Talking Kristen Stewart : November 2025

Friday, November 28, 2025

The Chronology of Water Promo Photos in Paris

Photographed By: https://x.com/ThomBrowne

Source: https://teamkristensite.blogspot.com/

Kristen Stewart talks with Variety on The Chronology of Water

Photographed By: Andrejs Strokins

Most biopics persuade you to empathize with the main character. But as actress-turned-writer/director Kristen Stewart explains, her screenplay adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir “The Chronology of Water” allows you to virtually become the protagonist.

“[Lidia] invites you to project yourself into her book,” she says. In a similar way, the film presents the thoughts of a woman (Imogen Poots) overcoming childhood abuse and adulthood addiction through sound design that places viewers inside her head. “Some of the emotional triggers are specific to her life, but I think they’re [also] invitations to remember your own. I wanted to make a movie that was not just about one person, but was kind of about all of us.”

“Water” is one of several fall features with scripts adapted from the lives of real protagonists, down-to-earth and extraordinary in equal measure. Scott Cooper (“Crazy Heart”) explores the tortured soul of a musical icon in “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere,” Derek Cianfrance (Oscar nominee for “Sound of Metal”) and Kirt Gunn portray a criminal with a heart of gold in “Roofman” and David Michôd (“Animal Kingdom”) and Mirrah Foulkes show the determination and survival skills of a female boxing pioneer in “Christy.”

Stewart’s feature writing/directing debut, which premiered as a Cannes Un Certain Regard selection in May and hits U.S. theaters in December, is the most impressionistic film of the bunch. The project has consumed her thoughts for the past eight years, in part due to the time she needed to raise “purely independent” financing. “I reached out to Lidia [and] told her, ‘Please don’t give this to anyone who’s going to voiceover it to death or provide a three-act structure that’s much easier to finance than the movie that we could make.

“I always wanted to make sure that you could watch this movie with your eyes closed, because I wanted it to feel like a haunted house,” Stewart says. “I wanted [the protagonist] to feel like she was sitting next to you in a theater whispering in your ear, giving you a little more emotional context.”

Source: https://variety.com/2025/film/focus/screenwriters-adapting-life-1236592379/

Kristen Stewart & Imogen Poots talks with I-D Magazine

Photographed By: MORGAN MAHER

It’s been raining for days in Los Angeles. In a 4000-square-foot suite at L’Ermitage hotel, where our i-D photo shoot with Kristen Stewart and Imogen Poots is taking place, the floor-to-ceiling windows look out over a panorama of gray clouds and even grayer concrete. “What an incredible day in L.A.,” Stewart says as she glances through the glass. “I can’t believe we’re shooting inside.”

The multi-room suite is so massive that Stewart and Poots remain almost completely out of my sight until the moment they are ready to shoot. Before I see them, I hear them, as sounds waft from their glam room: the buzz of electric hair clippers, muffled songs by Liz Phair and The The, bursts of laughter and more laughter. Once they do emerge, the beauty and coolness they exude feels so effortless one wouldn’t assume it took any preparation at all. Padding around in bare feet, they match each other with artfully-tousled “I woke up like this” hair and oversized suits big enough to make David Byrne proud. Stewart curls her lip and sneers at the camera. “We’re so sick of being actresses in photos, so today it’s like, ‘We’re in a band,’” she growls. She and Poots pose closely together, taking turns cradling one another and frequently cracking each other up between frames with a private joke or gesture.

When I speak to Stewart and Poots the next morning over Zoom, the rain still hasn’t let up. Poots is slightly delayed due to flooding in her hotel room, but she seems no more bothered by the elements than Stewart. In fact, they both seem tickled by the irony of water insinuating itself so overtly into the press tour for their film, The Chronology of Water. “Isn’t it crazy?” Poots remarks. “When your [publicist] said that, I was like, ‘Come on,’” Stewart replies.

