Kristen Stewart has a busy 2024 ahead of her with two films ready to premiere at Sundance, the lesbian crime thriller “Love Lies Bleeding” and the sci-fi romance “Love Me.” And she also has “Sacramento,” a road trip comedy on the way later this year, too. But Stewart may put off doing any other acting gigs until she gets the funding to make her directorial debut, “The Chronology Of Water.” In fact, that’s what she’s threatened to do in a new cover story for Variety. If Stewart can’t make the film, which she first announced at the Cannes Film Festival in 2018, she’ll quit acting altogether.
“I’m going to make this movie before I ever work for someone else,” she told Variety, laughing nervously. “Yeah, I will quit the f*cking business. I won’t make a-f*cking-nother movie until I make this movie. I will tell you that, for sure. I think that will get things going.” Despite five years of development, Imogeen Poots attached to star, and Ridley Scott producing through his Scott Free banner, Stewart still hasn’t gotten the backing she needs to film “The Chronology Of Water.” It’s a strange case considering Stewart’s global appeal and success in indie cinema over the past decade-plus. Acquiring backing for the film has proved “near impossible,” stated the actress. “The current climate is a real, capital N ‘No’ for anything that has not been proven already.”
Maybe Stewart is stuck due to her project’s challenging material. Based on Lidia Yuknavitch‘s 2011 memoir of the same name, “The Chronology Of Water” is a non-linear, stream-of-consciousness autobiography about the author dealing with her personal and sexual traumas through alcohol abuse as she strives to be a competitive swimmer. Stewart thinks its story may be too kinetic and unappealing for someone to back. “There’s a certain physicality to the type of film that I want to make that I think will be, in a slugline, really unattractive to quote-unquote ‘buyers,’ but in action, is entirely pervasively moving,” continued Stewart. “That has just not been an easy sell. It’s not about the plot. It’s about someone self-Heimliching and contextualizing why that person has swallowed their own voice their whole life.”
At least Stewart has the backing of her fellow artists to encourage her for now. “Love Lies Bleeding” director Rose Glass read Stewart’s screenplay for “The Chronology Of Water” that the actress co-wrote with Yuknavitch’s husband Andy Mingo, and she loved it. “It’s really wonderful,” she says. “I’m sure it will be a challenging one. It’s got some sharper images and leans into some spaces that make people uncomfortable — but in an interesting way.” Stewart also asserts that her approach to her directorial debut would explore female experience beyond the “heteronormative quality” of her previous acting performances. She envisions her film could hold “an entire, yet-to-be-written female language,” which, again, could be simultaneously alluring but uncomfortable for backers.
“There’s just something about the open nature of our physicality, and I mean that vaginally — the flow, the bleeding,” Stewart continued about her approach to her project. “We can take in a lot of negativity, and we can put out a lot of beauty, and that is what the movie’s about. But it comes from this disgusting, bloody orifice, and we’ve negated the existence of it forever, and it needs to be in discourse. It needs to be physicalized in movies. It needs to be looked at, acknowledged. It needs to be fucking honestly worshiped.”
But as ambitious as her vision for her movie is, Stewart thinks her relative lack of experience behind the camera is another obstacle for her. “I’ve never made a movie before, and so I lack experience — and therefore, I lack credibility,” Stewart said. That may dissuade some funders, but Stewart has directed before: a 2017 short film “Come Swim” which premiered at Sundance, and a music video for Boygenius last year. That may not be enough to convince backers, though. “They’re like, ‘I don’t know if she’s right,'” mocked Stewart. “I’m like, ‘Well, I am! I’ve done this forever.’”
Maybe this year’s Sundance will help Stewart find the funding she needs for “The Chronology Of Water.” She told Variety she plans to stay for the entire festival and will network to find the help she needs. “I feel like I could walk through a wall right now because — I’m going to tip my hand, because that’s what I do — I just scouted this movie, and I saw places, and people, and faces, and locations that opened themselves up to me and didn’t have big no’s on them, and I was just bawling the entire time,” Stewart said. “I can’t wait to go to f*cking Sundance. I can’t wait to make my movie.”
Stay tuned to The Playlist’s coverage of the Sundance Film Festival later this month to see how Stewart’s latest performances go with critics. And maybe she’ll find what she needs to make “The Chronology Of Water” at the festival, too.
