo. We wanted to be able to live in both spaces, so we had to find talent that could walk both lines. One is being sort of serious about the craft and what they brought to the table. And the other one is that we have to have fun with this, because it’s gay camp that we didn’t want to lose in the process. Because they are gay ghost hunters, and [that’s] what makes this show distinctly different tonally from other ghost hunting shows as well.

Yes, there certainly hasn’t been a show like this before.

Eric: When we cast them, it wasn’t just video casting. We brought everybody out. We wanted to meet them in person, see how they can work together. But we also wanted to see their talent. And there were some really scary moments with all of them. Renata sat in when Ken did a reading of my cards and was so frighteningly accurate.

Lombardo: Oh yes. I had chills. Literally, he needed to grab Rob. He was like, “I need to read you,” and pulled him aside. I had chills multiple times because we work together every day. I know him fairly well. And the stuff he was saying, I was like, “How? What?” That was honestly what put him through for us.

Eric: My business partner David, he had a reading from Logan. That was bonkers... [Logan’s reading] was so specific that there was no doubt that there was some connection that he was having. David broke down because it was about his father who had passed away. But it was so connective that it wasn’t just like, “Oh, your dad says hi,” or, “Your dad’s super proud of you.” It was down to a moment that he had on his deathbed that no one would’ve known about and David’s never spoken about. And David had never met Logan before. So it was amazing.

And this was just the audition?!

Eric: Right? And then you got into the field with them and it was nonstop. You’ve got five people who, when they merge together, that communication is open. They’re open for everything. So therefore that world connects much easier for them.

Another character in the show is the locations. They are so fun and spooky and unique. What was the search like not only for the locations, but the people that were in them?

Lombardo: We sought out iconic haunted locations. We made it hard on ourselves because we could have probably just gone to one city and just done more of what we do with Queer Eye, where we hub out of one city and sort of branch out. We shot for the stars in Season 1, which was a hybrid of finding the most iconic spooky locations across basically like the western middle of the United States, and then also finding people that were associated with those locations.

Eric: And some of these places have been done before on other shows. We didn’t care.

Yeah, you do it your way.

Eric: We are doing it our way. And why is this reoccurring? Why does it keep happening in this place if all these people come to visit? What are they not doing that we should be doing? The one thing that we wanted in every location was visibility. We didn’t want to just go have our team stay in a hotel, then they just go visit the people and then we leave. Tonopah is a perfect example.

Lombardo: That’s the Clown Motel episode.

Eric: It’s a really weird little town. I think the population’s like maybe 1,500 people.

Lombardo: Because it’s such a small town, the town got wind that this gay something was there. Something gay is happening in town. (Laughs)

Eric: We shot a sequence in the bar where we were meeting up with some town people. This beautiful moment happened where this woman—who never told us anything about this, we had no idea—brought up the fact that she was dealing with a non-binary child. As that moment was happening, I was downstairs in front of the monitor like, “Dear, sweet baby Jesus, let’s just keep going here.” Because this is that conversation that we don't normally see in paranormal shows, but we also don’t normally see in small towns like this.

It was a really amazing moment.

Eric: And that woman who stands up [after] and she says, “I’m pansexual,” it was this coming-out party that happened and it was a really beautiful, natural thing to see. So we insisted that in every one of our shows we were having visibility in these towns. Not just for the purpose of the investigation, but also the purpose of we’re a very large crew of LGBTQIA+ people. We need to be seen.

I love Kristen Stewart’s narration. It really brings a whole fun, campy layer to the show. How did you come to the decision to include narration, and was Kristen always going to be the voice of it?

Eric: Kristen was always the voice. We talked about it. I think it was Renata’s idea actually from day one.

Lombardo: She’s got such a great voice and such a distinct voice. And we talked a lot at the beginning about, how do you get Kristen’s DNA in the series without Kristen being on the show? So, conceptually it was always sort of like Kristen’s like the Charlie of the Charlie’s Angels. So that's sort of where it started.

Eric: And she’s a perfectionist. In the booth, I remember sitting in one of the sessions where she was just like, “I don't like the way I said that. Let me say it this way. What if I say it like this? What if I bring it here?” Super collaborative. Kristen cares deeply about this show and the people that we’re helping on the show. She wanted every element to be right, and when her voice is essentially the lead thing you hear on the show, she wanted to be just perfect.

Lombardo: And keep watching. You may see her, but in the time being, you’ll hear her.

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Tuesday, September 26, 2023

Kristen talks about 'Living for the Dead' with People

 


Kristen Stewart has enlisted a few friends to help her conquer some fears.

Along with the creators of Queer Eye, the actress is executive-producing and narrating Hulu’s new docuseries Living for the Dead, featuring five queer ghost hunters as they investigate famed haunted locations around the U.S.

“It’s so cool and enlivening that me and my best friend CJ Romero had this funny idea and now it’s a show,” Stewart, 33, said in a statement. “It started as a bit of a hypothetical silly pipe dream and now I am so proud to have shepherded something that is as moving and meaningful as it is truly a gay old time.”

The team, including Alex Le May, Juju Bae, Ken Boggle, Logan Taylor and Roz Hernandez, “makes me laugh and cry and they had the courage and heart to take us places I wouldn’t go by myself,” said Stewart. “And it’s a super cool maiden voyage for the company I’ve started with my partners Dylan Meyer and Maggie McLean.”

In PEOPLE's exclusive sneak peek at the show’s trailer, the cast work together to investigate locations — including Copper Queen Hotel, Waverly Hills Sanatorium, the Clown Hotel, Palace Theater and the Palomino — and experience cold chills, apparitions, unseen forces and spirit attachments.

“This is just the beginning for us and for Living for the Dead,” Stewart said. “We wanna one day have traipsed across the entire spooky ass country. Maybe the world!”

The Hulu original docuseries Living for the Dead premieres Oct. 18.

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Video: The 'Living for the Dead' Official Trailer

 


The TV series, executive produced and narrated by Kristen, premieres on Hulu in the US on 18 October 2023.

Friday, August 25, 2023

The queer ghost hunting TV show 'Living for the Dead' will premiere on Hulu on 18 October 2023


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Click on images for full view.

' Living for the Dead' will premiere on Hulu on 18 October. The series is executive produced by Kristen additionally it will be narrated by her.

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Monday, June 6, 2022