Kristen Stewart never questioned her ability to direct when it came to making her filmmaking debut “The Chronology of Water,” but when she got to post-production, she thought she had “ruined the movie.”
“We got home and I was like, ‘I think I killed everything. I think everything’s dead,’” Stewart told TheWrap founder and CEO Sharon Waxman during TheWrap’s Cannes Conversations in partnership with Brand Innovators, adding that when she started to see what her actors brought to the screen, the film evolved. “Then I opened up all these stunning, beautiful gifts and I was like, ‘No, no, we just did something different.’ Ingratiating yourself to newness is difficult. It’s like you have to mourn the loss of a thing.”
The Oscar-nominated actress said that while she felt frustrated and impatient over the eight-year process of finally getting “Chronology of Water” made, she never questioned her own ability to bring the project to the screen.
“I didn’t question for one second. I wanted to do this so badly. I like to not question impulses,” she said. “I guess it just took me a minute to come to the point that it was concise in itself, and then it decided to be born when it needed to be. And I was impatient, and I was a little petulant and frustrated and throwing public temper tantrums, but like, it wasn’t ready.”
The film, an adaptation of the Lidia Yuknavitch novel of the same name, stars Imogen Poots as a young woman who finds her voice through the written word and salvation as a swimmer. Stewart said she had a physical reaction to reading the book, which she described as a “sort of necessary outburst.”
“Even if you don’t have the specific relationship to abuse that this woman does, if you have been walking around the Earth with a female body for the last, you know, right now, being told to shut the f–k up is pervasive. It’s just a fact,” she said. “I think there are certain pieces of work that allow you to exist, all of a sudden you go, ‘Wow, f–k me. That is a mirror.’ And we are so much stronger together.”
“I didn’t want to make a movie about the things that happened to this woman,” Stewart continued. “I wanted to make a movie about what we can do to the things that happened to us.”
Watch the full conversation below.
