The Chronology of Water
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Insouciant, fast-talking and tired-eyed after a late night at last May’s Cannes Film Festival, actress Kristen Stewart was passionate in her discussion of long-gestating passion project The Chronology of Water. Based on writer and former champion swimmer Lidia Yuknavitch’s 2011 memoir of the same name, Stewart’s debut directorial feature explores sexual abuse, trauma, and the effort to live a creative, fulfilled, and embodied life in a female body.
Telling of Yuknavitch’s abusive childhood in 1980s Florida, her hedonistic personal life, and her eventual route to literary success, the film is deft, poetic and often harrowing. Imogen Poots stars as Yuknavitch, while Thora Birch is her heartbreakingly solemn older sister. Stewart’s film has a lyricism, brutality, and feminist anger that coalesce wonderfully for a first-time director. Far from a didactic screed or a faint-hearted biopic, The Chronology of Water feels like a true artistic statement.
We caught up with Stewart to discuss her creative process, working with Imogen Poots, and taking advice from Sofia Coppola.
How has reading Lidia Yuknavitch’s book been something that has helped you to identify yourself as an artist?
Kristen Stewart: The book is kind of like this haunted house. The things that happen to this character are extreme, but the things that happen to us in a pervasive sense – the squashing-down of voice and pushing down of natural instincts that women have to do – the amount of thievery and violation, even if it’s not literal – it’s there all of the time. Sometimes there are films or books or even a conversation that lead you to understand that you’re not listening to yourself the way you should be. When I read this book […] it’s like a life-saving piece of material. A flotation device.
This book is like the keys to your own castle. I thought when I read it, that if I had this relationship to it, that I couldn’t be alone, that it needed to be alive. If you’re reading a book, it takes a long time. You do it in your head. But I wanted to do it out loud. I wanted to do this with other people.
How was it to adapt the novel and to try to really capture the inside of someone’s mind in this way? It’s difficult to access interiority like this.
Kristen Stewart: The movie needed to have its own life. It’s not a movie about what happened to Lidia Yuknavitch. It’s about writing. It’s about the way you contextualise your life inside your body, repossessing the things that happened to you, and defining them on your own terms so you can come to acceptance.
It took eight years to make this. And halfway through, I thought we’d lost the movie. I just felt like I was being sucked dry. But I realised when I got back from the shoot, there were all these little gifts, and it was like […] once everything was laid out, it was like doing a jigsaw puzzle. There was an emotional connectivity. But I think if I had executed the script in an exacting way, it would have been trite.
It’s very intentionally fragmented and elliptical in its style. How was the editing process for you?
Kristen Stewart: Well, I made too much movie. But the only way to make something feel like a distillation is to have too much and reduce it, and then it feels like this concentrated, potent dose of something. I came home and put all my pieces on the table, and there were emotional through-lines and connections and sense memories that pointed very clearly to the cuts. It was obvious what needed to happen, even if it took a while to put the jigsaw pieces together. I never wanted it to feel too smart and too precious. But I think I wanted to strangle it, but I wasn’t strong enough. Thank god.
It took eight years to make this. And halfway through, I thought we’d lost the movie
How much do you identify with the main character?
Kristen Stewart: Well, she is all of us in a way. Women have a concave nature, we receive. It’s an inherent physical difference we have. And we have God, the Father, the Psychiatrist, the Director: they’re all men. We open ourselves up and hope to receive. And if you take the wrong things into your body, they will fucking kill you. It’s about the space women occupy, and how we often operate from a place of shame, and squash that little voice we know we should listen to.
As a debut director, were there any mentors or industry people who gave advice or guidance to you that you treasured?
Kristen Stewart: Yeah, dude. I spoke to Pablo Larrain when I was about to make a chaotic last-minute decision that could have really sunk us. For the rest of the movie, I had his voice in my head saying: keep it together. I fucking love him. Sofia Coppola read the screenplay and told me not to rely so much on voiceover – that images will find a connection to other images. She gave me really good, writerly advice.
Can you tell me about Imogen Poots and what she brings to this performance?
Kristen Stewart: She really had skin in the game. She’s been acting as long as I have, and therefore, there are certain safeguards and walls she has to protect the more tender parts of herself. But we both looked at each other and went: I want to let it out. It sounds weird, like we made a sports movie, but she actually got two hernias making this movie. After we finished the movie, she told me. I was like – ‘you’re fucking out of your mind, why didn’t you tell me?’ She said she didn’t want me to pull the leash. Imogen is so smart and capable, and she really is this whole movie.
And are you happy with the finished result?
Kristen Stewart: I love the movie now. But for a minute I thought that I’d ruined it. But I’ve done everything in public my whole life, so it was like: well, I guess everyone’s going to see it. Taking it to festivals and having these conversations is great. It’s a bizarre film. It’s like watching your kid go to school after cutting her hair weird, but then everyone loves it.
