Kristen Stewart on Why The Chronology of Water Is ‘Like a Female Orgasm’

Kristen Stewart threw what she describes as a “temper tantrum” to make her directorial debut, The Chronology of Water. She worked on it for eight years, refusing to let it die even as she gained and lost financing and actors and department heads, threatening not to act again until she was able to finish it. She dragged it bloodily over the finish line just in time for last night’s premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. After a 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 name Stewart adapted for the screen. Chronology is messy, structurally and visually and viscerally, playing with time and space and memory and oozing with bodily fluids — tears, spit, sweat, come, pee, blood, vomit. It’s a film about pain and pleasure, abuse and addiction, love and sex, and how women are forced 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 it hurt to make the film, getting the rights to Fiona Apple’s songs, creating her own cinematic language, Poots’s “big tit energy,” and the new, Chronology-inspired tattoos she got just before she arrived 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 particular the use of Fiona Apple’s “For Her” at the end. You wrote her a letter?
Oh, yeah. I wrote her a letter, and she wrote me one back.

What did you say? Why that song?
Where the fuck is my phone? I’ll paraphrase. She has a really similar place in my life to Lidia. There are just certain voices that help you find yours. That is a really concise way of putting it — your taste is formed by the people that come before you. Your impulses are encouraged or stifled by all of the things you consume. And I’ve really consumed and metabolized all of those albums. [Laughs.] That particular album, you can tell she made it in private. It sounds like a secret. 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 I 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, even though we’ve never met. I think I wrote a pretty fucking good letter. I was desperate to get the songs. And it wasn’t even flattery. I was like, “Dude, I revere you.”

You guys do need to meet. So last night you said at the premiere that you were working on the movie five minutes up until its premiere. Was that a slight exaggeration?
Not at all. I’m not even 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 called The Wrong Girls with Alia Shawkat, that Dylan [Meyer], my girlfriend directed — well, she’s my wife now.

Congrats, by the way. That’s really cool.
Yeah, it’s sick. This movie is about iteration. It’s not about the things that happened to this person. Or even really about Lidia Yuknavitch. Even though she is the ultimate kickstarter — which is a word I used 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. Because the things that we want are 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’s about the reframe. Especially now that reality is breaking so hardcore under our current administration. I’m like, “What’s real? Oh, it’s malleable? Okay, cool. I’m gonna take a page out of that big fuck’s book and make my truth my truth.”

You’re breaking reality.
Yeah. The reason we had to go make 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 couldn’t be as precise in the planning. Also my plan got completely commandeered. And my ship wrecked. We were floating in tatters down the Mackenzie River, trying to pick up the pieces 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 financing?
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 whole time?
Absolutely. At some point, I’ve adapted every single page of the book. It needed to live every single bit of it in order to distill it. And then 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 so we could come home and intuit, based on sense memory, things that are connected. All of the flashes in the movie where you go, “Oh, this feels like that” — she makes a certain expression that reminds you of another expression. Basically I needed to give the movie a life in order for me to slice it up and make something that felt more like a DMT trip, like a repossession of the body through words. Versus: “Then her dad abused her. And then drugs abused her. Then the world abused her.” No, no, no. This is about what’s real, what happened. We all remember things differently. Taking that power into your hands is something that I’ve learned to do as I get older. It’s a movie about salvation through art, but it’s also about the inner voice. The sneaky inner voice and the secrets that we keep. Fuck that.

Especially right now. It’s scary to talk about this right now because our country is falling apart. If I’m putting a target on my pussy and you want to try and come and grab 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 mean to you?
Imogen Poots! She doesn’t have big boobs. But I kept thinking she did. We were talking about costumes and how to age her. She plays 17 to 40 and it works. It’s crazy. She just has so much fucking integrity. We were talking about clothes and stuff and I was like, “We have to be careful with the bathing suit, she has…” And they were like, “Kristen, you have the same exact bra size.” And I was like, “What?!” [Laughs.] But she just seems…she’s such a gorgeous, open, lush, alive mammal. She’s so mammalian. A forest animal slash killer whale. So I think she must have these big tits. My brain, like, made her grow bigger boobs than she has.

Did you tell her that on set?
When we were doing costumes and stuff. I was like, “I thought you had big boobs, dude!” And she was like, [affects British accent] “No!” And that was the whole conversation. But now in retrospect I’m like, that’s so funny.

You said to the festival that this was the “biggest wound” of your career. Why?
It hurt so fucking bad. Because it was almost impossible. It was absolutely my inexperience that allowed me to pull this over the finish line. The amount of dropouts, acts of god — the movie was terrorized. It was really treated like a woman. It was really pissed upon. I really thought the movie was dying every day that I was making it. It was a really interesting ego check because I was convinced that I ruined it, that sure, we could string something together and I have to go show everyone. But that was just me trying to ingratiate myself with newness, which is really hard to do when you’ve planned something for eight years. And when I got out of the wreckage and into the safe harbor of the edit, I started opening all of these presents I didn’t know were given to me. I planted all of these seeds in these people and they bloomed like a motherfucker. I got home and I was like, “I have too much! I don’t know where to slice this!”

And then by the end, it took so long to edit the movie and then I 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 me…” 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 ceased to exist. I could not handle talking about it. But it was really fun getting into the final touches. It should have been a six-to-nine week 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-res scans — they don’t exist. They were done in Poland by different interns every day. There is a genuinely irretrievable, ephemeral, low-res version of the movie. I don’t want to screen a low-res version, I want a high-res. But this kaleidoscopic rainbow that fell off the truck because these kids were experimenting with my footage— that’s what I fell in love with. It was diffused with a foggy glass. And all of a sudden, when I stepped into color, it was like I was 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 believe 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 here with a movie that I thought 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 having its own 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 without being done. We threw it under a closed fucking door. I can’t believe we got here.

On the festival site, you mentioned this idea of a feminine grammar of cinema that’s yet to be written. It reminded me 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 granular and then big-picture. When I go microscopic, it’s the texture of the blood that sticks to the grout before it goes 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. Because it’s frustrating. It’s not the three-act success story that, as audiences, we’ve been trained to want. It’s like, “Aren’t we supposed to be happy now? Jesus Christ, you’ve dragged me through hell.” It’s like a female orgasm. It’s like, “Almost, almost, almost. Stick with me, stick with me, stick with me!” I don’t think the movie is long. It’s two hours and eight minutes, with a killer credit sequence that you have to see til the last frame to finish the movie. But it’s a serious fucking movie. We deserve to take up space. I didn’t need to make an hour and a half digestible experience so it would be less difficult for the consumer. It’s 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 today!” 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 when she comes on her hand, smells it, wipes it on her fucking bicep, and goes, “I didn’t know a girl body could do that. Shoot come.” And then this song comes on and it goes, “Mine, mine, mine, mine.” And it’s just fucking mine.