Directorial Debut ‘Chronology of Water’

Kristen Stewart loves to cook, but on this Thanksgiving eve, the last thing she wants to serve up is, well, a turkey. Which is why she’s been spending much of the day hovering over a desktop rather than a stovetop, reviewing footage from her long-in-the-making directorial debut, The Chronology of Water, a sexy, occasionally bloody, often elliptical drama adapted from Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir about a writer navigating trauma, addiction and the long, messy process of becoming an artist.

“People are like, ‘Oh, everything will get done at some point,’ ” she says over a Zoom call from the Los Angeles house she shares with her wife, filmmaker Dylan Meyer. “But I don’t think that’s true.”

It sounds a little strange considering that the film she is so meticulously fussing over premiered at Cannes way back in May — and opens theatrically in just a few days, on Dec. 5. The former Twilight star, now 35, laughs at the chaotic timeline, but it doesn’t slow her down. In her mind, the project is still very much a work in progress. “I want to put an hour back into the movie,” she says with a grin, presumably half-joking.

Stewart says she’s wanted to direct from the moment she first ventured onto a film set — which, in her case, was practically from birth. Her father was a stage manager; her mother was a script supervisor who later directed. They hauled her to sets throughout her childhood, where she absorbed shot lists and camera setups long before she understood what any of it meant.

At age 10, she landed her first screen role as Patricia Clarkson’s tomboy daughter in 2001’s The Safety of Objects, then spent the next two decades pinballing through the full spectrum of Hollywood fame: first as the mopey teenager in love with an even mopier vampire in the blockbuster Twilight franchise, then diving into work with auteurs like Olivier Assayas and Kelly Reichardt — including an Oscar-nominated turn as Princess Diana in Spencer and a César Award for her performance in The Clouds of Sils Maria (becoming the first American ever to win the French honor) — gradually carving out a reputation as one of the most adventurous actors of her generation.

Through it all, though, she says she’s been quietly running a parallel track, studying her directors — everyone from Catherine Hardwicke to Pablo Larraín — in preparation for the moment she’d step behind the camera herself. “There are certain actors that don’t know where the camera is,” she notes, “but I’ve never been unaware of the process.”

She seems to have been particularly aware of it during her Twilight years. Stewart recalls admiring Hardwicke’s ability to inject personality into a massive commercial machine — “That [first] Twilight movie is hers and reflects her; Catherine accomplished that, hands down,” she says — and noticing how quickly that personal stamp was squeezed as the franchise accelerated. “Being able to withstand and organize that many opinions, and still make something that feels like yours, is near impossible to do,” she says. “With so many voices in the room and with so much expectation, nothing feels personal.”

Stewart wonders whether sequel directors including Chris Weitz and Bill Condon “actually felt like they fully directed those movies,” adding that while working with them, she “felt bad for them and proud of them.” Their later Twilight films, she notes, “had personality, in spite of a really stifled process. They feel almost overtly, bizarrely, spastically themselves.

“You need to have an incredibly thirsty, hungry, brazen, deplorably narrow drive,” she goes on, mulling over the profession she’s finally joined. “You look at that and you get jealous of it as an actor. So then you go, ‘I’d like to form my own version of that.’ ”

As for directing Chronology, Stewart didn’t so much land that job as drag it into existence. She’d long been drawn to Yuknavitch’s memoir and pitched the author immediately after reading it in 2017, then spent years piecing together the financing. “People have a lot to say about how you do that,” she says. “It’s fucking hard, especially if you’re a young — when I say young, I mean inexperienced — actress who’s just demanded that she start making movies.”

Once she finally got the money together, actually shooting the film proved just as consuming. Stewart describes the production as a stretch of near total immersion — long days, little separation and the constant sense that she was guarding a very private vision from the usual swirl of outside opinions. She watched scenes back compulsively, trying to align each moment with the movie she’d been carrying around in her head for years. “All my initial impulses are so evident in the final product,” she says.

