{"id":400080,"date":"2026-01-10T23:56:13","date_gmt":"2026-01-10T23:56:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/400080\/"},"modified":"2026-01-10T23:56:13","modified_gmt":"2026-01-10T23:56:13","slug":"kristen-stewart-interview-on-directing-the-chronology-of-water","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/400080\/","title":{"rendered":"Kristen Stewart Interview on Directing ‘The Chronology of Water,’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kristen Stewart<\/a> doesn\u2019t love the logline to her new movie, \u201cThe Chronology of Water,<\/a>\u201d based on Lidia Yuknavitch\u2019s acclaimed memoir: \u201cAfter an abusive childhood, restless Lidia escapes into competitive swimming, sexual experimentation, toxic relationships, and addiction before finding her voice through writing.\u201d<\/p>\n

To Stewart, the summary feels trite. It was never the plot details that drove the actress-turned-filmmaker to spend the better part of a decade adapting Yuknavitch\u2019s prose into her feature directorial debut. It was the book\u2019s unique form \u2014 capturing the reconstruction of a fractured life \u2013 that was cinematically inspiring.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe book is just a big, huge permission slip, the keys to the castle to your own volition,\u201d said Stewart while a guest on this week\u2019s episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast<\/a>. \u201cAnd so the movie needed to be unwieldy, or else it would\u2019ve been like [in a mockingly preachy voice], \u2018You should trust yourself.\u2019 It would\u2019ve been an embarrassing self-help movie.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the things Stewart loved about the way Yuknavitch pieced together the memories of her life was that there was no present tense, allowing for a bold use of editing, as the juxtaposition of Lidia\u2019s memories flows like water. It\u2019s not an approach that translates to a traditional script, especially one that gets greenlit, even if you are Kristen Stewart<\/a>. To which Stewart offered this piece of advice, \u201cDon\u2019t take notes.\u201d If she had, she \u201cwould\u2019ve never made this movie.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI was dissuaded for many, many a year,\u201d said Stewart. \u201cI was convinced that the form of the novel was what was inspiring and not the detailed plot. It feels like a life flashing before your eyes, and it\u2019s really difficult to write that down, because the emotional connective tissue, it has to feel so ephemerally connected that it must be discovered.\u201d<\/p>\n

That discovery process was one Stewart worked on for eight years, writing 500 drafts of the screenplay \u2013\u00a0a number she insists is not hyperbole \u2014 to unlock how she would capture that emotional connective tissue.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you remember [when] you\u2019re seven, there are shockingly striking images and feelings that can rush back into your body as if they are present as hell,\u201d said Stewart. \u201c\u200aAnd so, I am my 7-year-old self right now. I am every person I\u2019ve ever been, if you let yourself drift into the waters of your physicalized memory, and that\u2019s hard to do sometimes \u2013 we live in a world that\u2019s so exterior, where we\u2019re concern about how we present ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

The film<\/a> is an exercise in tapping into the emotional memory we store in our bodies, and sound became Stewart\u2019s most valuable tool for unlocking it. Stewart referred to the sound design, led by supervising sound editor Brent Kiser, as being akin to a \u201cskipping record,\u201d as the film\u2019s sonic landscape fluctuates to follow Lidia\u2019s backwards-and-forwards journey between self-soothing, self-assurance, self-hatred, and self-laceration.<\/p>\n

\u201cYour body emotionally connects,\u201d said Stewart. \u201cAnd so it just feels like the movie is your memory as it starts to progress, and the sound becomes more complicated.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"THE\u2018The Chronology of Water\u2019Courtesy Everett Collection<\/p>\n

It is an unconventional use of sound. While there is some traditional voice-over in the film, the recordings and vocal performances (some more vocalization than voice-over) of Poots vary widely, often within the same scene, and in a way, Stewart said most sound professionals walked away from, as she struggled to find the right post-production collaborators.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s the eternal echo of the voices that oppress\u2026 until she finds a little bit of light at the end when she learns how to love herself,\u201d said Stewart. \u201c\u200aI wanted anyone watching this movie to be able to have the whole ride with their eyes closed. It\u2019s like a haunted house, the whole movie\u2019s like an intrusive thought.\u201d<\/p>\n

Talking about sound is not some nerdy technical thing for Stewart, but rather how she excavated the film\u2019s ideas and emotions. She gets so excited talking about sound, she gets excited about making more films.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think female voiceover is [something] we are just really lacking, an externalized female perspective. I can\u2019t wait to make another movie. I can\u2019t wait to do the female \u2018Taxi Driver\u2019 where we just get like a real solid slew of inner perspective that never stops.\u201d<\/p>\n

To hear Kristen Stewart\u2019s full interview, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast<\/a> on\u00a0Apple<\/a>,\u00a0Spotify<\/a>, or your favorite podcast platform.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kristen Stewart doesn\u2019t love the logline to her new movie, \u201cThe Chronology of Water,\u201d based on Lidia Yuknavitch\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":400081,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[236,88,2695,23575,193166,73140],"class_list":{"0":"post-400080","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-celebrities","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-film","11":"tag-filmmaker-toolkit-podcast","12":"tag-imogen-poots","13":"tag-kristen-stewart"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=400080"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400080\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/400081"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=400080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=400080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=400080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}