Before Kristen Stewart makes her directorial debut with the upcoming film The Chronology of Water, the Twilight star is opening up about her decision to work behind the camera instead of in front of it.
“Actresses get treated like s***, I’ve got to tell you,” Stewart, 35, told The Sunday Times in an interview published on Saturday, January 24. “People think anyone could be an actress, but the first time I sat down to talk about my movie as a director, I thought, ‘Wow, this is a different experience, they are talking to me like I’m somebody with a brain.’”
She continued, “There’s this idea that directors have otherworldly abilities, which is not true. It’s an idea perpetuated by men. Not to sound like I’m complaining all the time, but it’s worse for female actors than male ones — they get treated like puppets, but they are not.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Stewart details an interaction she had with a “male actor I really love,” highlighting the perceived differences between male and female actors.
“And I said there are no female Method actors because Method acting is an acrobatic performance to make acting seem like a feat that it is not,” she explained. “I think acting is just playing pretend; you don’t have to do 50 press-ups before a take. As soon as I made the distinction between male and female actors, he became defensive and said he had never met an actress that wasn’t crazy.”
She added, “A couple of years ago a comment like that would have made me turn red in the face, my ears would have started steaming and I would have seemed exactly like what he wanted me to seem like — an angry woman. Instead, I just continued and got to the end of my thought. Getting older is great because you can achieve a calm.”
Stewart got her acting start at just 12 years old, when she starred as Jodie Foster’s daughter in David Fincher’s 2002 thriller Panic Room. She became a bonafide superstar by the time she was 18 after playing Bella Swan in the blockbuster Twilight saga alongside costar Robert Pattinson. She eventually earned an Oscar nomination for best actress for her portrayal of the late Princess Diana in 2022’s Spencer.
Now, she’s directing The Chronology of Water, based on American writer Lidia Yuknavitch’s 2011 memoir following a young woman, Lidia (Imogen Poots), who is sexually abused at the hands of her father (Michael Epp). The film also stars Thora Birch and Earl Cave.
“If I was a man I wouldn’t have made this movie,” Stewart told The Sunday Times. “We have to deny our physicality every single day and there is so much — like birth — that is so painful and also quite beautiful, but we don’t share it because it is uncomfortable and icky.”
She continued, “We’ve been pushed out of the canon in terms of expression. I wanted to speak to a world designed to silence women. We have to push people out of the way to get our experience seen and that pisses people off.”
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