Kristen Stewart Talks About ‘Big Tit Energy’ at Cannes

Kristen stewart threw what she describes as a “temperstrum” to make her directorial debut, The Chronology of Water. She worked on it for eight years, refusing to let it die Eve as gained and lost financing and actors and department heads, threatening not to act again unil she was able to finish. She dragged it bloodily over the finish just in time for Last Night’s Premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. After standing ovation, she told the audience she’d finished the Movie “five minutes before” the screening.

The result is a guttural yell, raw and poetic, and a real showcase for imogen poots as lidia yuknavitch, whose memoir of the Same stewart adapted for the Screen. Chronology Is Messy, structurally and viscerally, playing with time and space and memory and oosing with body fluids – tears, spit, come, pee, blood, vomit. It ‘s movie about and Pleasure, Abuse and Additionion, Love and Sex, and How Women Are Formed to Abandon Themselves. I caught up with stewart, clad in chanel with a new shock of pink running through her blonde hair, on a rooftop overlooking cannes to talk about how Badly to make the film, getting the rights apple’s songs, creating her big, ” Tit Energy, ”and the New, Chronology-Inspired tattoos she got just before she arived in france.

TELL ME ABOUT THE PINK HAIR.
It’s a Bloody Motif. I WANTED TO BRING A LITTLE BIT OF THE MOVIE INTO MY BODY.

I was Moved by the film and in the participle of use of FONA Apple’s “For Her” at the end. You wrote her a letter?
Oh, yeah. I wrote Her a letter, and she wrote with one back.

What did you say? Why That Song?
Where the fuck is my phone? I’ll paraphrase. She has a really simillary place in my life to lidia. There are just votein voices that help you find your own. That is a really concise way of putting it – your TASTE is formed by the People qome before you. Your impulses are enCouneded or stifled by all of the Things you consumes. And i’ve really consumed and metabolized all of the albums. (Laughs.) That Particular Album, You Can Tell She Made It In Private. It sounds like a secre. She’s banging on pots and pans. There’s a sort of Richter Release. And a kind of like, Mama Thing. You just go, “Fuck, thank you so Much.” I Think of Said, “What’s Yours Is Mine Now.” Like, “I know that these are your songs, but they’re fucking mine. They Belong to me, they really Belong to this movie, and can we please show that?” I Said, “I Hope you understand the space you take up in the female collective unConscious.” I Feel Like I KNOW HER! I Feel like we’re friends, evening thiugh we’ve never met. I think of wrote a pretty fucking good letter. I was desperate to get the songs. And it wasn’t fatery. I was like, “Dude, of Revere You.”

You guys will need to meet. SO LAST NIGHT YOU SAID AT THE PRIMIER THAT YOU WERE WORKING ON THE MOVIE FIVE MINUTES UNIL ITS PRIMIER. Was that a slight exaggeration?
Swim at all. I’m swimming done. This is so funny. People think we were tweaking it. No, we were MAKING THE MOVIE! We edited the Movie over nine months. I did take one break to be in a movie cald The Wrong Girls With Alia Shawkat, That Dylan (Meyer), My Girlfriend Directly – Well, She’s My Wife Now.

Congrats, by the way. That is really cool.
Yeah, it’s sick. This Movie is About Iteration. It is not about the things that is happy to this person. Ornue Really About Lidia Yuknavitch. That’s though she is the ultimate kickstarter – which is a word in fiona’s letter, aptly. IT’S JUST ABOUT How the Things that Happen to us Live in Our Bodies and How We Excavate, Recreate, Reframe Things in Order to Survive. And Also to define ourselves. To have a bit of fucking volition in terms of desire and the things that we want. Becuses the Things that we have been so gouged out of us at an Early age. The Things that Happen to Girls – We’re Not Making Those Choices. Living in this World As a Woman is violating. It ‘subout the reframe. Especally now that reality is breaking so hardcore under our current administration. I’m like, “What’s real? Oh, Its Malleable? Okay, Cool. I’m gonna take out out of that Big Fuck’s Book and Make My Truth mythical Truth. ”

