At 33, she is already a veteran of the industry and has gone through all the stages, including that of a child prodigy, when at the age of 11 she played Jodie Foster’s daughter in David Fincher’s Panic Room, and also the of the teenage superstar, at the time when she had to flee hordes of fans with her Twilight co-star, Robert Pattinson, with whom she had a romantic relationship. In addition, she has participated in the awards race, with Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for her convincing work as Princess Diana in Spencer.
But now Kristen Stewart wants to take another career turn. The actress intends to expand her efforts as a film director and wants to try to solidify the status of an icon for the gay community. With the support of a personal fortune estimated at 65 million euros, the actress has taken all the time in the world to achieve this. Following the precept that says one should never use one’s own money to finance a film, Stewart has been trying for five years to launch The Chronology of Water, the film that will mark his debut as a feature film maker and which is an adaptation of a memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch, a former swimmer who detailed her experiences as a bisexual woman.
The project, for which Kristen co-wrote the screenplay with Andy Mingo, is advanced enough to have the support of Ridley Scott’s production company, which was already involved in the short film Come to Swim, which screened at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. A moreover, it has already been defined that the British Imogen Poots will be the protagonist. Although everything seems to indicate that the film will soon become a reality, it still has some hurdles to overcome, which led him to announce in a long interview with Variety that, if necessary, he will retire from acting until he manages to film the movie However, the meeting with the most important film magazine in the United States was shortly before the start of Sundance in January, which he attended to accompany the presentation of the last two films as a protagonist.
In a good show that today is far from the days when he was a favorite of the studios, in the first film, Love me, he plays a buoy lost at sea who, thanks to artificial intelligence, connects with a satellite that surrounds on Earth, played by recent Emmy and Golden Globe winner for Beef, Steven Yeun.
But it is in the other film at Sundance, Love lies bleeding (l’amor queda sangnant) that she has placed all her expectations on, because, as she explains in the interview with Variety, it is the one that best represents who she is today. In the film, she plays Lou, the lesbian manager of a gym who has a boring life in New Mexico at the end of the eighties. Everything changes when Jackie (Katy O’Brian), muscular and masculine, comes to do exercises one day, and a passion arises between them that is vividly reproduced on the screen. When Beth (Jena Malone), Lou’s sister, is beaten by her husband, J.J. (Dave Franco), the lovers team up to teach him a lesson, but the consequences will be more important than they imagined.
Stewart, who publicly came out with his gender identity in 2017 in a monologue on American television’s most popular show, Saturday Night Live, and five years later took his girlfriend, screenwriter Dylan Meyer, to the gala of the Oscar, admitted to Variety that she is very proud to be an example for the LGBTQ community: “I am constantly approached by women who tell me that they also kissed a girl in college. That’s why I want them to see me as part of this team, because we need each other”, he said.
The author of the article, Adam B. Vary, who is openly gay, also interviewed Jodie Foster, who, when talking about Stewart, whom she loves like a daughter, analyzed her decision to leave the wardrobe when she received the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the 2013 Golden Globes and her determination to play a lesbian woman in Nyad, the film for which Annette Bening is nominated for an Oscar: “I think there there is something generational about his attitude. She managed to do something that in my case I would never have thought I would be able to do”, he revealed.
