Photographed by Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York Times.
When it comes to artists and public figures, there are few things more compelling than when the people we thought we knew show us something different. It’s not an easy feat, but Kristen Stewart has managed it more than once.
Her first big shift was professional: Stewart shot to stardom in the late 2000s and early 2010s as an ingénue lead in big-budget Hollywood hits like the five “Twilight” films and “Snow White and the Huntsman.” But by her mid-20s, she largely rejected acting in popcorn movies in favor of subtler and more emotionally varied independent work, including two films with the great French director Olivier Assayas (“Clouds of Sils Maria” from 2014 and “Personal Shopper” from 2016), as well as “Spencer” (2021), for which she earned an Academy Award nomination for her performance as Princess Diana.
She has undergone a pretty profound transformation offscreen too. During her blockbuster days, Stewart, who is now 35, was a frequent target of the tabloid press, both for her relationships — notably with her “Twilight” co-star Robert Pattinson — and also for her often sullen-seeming public appearances. Flash forward to 2025, and Stewart, who publicly came out in 2017 and married the screenwriter and producer Dylan Meyer this year, has harnessed some entirely different energy. She has embraced her status as a millennial queer icon and also come to see promotional duties not merely as a chore to suffer through but, as I think you’ll see from our interview, opportunities for connection and exploration.
Now, Stewart is changing again, directing her first full-length feature, “The Chronology of Water.” The film, which is in select theaters now, is an adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir of the same name. Imogen Poots stars as Lidia, a competitive swimmer who fights through a series of traumas on her way to becoming the writer she needs to be. It’s a provocative movie — formally and in its subject matter — and one that raises questions about womanhood, sexuality, excess and the stories we choose to tell about ourselves. Those remain questions with which Stewart herself is still eagerly wrestling.
You’ve been trying to make “The Chronology of Water” for close to 10 years, and it’s a memoir that involves a lot of heavy stuff: addiction, child abuse, the loss of an infant. When you first read the book, what was it about that material that made you feel like this was a story that you had to tell? It was the way that she told it; it was the fact of the telling. There’s an invitation in the text to excavate your own memories. But for me, it’s much less about the things that happened to Lidia and much more about how she reorients those things and writes them down. Just the idea of diaristic writing by women being criticized for being selfish and narcissistic — it’s like, anytime you start talking about yourself, it becomes this tired, pathetic, messy thing. And I wanted to make something tired, pathetic and messy that also felt exuberant and encouraging.
So you’re saying that your interest in the material wasn’t as much about the particulars of Lidia’s experience as it was about the way that her writing invited you to examine the particulars of your own experience. I wonder if you can make that concrete a little — As soon as you start making those things specific, you completely dilute the point. In the beginning of the movie, we show a series of images of a woman bleeding at various times in her life. There’s a way that blood sticks to the grout before it runs down the drain that indicates that it did not come from a laceration or a cut; it came from an orifice. That is a very specific experience, but it is also general enough for everyone to insert their lives into the movie if you are a woman or if you have ever loved a woman or heard her speak about what it feels like to bleed from the place that hurts the most but creates life. So if the question is like, Did I have an abusive relationship with my father? No. Do I resent him when he comments on my appearance? Yes.
This is a naïve question, but why does it take eight years to make a movie like this? It’s not a giant special-effects movie. It doesn’t have a bunch of locations all over the world. I had to do a lot of kicking and screaming. Most of the time it’s difficult to pay for something that doesn’t have an equatable success story, something that makes you go, “This is gonna be great because we’ve seen it before.” But this had to be the first thing I said, because it’s about saying things. It took a long time because it is unsavory, unpalatable, because it’s about violation and repossession — and also how fun it is to watch someone do that, because she is a force. She’s like a tsunami. And also there’s a sexuality in it that feels delicious.
In a way, you’re talking about Lidia’s sense of abandon. That could be sexual abandon, creative abandon, abandon when it comes to drinking or drug use, abandon with relationships. I wonder, given that you’re a public figure, if it’s hard for you to feel abandon? I don’t self-censor. I don’t fixate on how things are going to land on other people, because I’m not smart enough.
You think it’s a matter of intelligence? Some people are mastermind crazy control freaks, and I just don’t have that. I think those people are going to die young. It would take years off your life to try and think in those terms. I’ve been lucky enough that I fell on my face in public. A nice healthy amount of humiliation is really humbling, and it makes you realize: That first scratch? Who cares? After that first scratch, you go: OK, crash the car. We can fix it.
But the way that people who don’t know you have a relationship with you — it’s a very rare mode of human existence. What’s it like? I mean, sometimes you find yourself on something that doesn’t really know what it’s saying. And then the subsequent conversation is confused and ambiguous and becomes very sell-y. It feels like you’re just a capitalist cog, which we all are.
Speak for yourself! Hey, go buy a ticket to “The Chronology of Water”! Recently, I was working with a director that was talking about an actress who was thinking about whether or not they should do a film, and they were like, “Well, I think the market right now is. …” I don’t think I’ve ever said the word “market,” unless I was going to buy some oranges. That is just how I function.
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