written by ARIEL LEBEAU
photography MORGAN MAHER
styling ESTHER MATILLA
It’s been raining for days in Los Angeles. In a 4000-square-foot suite at L’Ermitage hotel, where our i-D photo shoot with Kristen Stewart and Imogen Poots is taking place, the floor-to-ceiling windows look out over a panorama of gray clouds and even grayer concrete. “What an incredible day in L.A.,” Stewart says as she glances through the glass. “I can’t believe we’re shooting inside.”
The multi-room suite is so massive that Stewart and Poots remain almost completely out of my sight until the moment they are ready to shoot. Before I see them, I hear them, as sounds waft from their glam room: the buzz of electric hair clippers, muffled songs by Liz Phair and The The, bursts of laughter and more laughter. Once they do emerge, the beauty and coolness they exude feels so effortless one wouldn’t assume it took any preparation at all. Padding around in bare feet, they match each other with artfully-tousled “I woke up like this” hair and oversized suits big enough to make David Byrne proud. Stewart curls her lip and sneers at the camera. “We’re so sick of being actresses in photos, so today it’s like, ‘We’re in a band,’” she growls. She and Poots pose closely together, taking turns cradling one another and frequently cracking each other up between frames with a private joke or gesture.
Imogen wears jacket CHANEL, Bodysuit stylist’s own, Necklace David Yurman. Kristen wears jacket Chanel, Bodysuit and top stylist’s own, top necklace stylist’s own, bottom necklace David Yurman.
When I speak to Stewart and Poots the next morning over Zoom, the rain still hasn’t let up. Poots is slightly delayed due to flooding in her hotel room, but she seems no more bothered by the elements than Stewart. In fact, they both seem tickled by the irony of water insinuating itself so overtly into the press tour for their film, The Chronology of Water. “Isn’t it crazy?” Poots remarks. “When your [publicist] said that, I was like, ‘Come on,’” Stewart replies.
After an eight-year gestation period, Stewart and Poots are readying themselves for the release of Chronology, Stewart’s feature directorial debut, out December 5 in New York and Los Angeles before it opens across the U.S. on January 9. It’s a milestone that is more hard-won than one would guess for a star of Stewart’s stature; she has been vocal about how difficult it was to secure funding for the project since she first discovered the book in 2017 and announced her intentions to adapt it in 2018. Despite Stewart’s pedigree as an Oscar-nominated performer and indie cinema icon—acting in films by Olivier Assayas, Kelly Reichardt, David Cronenberg, and Pablo Larraín—as well as her shortform directorial outings—she directed a (presciently aquatic) 18-minute short called Come Swim in 2017, and boygenius: the film in 2023—financiers were resistant to taking the plunge. In January 2024, Stewart’s frustration led her to declare in a Variety cover story that she would refuse to take on any new acting projects until Chronology was complete: “I will quit the fucking business,” she said at the time.
All clothing Prada, Jewellery David Yurman
Jacket Versace, Top and pants stylist’s own, Necklaces and ring David Yurman, Earrings Lie
Shaking the table worked just well enough, though Stewart had to venture to international waters to get the job done, ultimately shooting in Latvia and Malta over 32 days in 2024. “We had to leave the United States to make this possible,” Stewart said while promoting Chronology at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, where it premiered in the Un Certain Regard section. “Thank God I stamped my feet, because if I didn’t, it wouldn’t have happened,” she said. “I did have to throw a public temper tantrum in order to get this done.”
The Chronology of Water is based on Lidia Yuknavitch’s acclaimed 2011 novel of the same name. The title refers to the book’s (and the film’s) narrative fluidity. As Yuknavitch reflects on the formative events of her past—childhood abuse, sexual awakenings, doomed relationships, addiction, loss—her memories come in tidal waves, crashing against the boundaries of time and recollection. “Your life doesn’t happen in any kind of order… It’s all a series of fragments and repetitions and pattern formations. Language and water have this in common,” she writes early in the book. “All the events of my life swim in and out between each other. Without chronology.”
“The reason that this book spoke to me was because it conjured my own shit.”
KRISTEN STEWART on adapting “The Chronology of Water”
In translating the memoir to screen (with the help of Yuknavitch’s husband Andy Mingo as screenwriter), Stewart stays true to the unbridled nature of Yuknavitch’s prose, eschewing linearity in favor of a visceral sensory collage that puts you in her protagonist’s head. Some memories come in small, fragmented drops—staccato shots of blood circling a drain, or handlebars on a child’s bike—while others burst forth like emotional geysers. (Water isn’t the only symbolically-charged liquid at work, there is also blood, sweat, tears, spit, cum, and vomit. Chronology is an ode to all that the body holds, as well as what it releases—figuratively and literally.) Lidia, as played by a thunderous Poots, cascades across the emotional spectrum from enraged to aggrieved to fucked-up to blissed-out and back again. It is an uncompromising film that pushes you straight into the deep end and expects you to sink or swim.