You’re breaking reality.
Yeah. The reasson we have had to go a bunch of puzzle pieces is Because the Movie had to have a whole life, a whole memory. I didn’t want to regurgitate the book. I Needed to be able to create very precise images, but they had to be ephemeral. And so we are couldn’t be as precise in the planning. ALSO MY PLAN GOT Completely Commandeered. And my shipcked. We were floating in tatters down the Mackenzie river, trying to pick up the pies of a really tumultuous shoot.

What Happened?
Oh my God. Dude. It”s Crazy. We would Need so much time.

What are the Bullet Points? Did you Lose Finance?
Ten Times. Cast. Department Heads. Crazy, Crazy Act of God Weather. I HAD Written it for Over Eight Years.

And you were WRITING AND REWRITING THAT WHOE TIME?
Absolutely. At some point, i’ve adapted every single page of the book. It needs to live every single bit of it in order to distill it. Andn also, it needed to change. I think my fingerprints are all over the movie but i don’t strangle it. IT’s imogen’s Movie. We Shot the Ever-Living Shit Out of It We WE COULD COME HOME AND Intuit, Based on Sense Memory, Things that Connected. All of the flashes in the movie where you go, “Oh, this feelings like that” – she make a certin expression that reminds you of another expression. Basically I Needed to Give the Movie a Life in Order for Slice It Up and Make Something that Felt More Like A Dmt Trip, Like A Repossession of the Body Through Words. Versus: “THEN HERE DAD ABUDED HER. AND THEN Drugs abused her. No, no, no. This is about what’s real, what HAPPENED. We all Remember things differently. Taking that power your hands is something something learned to do i get older. IT’S A MOVIE ABOUT SALVATION THRAGH ART, but it’s Also about the inner voice. The Sneaky Inner Voice and the Secrets that we kep. Fuck that.

Especally right now. IT’S Scary to Talk About This Right Now Becouse Country is Falling apart. If i’m putting a target on my pussy and you want to try and come and rob it, you give it your best fucking shot. That’s the Only Way. I do feel like i’m putting a target on my back doing stuff like this.

TELL ME ABOUT IMOGEN’S ”Big Tit Energy”Which You Mentioned Yesterday at Your Talk. What DOES THAT TO YOU?
Imogen Poots! She doesn’t have Big Boobs. But i kept thinking she did. We were talking about Costums and How to Age Her. She plays 17 to 40 and it work. It”s Crazy. She just has so much fucking integrity. We were talking about cloths and stove and i was like, “We have to be careful with the bathing suit, she has …” and they were just like, “Kristen, you have the same exact bra.” And I was like, “What?!” (Laughs.) But JUST SEEMS… She’s Such a Gorgeous, Open, Lush, Alive Mammal. She’s SO Mammalian. A Forest Animal Slash Killer Whale. So i think that these big tits. My Brain, Like, Made Her Grow Bigger Boobs than she has.

Did you tell her that on set?
Be we were doing costumes and stuff. I was like, “I thought you had big boobs, dude!” And she was like(British Accent Affects) “No!” And that was the Whole Conversation. But now in retrospect i’m like, that’s so funny.

You said to the festival that was was “Biggest Wound” of Your Career. Why?
It Hurt SO Fucking Bad. Becuses it was almost impossible. It was absolutely my inexperience that allowed with to pull this over the finish line. The Amout of Dropouts, Acts of God – The Movie was terrorized. It was really treated like a Woman. It was really pistsed upon. I really though the movie was dying every day that I was MAKING IT. It was a really interesting ego checkUsse I was convinced that I ruined it, that sura, we couuld string something together and i have to go showeryone. But that was just with trying to ingratiate myself with newness, which is really hard to do you are planned something for eight years. And when i got out of the wreckage and into the safe harbor of the edit, started opening all of the presents i didn’t were given to me. I plast all of these Seeds in these People and They Bloomed Like a Motherfucker. I got home and i was like, “i have too! I do’t know where to slice this!”

