Kristen Stewart provides an update on her long-awaited feature directorial debut, The Chronology of Water, which she is dying to make happen. After making a name for herself at a young age with roles in Panic Room, Speak, and Catch That Kid, Stewart achieved global stardom for her role as Bella Swan in the Twilight film saga. She is now an Academy Award-nominated actress for her immersive performance in Pablo Larraín's biopic Spencer, in which she portrayed Diana, Princess of Wales.
The Twilight star's latest project is Crimes of the Future, a body horror film written and directed by genre specialist David Cronenberg. The film just had its premiere at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, where it received a six-minute standing ovation, but also prompted multiple walkouts during the screening, which the director expected would happen. In the divisive film, Stewart plays an investigator working for the National Organ Registry who takes a particular interest in Viggo Mortensen's lead character, who is suffering from "Accelerated Evolution Syndrome," which causes him to grow new organs inside his body.
While at this year's Cannes Film Festival for the Crimes of the Future premiere, Stewart spoke to IndieWire about her long-awaited feature directorial debut, an adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s 2011 memoir, The Chronology of Water. Stewart indicated she wants the project to come together sooner rather than later, saying “If I don’t make this movie before the end of the year, I’ll die.” However, the Oscar nominee still has yet to secure complete financing for the film, in part due to her desire to make the movie with a small crew of five people with an indefinite shooting schedule along the coast of Oregon, where Yuknavitch is from.
Stewart first became linked to a Chronology of Water adaptation at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, where she first revealed her plans to write, direct, and star in the film as a male character, leaving the female lead for another actor. Stewart gushed with praise for Yuknavitch’s prose, describing it as "ragingly female," and revealed her goals are to write an exceptionally great female character and hire a "really spectacular actor" to play them. In other interviews since then, Stewart has said this lead role has been cast, though she didn't reveal who got the part.
Since starring in the critically-panned Twilight Saga, Stewart has been honing her craft on a variety of lower-profile, independent projects such as Clouds of Sils Maria and Personal Shopper. She's certainly come a long way from the melodramatic vampire franchise in which her acting was often criticized, to silencing those critics with a mesmerizing performance in Spencer. Kristen Stewart has proven she's ready to make the jump to directing and her debut is slowly but surely coming together.
Source: IndieWire