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!'” Stewart recalls. “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 really is if you have something to say, then a movie can fall out of you very elegantly.”
You wouldn’t necessarily say that 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,” says Stewart. “I was pregnant for a really long time and then I was screaming bloody murder.”
Yet however dramatic 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 a such a male f—— thing,” she says. “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.”
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 says, generates the kind of questions she likes around 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 color 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.”
“The book was this call to arms invitation to listen to your own voice, which, if you’re walking around in a girl body, is really hard to do,” says Stewart. “It fragments in a way that feels truer to my internal experience than anything I’ve ever read.”
“I really wanted to make something that wasn’t about what happened to this person, it’s about what she did with what happens to her, and what writing can do for you,” adds Stewart. “It’s like the most meta, crazy experience to have also cracked myself open at the same time.”
That goes for Poots, too, the 35-year-old British actor who, in “The Chronology of Water,” gives one of her finest, most wide-ranging performances.
“It’s Lydia’s life story and the cards that were dealt her, but in terms of the reactive nature, that’s the female experience,” says Poots. “How you’re surveilled, how you’re supposed to respond, conform, how that’s repulsive, and how you sabotage something good — all of these things are just very, very female.”
Together, Stewart and Poots have been clearly bonded by the experience. Stewart calls Poots “a sibling now.” In Stewart’s best experiences with directors, she says, it becomes such a back-and-forth exchange that the separate jobs disintegrate, and, she says, “You’re kind of sharing a body.”
“But I’m positive I said nothing useful to her ever, and I talked way too much,” says Stewart. Poots immediately disagrees: “That’s not true, Kristen!”
“Kristen is incredibly present but at the same has this ability, like a plant or something, to pick up on a slight shift in the atmosphere where it’s like: ‘Wait a minute,'” Poots says, causing Stewart to laugh. “There is this insane brain at play and it’s a skill set that comes in the form of an intense curiosity.”
That curiosity, now, includes directing more movies. “The Chronology of Water” may signal not just a new chapter for one of American movies’ most intrepid actors, but an ongoing artistic evolution.
“Our production was a shipwreck, so basically we had to put the boat back together,” Stewart says of the editing process. That reassembling, Stewart believes helped make “The Chronology of Water” something less predetermined, where “the emotional, neurological tissue that occurred between images was real.”
“There was no way to make this movie under more normal circumstances,” says Stewart, “because then it would have been more normal.”
