Kristen Stewart has been talking about directing as long as she’s been acting. Not many people encouraged it.
“I spoke to other actors when I was really little because I was always like: ‘I want to direct movies!’ I was fully set down by several people who were like, ‘Why?’ and ‘No’. It’s such a fallacy that you need to have an unbelievable tool kit or some kind of credential. It is really ss if you have something to say, then a movie can fall out of you very elegantly,” Stewart recalled.
You wouldn’t necessarily say that Kristen Stewart’s feature directing debut, ‘The Chronology of Water’, elegantly fell out of her at the Cannes Film Festival. She arrived in Cannes after a frantic rush to complete the film, an adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s 2011 memoir, starring Imogen Poots. Sitting on a balcony overlooking the Croisette, Stewart says she finished the film ‘30 seconds before I got on an airplane’.
“It was eight years in the making and then a really accelerated push. It’s an obvious comparison, but it was childbirth. Was pregnant for a really long time and then I was screaming bloody murder,” she said.
Yet, however dramatic it was the arrival of ‘The Chronology of Water’, it was emphatic. The film, an acutely impressionistic portrait of a brutal coming of age, is the evident work of an impassioned filmmaker. Stewart, the director, turns out to be a lot like Stewart, the actor: intensely sensitive, ferociously felt.
For Stewart, the accomplishment of ‘The Chronology of Water’, which is playing in the sidebar ‘Un Certain Regard’ and is up for sale in Cannes, was also a revelation about the mythology of directing.
“It’s such a male f—— thing. It’s really not fair for people to think it’s hard to make a movie, insofar as you need to know things before going into it. There are technical directors, but, Jesus Christ, you hire a crew. You just have a perspective and trust it. My inexperience made this movie,” she said.
Kristen Stewart’s first steps as a director came eight years ago with the short ‘Come Swim’, which she also premiered in Cannes in 2017. The festival, she said, generates the kind of questions she likes about movies. It was around then that Stewart began adapting Yuknavitch’s memoir.
In it, Yuknavitch recounts her life, starting with sexual abuse from her father (an architect played by Michael Epp in the film). Competitive swimming is one of her only escapes and it helps get her away from home and into college. Blissful freedom, self-lacerating addiction and trauma colour her years from there, as does an inspirational writing experience with Ken Kesey (Jim Belushi in the film). Stewart calls the book ‘a lifesaver - like, actually, a flotation device’.