Kristen Stewart has been “wanting to make movies since I was nine or 10 years old,” she told me on her fourth trip to Cannes in 2017, for the short “Come Swim.” She’s been a fixture at the festival ever since her maiden voyage in 2012 with Walter Salles’ “On the Road,” followed by Woody Allen’s “Cafe Society,” Olivier Assayas’ “Clouds of Sils Maria” and “Personal Shopper,” David Cronenberg’s “Crimes of the Future.” She also served on Cate Blanchett’s Competition jury in 2018.
Stewart’s audacious debut, the Un Certain Regard entry “The Chronology of Water,” was well-received. After eight years of development, Scott Free financed the mood poem about swimming and writing for survival amid personal trauma. Stewart is ebullient after having talked about making her first feature for so long. Back in 2022, she announced that she was adapting (with Andy Mingo) Lidia Yuknavitch’s frank 2011 memoir. Stewart resonated with her hardscrabble story about a woman (Imogen Poots) coping with her teenage sexual abuse by her father via sex, anger, competitive swimming, addiction, and creative writing.
Stewart and I talked on a balcony at the Majestic Hotel. The interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Anne Thompson: What made you so clear that you should turn this material into your first feature? You went for it.
Kristen Stewart: It’s not a movie about the things that actually happened to Lidia. It’s about the things that happened to all of us, and then how to take those things into your body. [They] might not be equivalent or exactly like the experience and abuse specifically that she had. Her plight might not be everyone’s, but it’s similar. There’s thievery and violence in the fucking female experience right now, with the imagery that’s thrust at us and the conversations that are had outside of our bodies and what they do to our inner voices, when we go: “I don’t think you should do that. Don’t say it, keep it a secret. Don’t tell anyone you’re in pain. Don’t tell anyone that that wasn’t OK with you. Keep it to yourself. Oh, don’t vouch for yourself. Don’t fight for that. Oh, don’t speak too loud; they won’t hear you.” Measure, measure, measure. Shame, shame, shame. And so it was not possible to pull back, because the whole movie is about getting that feeling out. I’ve never felt like a provocateur. I never was trying to push buttons.
It doesn’t feel like that. It feels like you’re expressing yourself in every fiber of your being.
It is the truth. There was never a point where I ever questioned it, because there was no way that I was alone in this. The book is such a lifeboat. It’s like a flotation device. It’s such a good place to start. It’s very meta to make a movie about how hard it is to say something that’s exactly what I was experiencing.
Over your career, you’ve taken control of your choices. You’ve often taken the indie route.
Absolutely. This was not without help. I needed to have a couple of public temper tantrums in order to get the right people to listen. I have this stunning collaborator in Charles Gillibert, who [produced] “On the Road,” “Personal Shopper,” and “Clouds of Sils Maria.” He understands that [women] need help and we need a fucking leg up. It took a long time to get this made. Yeah. It took forever.
What hurdles did you face?
The book is not about the things that happened to her, but about how she processes those things, and about how art can save you. And there was no way to sell the movie as an idea. It was impossible to say to people that I wanted to make a DMT trip experience, a life flashing before your eyes, in the way that your memory feels neurological and physical to you. It’s different from the book. It’s a faithful adaptation, but it is not the same experience. There was no way for me to tell people that I needed to go make so many puzzle pieces that I could come home and find authentic, emotional connective tissue, because you cannot plan for things like this. You can’t plan for the ephemeral. You have to go catch it. You have to go create an environment in which things can sprawl and people can explore and learn things. And so therefore, the movie had to have a life in order for it to have its own memory. It couldn’t be exacting, controlled. My hands and my fingerprints are all over it, but I’m not strangling the movie, because the movie had such volition, it had such its own life, that it was telling me what it wanted every day.
Was the movie finished when you brought it to Cannes? Would you go back to the editing room?
