Kristen Stewart: “With this film, I have long thought of having mesyy”
Meeting with the one who signs the exciting beginnings of director with The Chronology of Water despite a long and sometimes chaotic creation process.
When is your desire to adapt The Chronology of Water from Lidia Yuknavitch, this book Where she told how she had managed to get out of the literature of a toxic family environment ravaged by violence. ?
Kristen Stewart: Before I even finished reading it! So much page after page, this story had struck me and brought out of the closet a mind-blowing number of corpses that I myself had locked there. But this precipitation, therefore born from this intimate experience of reader, was obviously unlike what it was necessary to adapt to the screen this book, constituted as a kaleidoscope or a puzzle which must be expected to be deposited to grasp all the meaning
How did you do it?
I took my time. I took several years to write my version of each page of this book. While obviously growing up, by ripening, my relationship to this work has changed. This is why this long time, although not always my fact, served the project. My final version of this scenario contained at least 5 different films. And then I chose… not to choose! Because I was sure that it would be the only way to find my film to me. In this, I can say that making The Chronology of Water looked like free jazz. At the shooting as well as in assembly. Besides for at least a year, during the post-production phase, I thought I had everything messed up. I even crossed a kind of mourning which I had trouble freeing it because I wanted to have not been up to it. And then suddenly, the film appeared to me. I had managed to build my kaleidoscope. Among the fifteen possible films from my rushes, I managed to make one. Which looks like what I had felt as a reader. The trip was long and trying but I never felt so much alive
Your film marks by its incredible sensory power, your work on textures, colors, the grain of different skins…. Your director of the photo Corey C. Waters was present very upstream in writing to create this universe?
I would have loved it! Because since this shooting, Corey C. Waters has become like a blood brother like me. But what happened in this post tells the rollerblading emotional coaster that this adventure was for me. I had indeed done all the preparation with another head of operator but I perceived that something was wrong. So, a weekend, very late I decided to change everything and use Corey. I was aware of the madness of this gesture. It’s like jumping from a cliff without knowing how to swim and without a life vest. Corey is even younger than me and not much experience. We were two babies. But he immediately connected to the images I had in mind and transcended them. He immediately became an essential element of this project. Even if it was in fact one of the last to join him.
It was obvious from the start that you would not play the central role?
Yes because I would have been absolutely unable to manage everything.
And what made you want to entrust it to Imogen Poots?
Because I hadn’t seen it bad on the screen. But also because beyond her talent, I knew that spectators would naturally be attached to her and therefore follow her character including in all the bad decisions she takes. Imogen spontaneously arouses an empathy essential for the balance of my film. And I can I think she like me arrived at a stage of our lives where we were able to get caught up in this story. Like a second departure for us who started very young on the screen. We have long been taught to hide certain things to attract attention, to find work, to “succeed” … with The chronology of water, I have the feeling that we are exactly in the opposite logic. And each in our place, she in front of the camera, me behind, we revealed new things of us.
The Chronology of Water. By Kristen Stewart. With Imogen Pots, Thora Birch, James Belushi… Duration: 2h08. Indeterminate