Jacket MM6 Maison Margiela, Bra Calvin Klein, Skirt Skirts by Britt Liberg, Top necklace stylist’s own, Bottom necklace and ring David Yurman
The subjective nature of the film, which follows Lidia from her days as a competitive swimmer at age 18 to her career as a writer and professor in her 40s, confers substance as well as style. “Lidia’s inner voice spoke to mine, and her memories started to overlap with my life in a way that I thought was so cinematic… [Through art,] you start to have interactions with parts of your life that felt inaccessible,” Stewart says, explaining that what drew her to Yuknavitch’s story was how much it reflected her own. “I have such reverence and fucking respect for Lidia and the particularities of who she is and her life and her voice and everything, but the reason that this book spoke to me was because it conjured my own shit.”
Poots felt similarly about Stewart’s script. “It was clearly very her,” she thought, even though she didn’t yet know Stewart at the time she read it. “I’d never read anything like it. It was so original.” Once Stewart offered her the role (in an email that, according to Poots, went something like, “Hey dude, you wanna make this movie with me?”), they soon forged an intimate working dynamic, bonding over books and films, and developing a shared creative and emotional lexicon. “There’s lots of different strands within our friendship and the way that we collaborated,” Poots says, “But we definitely connected over how much things matter to us… [We are] two people who just cannot wait to express how much things matter to them.”
“This was an opportunity to open up an echo chamber,” Stewart says. “I wanted to invite Imogen’s life into mine.”
all clothing prada
The ease and intimacy between Stewart and Poots is palpable. You could call it sisterly, but there’s more: It crackles with the electricity of two people who have lived past lives together. In conversation, each is visibly energized by the other’s ideas; they volley back and forth, picking up where the other left off, almost telepathically. They get giddy joking about which Beatles they most identify with. “I think you would be Paul, because he cares about the band so much,” Poots says to Stewart, who bristles. “But he’s so reasonable,” she sighs. (They both agree Poots would be Ringo.)
Both voracious readers, they pepper our conversation with names like Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, Sheila Heti, Denis Johnson. The film forges a unique conversation with literature, echoing but also building upon the foundation of Yuknavitch’s memoir. In preparation for the role, Stewart gifted Poots the rest of Yuknavitch’s books, as well as several works by the late postmodernist writer Kathy Acker, who is referenced in the film when Lidia reads a graphic passage from Empire of the Senseless, to her classmates’ chagrin. (In the book, Yuknavitch also describes her sexual relationship with Acker, who eventually became her mentor.) One can intuit the influence of the radical writers Stewart and Poots gravitate to on the gutsy, defiant voice of the film.
Actress Lili Taylor, a close friend and mentor to Poots, also shared two books she thought would help: Bonnie Tsui’s Why We Swim and Leanne Shapton’s Swimming Studies, which became key references for Poots during prep. “I knew the experience was going to be a profound one for Immy. It was going to require her to be physically and psychologically vulnerable,” Taylor recollected to i-D via email. “[Poots] is open and courageous, so she is able to travel wherever the scene needs to go––often into the unknown.”
Jacket MM6 Maison Margiela, Bra Calvin Klein, Top necklace, bottom necklace, ring David Yurman, Middle necklace stylist’s own
As for cinematic inspirations, the film whose influence on Chronology is most immediately apparent is Morvern Callar, Lynne Ramsay’s own unflinching feature debut from 2002 (also adapted from a book.) Ramsay’s thorny character study, shot in a subjective, photographic style, offers a favorable precedent that informs and buoys Stewart’s approach. (A more direct connection: Esmé Creed-Miles, daughter of Morvern’s lead actress Samantha Morton, plays a small role in Chronology.) Stewart emphatically confirms Morvern is a key inspiration. “It’s literally first on my list. I saw that movie kind of late in the game [and] I screamed at my fucking screen,” Stewart says, describing how strongly she identified with Ramsay’s sensibility. “There are some things that feel like permission, and then there are some things that just feel like you. I was like, ‘How do you know? Get out of my head.’”
(Coincidentally, or maybe through the psychic transference Stewart is alluding to, Ramsay’s latest film Die My Love also happens to follow the psychological and physical tumult of a woman writer protagonist, and incidentally happens to star Stewart’s ex, Robert Pattinson. Although I’m dying to ask whether she’s seen it, time constraints prevent me.)
