Kristen Stewart's Audacious Directorial Debut: A Cinematic Revolution
Kristen Stewart has unleashed her first feature film as director, The Chronology of Water, and it represents nothing less than a cinematic revolution. The project, starring the formidable Imogen Poots, has been generating intense discussion at film festivals worldwide, with Stewart describing it as a "punk rock ayahuasca trip" that defies conventional storytelling.
A Film That Demands to Be Experienced
"The movie is to be eaten alive and re-metabolised and shat out differently, from everyone's perspective," Stewart declares with characteristic intensity. This impressionistic arthouse collage, adapted from Lidia Yuknavitch's experimental memoir, explores themes of pain, loss, memory and desire reclamation. Stewart acknowledges the film won't appeal to everyone, citing one memorable Letterboxd review: 'The Chronology of what the fuck did I just watch?'
"Whether it's your least favourite movie or your most favourite, it's not lying, it's genuine," Stewart asserts. "And I'm so fucking proud of that." Sitting alongside her star Imogen Poots, Stewart's energy is palpable - her leg bouncing, her vocabulary ferocious, creating an atmosphere that feels both invigorating and galvanising.
From Page to Screen: A Passionate Journey
Stewart first encountered Yuknavitch's memoir in 2018 while filming JT LeRoy. "Forty pages in, I was so rallied and so viciously adamant that nobody else could make the movie but me," she recalls. "It was so physical. So vital. Such a permeating secret."
The director was particularly drawn to the book's exploration of female experience. "As a woman, we have these seeping birthplaces that are our orifices, and it's where we hold our power, but it's also where we're taken advantage of," Stewart explains. "We're all so muzzled. And it just felt like the muzzle was off. That's the fun part. It's got a loud mouth. A big, wide-open mouth."
Overcoming Industry Resistance
The film faced significant challenges in securing financing, with Stewart and Poots discussing how confessional literature by women is often belittled compared to similar work by men. "There are so many examples within modern literature of men laying it all bare, but as soon as you do something overtly personal as a woman, it's less serious," Stewart observes. "We've just been fully X-ed out of modernism in the canon."
When potential backers read the script, Stewart says they reduced it to simplistic marketing questions. "OK, well, what's it about, incest and rape? Fun!" she mimics. "It's about the gouging out of desire, and the reframing of that, and how empowered that is. In a slug line, it's a really tough sell." The project took eight years of development before finally coming together, mostly filmed on location in Latvia.
A Cast of Creative Misfits
Poots delivers a performance of immense physical and emotional intensity as the adult Lidia, supported by a remarkable ensemble including Kim Gordon, Thora Birch and Jim Belushi. When asked about her casting choice, Stewart offers characteristically blunt praise: "She's my favourite actor, and everyone else sucked. There was literally no one else, and she's been a fave of mine for ever."
The film's unconventional structure, rejecting traditional narrative in favour of memory fragments, created unique filming conditions. Male actors would come and go "sort of like a conveyor belt," as Poots describes it, or "chapters" in Stewart's formulation. "It was fucking incredible to watch male actors come in and have it not be about them," Stewart grins. "I would be like: sorry, but we're actually not gonna shoot you. We're just gonna shoot her."
A Shared Understanding Among Artists
Thora Birch, who plays Lidia's sister Claudia, describes the experience of working with Stewart as both intimidating and exhilarating. "You cannot enter a conversation with Kristen Stewart without coming locked, loaded and ready to go," she laughs from her Los Angeles home. Birch believes their shared experience of childhood fame created an immediate connection. "Maybe I related to her because we're both performers who started out very, very young, and so we had a common language."
Birch sees the film as emblematic of female experience that mainstream cinema rarely addresses. "We're talking about period blood and stillborns and familial sexual abuse. Nobody wants to talk about this stuff, and yet she presents it in such a way that it marries fantasy and poeticism, and also the human experience."
A Defining Moment in Stewart's Career
For those who know Stewart primarily as a movie star, The Chronology of Water may come as a surprise. Birch, however, sees it as entirely consistent with Stewart's artistic vision. "This is a very Kristen Stewart movie," she insists. "One reviewer said: homegirl can direct. And coming from LA, I was like: yeah, that's it. Homegirl can direct. She knows what's up."
The film represents Stewart's determination to create art on her own terms, refusing to be muzzled by industry expectations or conventional storytelling. As it prepares for its UK cinema release, The Chronology of Water stands as a testament to artistic courage and the power of female creative vision in contemporary cinema.