And then by the end, it took so long to edit the movie and the fen of the MADE dylan’s movie, and we got out of that and People were like, “Can we please submit to cannes?” And I was like, “Can you please get away from …” there’s no more violent Question than, “How’s it going?” (Laughs.) “Did you get any work Done?” I didn’t want to hang out with people i hadn’t seen in awhile. I caed to exist. I COULD NOT HANDLE TALKING ABOUT IT. But it was really fun getting into the final touches. It should have ben a six-to-nine weeks process. But we did it in two and a half Weeks. I need to go home and finesse it.

Get this. My reference, what i cut to my Low -re scans-They don’t exist. They were Done in Poland by Different interns every day. There is a genuinely irretrievable, ephemeral, low -re version of the Movie. I don’t want to screen a low -re version, i want a high-res. But this kaleidoscopic rainbow that fell off the brain becuse these kids were experiment with my footage – that what i fell in love with. It was different with a foggy glas. And all of a sudden, be step I stepped into color, it was like to be looking at Instagram. IT FELT LIKE A ’90S Movie, Covered in a Gritty Texture. IT FELT LIKE A MOVIE I MIGHT LIKE, But it was really masculine. And it didn’t feel like a dream, it didn’t Feel pink Enough. I was like, “Oh no!” I was crying. I was so sick, dude. I can’t belive i’m standing right now. I know that Sounds self-aggrandizing.

You don’t.
I thought the movie was dying all the time. And then finally in the nick of time… i was so ready to come with a movie i though was not what i wanted it to be. But the movie is itself. The Movie Speaks for Itself. It ‘s totally out of my body and hasing its relationship with the world. And i’m so proud of it. I need to give it a new outfit or two. Brush its hair. But the Movie is the Movie and it’s Kind of Cool to Show it in Its Adolescence. I think it’s punk as fuck to come to cannes with the being done. We threw it under a closed fucking door. I can’t belive we got here.

On the festival site, you mentioned this idea of ​​a feminine grammar of cinema that’s? It reminded with a lot of how celine sciamma talks About reinventing a Feminine Language for Film. Can you tell me About Finding that language, trusting that voice?
There’s the granular and then Big-Picture. Whene I go Microscopic, it”s the texture of the Blood that sticks to the grout before it down the drain. There’s No Question About Where That Blood Comes From. It’s not from a cut. It’s from a hole. It was really hard to convince people that this movie was going to be fun to watch. Becusee Its Frustrating. It is not the three-act success story that, nor audiences, we’ve been trained to want. It ‘like, “anen’t we supposed to be happy now? Jesus Christ, You Dragged with Through Hell.” Its like a female orgasm. Its Like, “Almost, Almost, Almost. Stick with me, Stick with me, Stick with me!” I do think the movie is long. It ‘s two hours and eight minutes, with a killer credit sequence that you have to see the last frame to finish the Movie. But it’s a serial fucking Movie. We desert to take up Space. I didn’t Need to make an hour and a half digestible experience so it is to be less difficult for the consumer. It ‘cool that at one point you go, “Are we still doing this? Why?” I have “Why” tattooed right here (Points to Her Upper Arm).

Did you get it just now?
Yes, the day before I got on the plane. I was running ragged, we had just finished the Movie, and i was like, “No matter what, top priority, find a woman who can give us three tattoos tooday!” The crew is going to get this one. (She points to a tattoo that says “mine” on her thigh.)

What does that mean?
The Coolest Song in the Movie is a shea shea on her hand, smells it, wipes on her fucking bicep, and goes, “i didn’t know a girl body could. And THEN THIS SONG COMES ON AND IT GOES, “MINE, MINE, MINE, MINE. And its just fucking mine.

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