After an eight-year gestation period, Stewart and Poots are readying themselves for the release of Chronology, Stewart’s feature directorial debut, out December 5 in New York and Los Angeles before it opens across the U.S. on January 9. It’s a milestone that is more hard-won than one would guess for a star of Stewart’s stature; she has been vocal about how difficult it was to secure funding for the project since she first discovered the book in 2017 and announced her intentions to adapt it in 2018. Despite Stewart’s pedigree as an Oscar-nominated performer and indie cinema icon—acting in films by Olivier Assayas, Kelly Reichardt, David Cronenberg, and Pablo Larraín—as well as her shortform directorial outings—she directed a (presciently aquatic) 18-minute short called Come Swim in 2017, and boygenius: the film in 2023—financiers were resistant to taking the plunge. In January 2024, Stewart’s frustration led her to declare in a Variety cover story that she would refuse to take on any new acting projects until Chronology was complete: “I will quit the fucking business,” she said at the time.

Shaking the table worked just well enough, though Stewart had to venture to international waters to get the job done, ultimately shooting in Latvia and Malta over 32 days in 2024. “We had to leave the United States to make this possible,” Stewart said while promoting Chronology at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, where it premiered in the Un Certain Regard section. “Thank God I stamped my feet, because if I didn’t, it wouldn’t have happened,” she said. “I did have to throw a public temper tantrum in order to get this done.”

The Chronology of Water is based on Lidia Yuknavitch’s acclaimed 2011 novel of the same name. The title refers to the book’s (and the film’s) narrative fluidity. As Yuknavitch reflects on the formative events of her past—childhood abuse, sexual awakenings, doomed relationships, addiction, loss—her memories come in tidal waves, crashing against the boundaries of time and recollection. “Your life doesn’t happen in any kind of order… It’s all a series of fragments and repetitions and pattern formations. Language and water have this in common,” she writes early in the book. “All the events of my life swim in and out between each other. Without chronology.”

KRISTEN STEWART on adapting “The Chronology of Water”

In translating the memoir to screen, Stewart stays true to the unbridled nature of Yuknavitch’s prose, eschewing linearity in favor of a visceral sensory collage that puts you in her protagonist’s head. Some memories come in small, fragmented drops—staccato shots of blood circling a drain, or handlebars on a child’s bike—while others burst forth like emotional geysers. (Water isn’t the only symbolically-charged liquid at work, there is also blood, sweat, tears, spit, cum, and vomit. Chronology is an ode to all that the body holds, as well as what it releases—figuratively and literally.) Lidia, as played by a thunderous Poots, cascades across the emotional spectrum from enraged to aggrieved to fucked-up to blissed-out and back again. It is an uncompromising film that pushes you straight into the deep end and expects you to sink or swim.

The subjective nature of the film, which follows Lidia from her days as a competitive swimmer at age 18 to her career as a writer and professor in her 40s, confers substance as well as style. “Lidia’s inner voice spoke to mine, and her memories started to overlap with my life in a way that I thought was so cinematic… [Through art,] you start to have interactions with parts of your life that felt inaccessible,” Stewart says, explaining that what drew her to Yuknavitch’s story was how much it reflected her own. “I have such reverence and fucking respect for Lidia and the particularities of who she is and her life and her voice and everything, but the reason that this book spoke to me was because it conjured my own shit.”

Poots felt similarly about Stewart’s script. “It was clearly very her,” she thought, even though she didn’t yet know Stewart at the time she read it. “I’d never read anything like it. It was so original.” Once Stewart offered her the role (in an email that, according to Poots, went something like, “Hey dude, you wanna make this movie with me?”), they soon forged an intimate working dynamic, bonding over books and films, and developing a shared creative and emotional lexicon. “There’s lots of different strands within our friendship and the way that we collaborated,” Poots says, “But we definitely connected over how much things matter to us… [We are] two people who just cannot wait to express how much things matter to them.”

The ease and intimacy between Stewart and Poots is palpable. You could call it sisterly, but there’s more: It crackles with the electricity of two people who have lived past lives together. In conversation, each is visibly energized by the other’s ideas; they volley back and forth, picking up where the other left off, almost telepathically. They get giddy joking about which Beatles they most identify with. “I think you would be Paul, because he cares about the band so much,” Poots says to Stewart, who bristles. “But he’s so reasonable,” she sighs. (They both agree Poots would be Ringo.)