Stewart shares with me a list of 24 films that inspired her, including Morvern Callar as well as a number of Ramsay’s shorts, Rebecca Miller’s Angela, Catherine Breillat’s A Real Young Girl, Celine Sciamma’s Water Lilies, Agnes Varda’s Le Bonheur and Jacquot de Nantes, and Chick Strand’s Soft Fiction (“It’s beautiful and important and people should watch it.”) Poots also cites Julia Reichert’s 1971 documentary Growing Up Female as one of the films she and Stewart watched during pre-production.
Olivier Assayas, who directed Stewart in Personal Shopper and Clouds of Sils Maria, isn’t at all surprised by how fully-formed Chronology feels for a first feature. “I expected no less from Kristen,” he tells me, smiling, on a Zoom call from Paris. “She has the whole package. The main thing she has to an impressive extreme is the understanding of actors… but also she has a very strong visual sense. It’s not just doing what she has seen other filmmakers do… It’s a language all her own.”
“There is an energy [with Kristen] that I’ve never found with anyone else, and that’s a very sacred thing.”
imogen poots
Assayas also recognizes the parallel between Yuknavitch’s story of finding her voice through writing and Stewart’s own artistic journey. “She’s adapting an autobiographical novel, but ultimately, she’s talking about herself and her own path to become an artist,” he observes. “It seemed so obvious that she, at some point, would become a filmmaker that it didn’t even need saying. Gradually she realized it’s more about coming to terms with herself… I knew it would be a long road, but I knew that eventually she would make it, because I think she’s one of those [people] who ultimately does exactly what she wants to.”
Vivid 16mm cinematography by Corey C. Waters adds to Chronology’s feeling of looking back in time at the diffuse edges of memory. “I wanted this movie to feel like it was found in an attic… something that felt stitched together,” Stewart says of the choice to shoot on celluloid. “It totally informed my editorial process. There were times where the moment was done because we ran out of film, you know? And that’s sometimes how you remember your life.” This contributed as much to the movie’s soul as to its aesthetic. “If you roll out [of film], your film turns pink, yellow, orange, red—it becomes something that feels bloody and like a scar and feels burned,” she says. “The movie feels like a fucking body.”
The film does feel like a living, breathing amalgamation of Stewart’s and Poots’ personal experiences, emotions, ideas and references blended with Yuknavitch’s––with raw nerves, scraped knees, and an open heart. Their mutual dedication to the film and synonymously, to each other, makes Chronology’s sheer existence a veritable artistic victory. “The movie is about listening to yourself, which is really hard to do when the voice in the room that is the loudest is the patriarchy… It took me a really, really, really long time to trust myself,” Stewart says. “Finding Immy and making this movie [felt], this sounds cheesy, but like unearthing a battle cry. It felt joyous as fuck.”
“There is an energy [with Kristen] that I’ve never found with anyone else, and that’s a very sacred thing,” says Poots. “That’s a historical thing in your own life, to have experienced that. And then to make something [together] and have that thing exist, is huge.”
A much different version of Chronology could have been assembled in the editing bay; a version that’s more neat, less chaotic, less dark, more broadly palatable to distributors and casual audiences and awards bodies, but the conviction of Stewarts’ and Poots’ creative choices constitute the film’s ultimate achievement. “There’s some idea that people still want simplicity, because there’s great elegance to simplicity. If you say, ‘This is what it is to be a woman,’ that goes down easy, right?” Poots says. “It’s a thorny, rotten, wondrous, astonishing thing [to be a woman]. I am so tired of being projected upon… It’s all other people’s misplaced horror and guilt and all of that that we then have to carry on our backs.”
Chronology honors the essential contradictions of the feminine experience; the pleasure and rage that intertwine. “I think we’re both, in our own ways, quite livid,” says Poots. “It’s also the coolest thing about each other, I think, how that comes out.” As Stewart puts it, “Rage can be the most fun thing ever.”
Inevitably, the film won’t be for everyone, but Stewart is unafraid of the uncomfortable conversations that will follow. “I always get, like, ‘Ah, it’s really tough,’” she says. “I’m like, ‘Yeah, but it’s fun, right?’”
in the lead image KRISTEN WEARS JACKET VALENTINO. IMOGEN WEARS ALL CLOTHING GUCCI, NECKLACE AND RINGS DAVID YURMAN, EARRINGS LIE.
hair stylist for imogen poots JOHN D
makeup artist for imogen poots JO BAKER using Chanel
hair stylist for kristen stewart ADIR ABERGEL
makeup for kristen stewart MAI QUỲNH using Chanel
nail technician ERI ISHIZU
photo assistant BENNET PEREZ
stylist assistants GEM BROOKES, ELIZAVETA NOVIKOVA, IAN WHALLEY location L’ERMITAGE BEVERLY HILLS
production THE MORRISON GROUP