The picture is pretty final, it’s color-corrected. I’m not going to cut it, OK? It deserves space. It’s not like the normal success story that has a three-act structure in the terms that we’re used to. Audience are trained, everybody is, because you could not be, to have a certain capacity and a certain expectation for a rhythm and a time code: “I’m supposed to get this now. I want it. Where is it?” Quite often in the movie, there’s so many false wins and starts and hard crashes. And there’s an undulation that resembles a female orgasm that steps away from this 1-2-3, punch of the climax and a sigh of relief in the last five minutes, and the movie’s over. You think you’re there, you think you’re there, you’re not sure. Then you kill it, then you pull back, and then you’re: “Why am I still here?” And it’s frustrating at times, probably. Three-quarters of the way through, you might think to yourself, “Where are we going?” It is intentional.
Imogen Poots anchors it.
She’s the reason why you can get away with all the rest of it, because you never want to stop hanging out with her. Unless we had somebody who really kept you on a line, we were dead in the water.
How did you know she was the right one?
She’s a walking motif. Look at her eyes. Visually, I was taken aback when her face filled my Zoom screen in which we did a pseudo audition, aah, I started getting this feeling: “Oh, my God, the movie might exist.” Because without Lidia — her body is our movie.
You do not shy away from all the orifices and aspects of a woman’s body, and you show a lot of blood.
The second shot of the film is intentional. Fifty percent of the population is not going to wonder where that blood came from. It didn’t come from a wound. It’s textured and chunky, and it’s being sucked down a drain. She also comes into her hand so hard that it’s dripping from her fingers, and she smells it before getting her mind blown by the sheer capability of her own body. And then the hymen breaking, all of the times that she was aching and itching and bleeding. How often have you ached or itched or bled in public and just been: “No, you never, that’s an alone experience, no matter what.” It’s isolating. I hate walking around not telling people what’s going on with me.
It happens to everyone. Women will respond to this. It’s all about the physical.
Yes — the movie takes place on the surface of this woman’s skin. We would arrange rocks on the sand in the same configuration as my favorite pattern of moles on her stomach, just to make sure that we related her to organic material, to imply that she grew here. She did not choose the things that happened to her. We are gouged out. Our desires are given to us. We experience things that we don’t choose, and then they define us for the rest of our lives. [It’s] a book about revering words, and the life-saving significance and importance of words. I also wanted to stay outside of any word, inside the unnamed wet, because we don’t have to take credit for all the shit that comes out of us, but we can turn it into something that is pleasure and pain at once and have that be something that you can decide whether or not it hurts or it feels good.
It must have felt good for you. You’re a director now.
Oh man, it felt so good. I’m dying.
You’re going to do it again.
I can’t wait.
Have you got things in the hopper? Now they’ll give it to you easily.
Yeah, several. It’s going to be a lot easier this time. I’ve always said that as long as I can make another movie after my first one, that I don’t need to be precious or clever about it at all. It just needs to feel pure. I’ve earned the right to try one more time. I never want to make the same movie twice. So whatever comes out next is going to not be anything like this. I can’t fucking wait.
Jim Belushi is brilliant as Lidia’s writing mentor, Ken Kesey.
He brought pages to our pages. He’s a movie star: He did so much research. He was the person that we needed to come pat us on the back and remind us that it’s okay to want approval from a male figurehead, it’s not weird, and it’s not anti-feminist. You’re not a bad feminist if you want someone like Jim Belushi to pat you on the back and tell you that you’re a good girl.
Why did you shoot in 16 millimeters?
Because I didn’t want to record this. I wanted to take pictures so I could slice them up, and I wanted it to feel like a dream, and I needed it to flash before your eyes. And there’s just too much information in a digital image. You can’t put yourself into it, and it also doesn’t speak to time in the way that the movie needs to. The movie needs to fracture. You can’t fracture a recorded image. There’s no break. You get all the information. [The movie] is a completely and utterly inundating experience. But for us, we only have 24 pictures every second, and sometimes less because we’ve pulled them out. And so we really fuck with the experience of literal time, and we put it back into the body, and we can span four decades fluidly, because we shot on film. And also, it does something to people on set. You realize your camera has a heartbeat, you can hear it when the camera starts running — whir — everyone stands at attention. It infuses an immediacy and a sort of honor.
“The Chronology of Water” premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