The actress at the center of the film — Imogen Poots, best known for her roles in 2007’s 28 Weeks Later and 2015’s Green Room — recalls that Stewart was always pressing for something deeper. “She’s on the quest, on the hunt … for more knowledge, more ways to identify something,” she says.

Even after its splashy Cannes launch, backed by critical acclaim, Stewart struggled to find distribution. “Everyone was like, ‘I cannot sell this,’ ” she says. “Everyone was really focusing on the negative.” To her, the material wasn’t “tough” so much as tactile and emotional, a sensorial character study. The small distributor The Forge eventually stepped in and is now mounting a scrappy awards campaign on the film’s behalf. “I look at this whole season as this big cruise ship, and we’re these Finding Nemo turtles, riding the little wave of the ship,” Stewart says. “At some point people are going to turn around and be like, ‘Hey, what are you doing here?’ ”

The film’s visual and thematic intensity, Stewart believes, speaks for itself — its “lush and girly and soft” textures, its vivid emotional logic, its grainy close-ups and to-hell-with-linearity narrative style. But the road to that point was longer in part because she refused to sand down any of its edges. “When you’re a woman working in this business, you make your perspective a little different in order to be heard — you twist yourself into a palatable shape. We are all walking pretzels,” she says. “Then [women] are shoved to the sidelines and completely tokenized in order to make people feel better about their guilt and their shame. And anytime a woman says something — if it lands — there are people coming in to take credit for that.”

A version of that frustration resurfaced last month when Stewart delivered a fiery keynote at the Academy Women’s Luncheon — a furious dismantling of the myth of post-#MeToo progress — which went viral for a single word. “I knew as soon as I used the word ‘angry,’ that would be the pull quote,” she says now. Her larger point — that she isn’t “grateful to the boys’ club business model that pretends to want to hang out with us while siphoning our resources and belittling our true perspectives” — was more complicated, and more personal.

Stewart has little illusion that the larger system will shift anytime soon. Even so, her next job drops her squarely inside it: She’s prepping to star in her TV debut, The Challenger, an Amazon limited series about Sally Ride, the tennis champion turned astronaut. Stewart seems genuinely excited about the six-month shoot, if slightly bemused to be stepping back into a large-scale corporate production. “We’ll see how it goes,” she says. “These people and producers are not reptiles. But I am a little scared.”

She’s also eager to get back to directing. Her next project, she says, will be deliberately tiny: “I need 10 people to help make this movie with me in Los Angeles, and all the actors are my friends, and I don’t need to make any money — we can make it for absolutely nothing in four to six weeks. We will make this in the dead of night and nobody will know it. Fucking try to shut us down — absolutely not! That’s the way I want to make my next movie.”

It’s the opposite of a studio undertaking, which is precisely why she wants to do it.

But first she has to let go of The Chronology of Water — which is proving to be a decidedly difficult thing to do.

She’s still got the film’s images pinned up on the wall of her home office. This morning, as she was assembling a zine for her cast and crew, filled with unused images and moments from shooting, her computer crashed, then the power went out — almost as if the universe were hinting that it was time to move on. But she just relocated to another room, which at least on Zoom looks borderline monastic: A large upholstered chair and an art deco vanity appear to be the only furniture. As she talks, she absent-mindedly adjusts her Dodgers-themed Marriage Skateshop cap, a gesture that makes her look both focused and a little restless.

Or maybe just fixated. She may not be able to splice that extra hour into the film — or, this close to release, even an extra minute — but she’s still cooking up last-minute plans for Chronology of Water. She has visions of turning every screening into a kind of gallery, a way to immerse audiences in the film’s emotional logic. “I want to create this installation piece so you feel engulfed by the movie when you enter and when you exit,” she explains.

But she also knows, down deep, that she needs to stop “shredding this movie by the frame, down to its bolts,” as she puts it. “I want to make my next movie so badly. So I need to stop eating this one over and over and over and over.”

This story appeared in the Dec. 3 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.