Both voracious readers, they pepper our conversation with names like Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, Sheila Heti, Denis Johnson. The film forges a unique conversation with literature, echoing but also building upon the foundation of Yuknavitch’s memoir. In preparation for the role, Stewart gifted Poots the rest of Yuknavitch’s books, as well as several works by the late postmodernist writer Kathy Acker, who is referenced in the film when Lidia reads a graphic passage from Empire of the Senseless, to her classmates’ chagrin. (In the book, Yuknavitch also describes her sexual relationship with Acker, who eventually became her mentor.) One can intuit the influence of the radical writers Stewart and Poots gravitate to on the gutsy, defiant voice of the film.

Actress Lili Taylor, a close friend and mentor to Poots, also shared two books she thought would help: Bonnie Tsui’s Why We Swim and Leanne Shapton’s Swimming Studies, which became key references for Poots during prep. “I knew the experience was going to be a profound one for Immy. It was going to require her to be physically and psychologically vulnerable,” Taylor recollected to i-D via email. “[Poots] is open and courageous, so she is able to travel wherever the scene needs to go––often into the unknown.”

As for cinematic inspirations, the film whose influence on Chronology is most immediately apparent is Morvern Callar, Lynne Ramsay’s own unflinching feature debut from 2002 (also adapted from a book.) Ramsay’s thorny character study, shot in a subjective, photographic style, offers a favorable precedent that informs and buoys Stewart’s approach. (A more direct connection: Esmé Creed-Miles, daughter of Morvern’s lead actress Samantha Morton, plays a small role in Chronology.) Stewart emphatically confirms Morvern is a key inspiration. “It’s literally first on my list. I saw that movie kind of late in the game [and] I screamed at my fucking screen,” Stewart says, describing how strongly she identified with Ramsay’s sensibility. “There are some things that feel like permission, and then there are some things that just feel like you. I was like, ‘How do you know? Get out of my head.’”

(Coincidentally, or maybe through the psychic transference Stewart is alluding to, Ramsay’s latest film Die My Love also happens to follow the psychological and physical tumult of a woman writer protagonist, and incidentally happens to star Stewart’s ex, Robert Pattinson. Although I’m dying to ask whether she’s seen it, time constraints prevent me.)

Stewart shares with me a list of 24 films that inspired her, including Morvern Callar as well as a number of Ramsay’s shorts, Rebecca Miller’s Angela, Catherine Breillat’s A Real Young Girl, Celine Sciamma’s Water Lilies, Agnes Varda’s Le Bonheur and Jacquot de Nantes, and Chick Strand’s Soft Fiction (“It’s beautiful and important and people should watch it.”) Poots also cites Julia Reichert’s 1971 documentary Growing Up Female as one of the films she and Stewart watched during pre-production.

Olivier Assayas, who directed Stewart in Personal Shopper and Clouds of Sils Maria, isn’t at all surprised by how fully-formed Chronology feels for a first feature. “I expected no less from Kristen,” he tells me, smiling, on a Zoom call from Paris. “She has the whole package. The main thing she has to an impressive extreme is the understanding of actors… but also she has a very strong visual sense. It’s not just doing what she has seen other filmmakers do… It’s a language all her own.”

Assayas also recognizes the parallel between Yuknavitch’s story of finding her voice through writing and Stewart’s own artistic journey. “She’s adapting an autobiographical novel, but ultimately, she’s talking about herself and her own path to become an artist,” he observes. “It seemed so obvious that she, at some point, would become a filmmaker that it didn’t even need saying. Gradually she realized it’s more about coming to terms with herself… I knew it would be a long road, but I knew that eventually she would make it, because I think she’s one of those [people] who ultimately does exactly what she wants to.”

Vivid 16mm cinematography by Corey C. Waters adds to Chronology’s feeling of looking back in time at the diffuse edges of memory. “I wanted this movie to feel like it was found in an attic… something that felt stitched together,” Stewart says of the choice to shoot on celluloid. “It totally informed my editorial process. There were times where the moment was done because we ran out of film, you know? And that’s sometimes how you remember your life.” This contributed as much to the movie’s soul as to its aesthetic. “If you roll out [of film], your film turns pink, yellow, orange, red—it becomes something that feels bloody and like a scar and feels burned,” she says. “The movie feels like a fucking body.”

