In recent months, Kristen Stewart has been doing a lot to promote her directorial debut feature, The Chronology of Water. Kristen spent eight years trying to put this movie together, getting the financing and working out the cast and the screenplay adaptation. She started working on this in her 20s and now she’s 35. She grew and changed a lot during this process, and she recently spoke about that growth with the Times of London. Her comments about how women in the industry are treated is very on-point, and she also talks about what it’s like to live under Trump fascism. Some highlights:

A story about actors: “I was talking to a male actor I really love. 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. 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. 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.”

Making The Chronology of Water: “The movie feels like it’s barely dragging itself over the finish line, and I really love that about it. It feels a little bit adolescent.” She sounds like she relishes a challenge, adding that “so many people said this was an impossible movie, but maybe it won’t be so hard to get funding next time because me and Imogen proved something”.

Whether it would have been easier to make this if she was a man: “If I was a man I wouldn’t have made this movie.” She was drawn to the story because it shows the taboo side of being a woman. “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. 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.”

Acting versus directing: “Actresses get treated like sh-t, I’ve got to tell you. 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. 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. Imogen [Poots] put her whole body and soul into this movie.”

Life under Trump: “Reality is breaking completely under Trump. But we should take a page out of his book and create the reality we want to live in.” She lives in Los Angeles and New York — does she think she will stay in the US? “Probably not. I can’t work freely there. But I don’t want to give up completely. I’d like to make movies in Europe and then shove them down the throat of the American people.”

[From The Times]

One of my favorite “things” to happen in recent years is “actresses calling out Method actors.” It’s sooooo funny, because you know those ladies have been disgusted with their costars’ Method antics for decades. “Oh, you have to do pushups before every take and treat everyone like sh-t because that’s your method? GMAFB!!” Kristen is absolutely right, and she’s absolutely right about men trying to embiggen themselves by acting like what they’re doing is so tortured and difficult. I also appreciate what she’s saying about Trump’s America.

Photos courtesy of Cover Images, Avalon Red.