The film does feel like a living, breathing amalgamation of Stewart’s and Poots’ personal experiences, emotions, ideas and references blended with Yuknavitch’s––with raw nerves, scraped knees, and an open heart. Their mutual dedication to the film and synonymously, to each other, makes Chronology’s sheer existence a veritable artistic victory. “The movie is about listening to yourself, which is really hard to do when the voice in the room that is the loudest is the patriarchy… It took me a really, really, really long time to trust myself,” Stewart says. “Finding Immy and making this movie [felt], this sounds cheesy, but like unearthing a battle cry. It felt joyous as fuck.”

A much different version of Chronology could have been assembled in the editing bay; a version that’s more neat, less chaotic, less dark, more broadly palatable to distributors and casual audiences and awards bodies, but the conviction of Stewarts’ and Poots’ creative choices constitute the film’s ultimate achievement. “There’s some idea that people still want simplicity, because there’s great elegance to simplicity. If you say, ‘This is what it is to be a woman,’ that goes down easy, right?” Poots says. “It’s a thorny, rotten, wondrous, astonishing thing [to be a woman]. I am so tired of being projected upon… It’s all other people’s misplaced horror and guilt and all of that that we then have to carry on our backs.”

Chronology honors the essential contradictions of the feminine experience; the pleasure and rage that intertwine. “I think we’re both, in our own ways, quite livid,” says Poots. “It’s also the coolest thing about each other, I think, how that comes out.” As Stewart puts it, “Rage can be the most fun thing ever.”

Inevitably, the film won’t be for everyone, but Stewart is unafraid of the uncomfortable conversations that will follow. “I always get, like, ‘Ah, it’s really tough,’” she says. “I’m like, ‘Yeah, but it’s fun, right?’”

Source: https://i-d.co/article/kristen-stewart-director-interview-the-chronology-of-water-movie-imogen-poots/

Kristen Stewart & Imogen Poots on the cover of I-D Magazine The Director's Cut Issue 2025

Photographed By: MORGAN MAHER

Source: https://teamkristensite.blogspot.com/

Friday, November 21, 2025

Kristen Stewart to be honored at the SFFILM AWARDS NIGHT

On Thursday, the Bay Area’s SFFILM announced honorees for its annual SFFILM Awards Night fundraising event: Oscar-winning actor and “One Battle After Another Star” Benicio Del Toro, presented by co-star Regina Hall; “Sinners” star Wunmi Mosaku, presented by co-star Delroy Lindo; “The Chronology of Water” director Kristen Stewart, presented by her lead star Imogen Poots; and “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere” director Scott Cooper.

Per the nonprofit organization SFFILM, the event, set for Monday, December 8, “honors exemplary achievement in film craft and is a fundraiser with proceeds from the event supporting SFFILM’s enduring mission to discover, nurture, and showcase the next generation of film artists.” The event takes place at San Francisco’s Gateway Pavilion at Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture.

Nion McEvoy & Leslie Berriman Award for Storytelling: Kristen Stewart

Past recipients include Jason Reitman (2024), Roger Ross Williams (2023), Sarah Polley (2022), Maggie Gyllenhaal (2021), Aaron Sorkin (2020), Lulu Wang (2019), Boots Riley (2018), Emily V. Gordon and Kumail Nanjiani (2017), Tom McCarthy (2016), Paul Schrader (2015), Stephen Gaghan (2014), Eric Roth (2013), David Webb Peoples (2012), Frank Pierson (2011), and James Schamus (2010), among others.

Schedule For the SFFILM AWARDS NIGHT On December 8th, 2025

6:00 pm Cocktail Reception

7:00 pm Dinner by McCalls Catering & Events and Awards Program

Sources: https://teamkristensite.blogspot.com/ & https://www.indiewire.com/awards/results/sffilm-honors-benicio-del-toro-kristen-stewart-1235161839/?utm_campaign=trueanthem&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter

Kristen Stewart attends The EnergaCamerimage International Film Festival in Poland

Source: https://teamkristensite.blogspot.com/

Thursday, November 20, 2025

Kristen Stewart talks with Cultured Magazine Artists on Artists Issue & Interviewed By Director Olivier Assayas

Photography Assistance by Dan Patrick

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.

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.

Source: https://www.culturedmag.com/article/2025/11/20/film-kristen-stewart-movies-olivier-assayas-interview/