At the Cannes Film Festival in 2018, Kristen Stewart announced that her feature directorial debut would be an adaptation of “The Chronology of Water,” the 2011 memoir by author Lidia Yuknavitch. Since then, Stewart has been pounding the pavement to drum up financing for the project. But despite her track record of headlining some of the most well regarded independent films of the last 10 years —from “Clouds of Sils Maria” to “Spencer” — and despite the fact that Imogen Poots is attached to star as Yuknavitch, and that Ridley Scott is producing through his production company Scott Free, Stewart has been unable to secure the backing she needs to move forward.
This frustrating experience has pushed Stewart to make a surprising announcement about “The Chronology of Water” during her interview for PvNew’s Jan. 11 cover story.
“I’m going to make this movie before I ever work for someone else,” she says, before breaking into nervous laughter. “Yeah, I will quit the fucking business. I won’t make a-fucking-nother movie until I make this movie. I will tell you that, for sure. I think that will get things going.”
The 33-year-old is starring in two feature films at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the pulpy lesbian crime thriller “Love Lies Bleeding” and the conceptual sci-fi romance “Love Me.” She’s also filmed a supporting role in the upcoming indie road trip comedy “Sacramento,” costarring Michael Cera, Maya Erskine, and Michael Angarano, who is making his directorial debut with the film. But then her slate is clear, and she does not intend to fill it until she can get “The Chronology of Water” made.
Reaching that goal, however, has been “near impossible,” Stewart says. “The current climate is a real, capital N ‘No’ for anything that has not been proven already.”
Stewart knows that one of the hurdles is that she wants to recreate Yuknavitch’s non-linear, stream-of-consciousness prose — meant to evoke the elusive tumult of memory —as a cinematic experience, while portraying how the author’s personal and sexual traumas fueled her alcohol abuse even as she was striving to be a competitive swimmer.
“I think there’s an entire, yet-to-be-written female language,” Stewart says. “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. 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.”
Filmmaker Rose Glass, who directed Stewart in “Love Lies Bleeding,” has read a version of the screenplay that Stewart wrote with Yuknavitch’s husband, Andy Mingo. “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.”
In her PvNew cover story, Stewart also discusses wanting to explore a wider spectrum of female experience beyond the “heteronormative quality” that she credits for boosting her acting career, and she wants to bring that to “The Chronology of Water.”
“There’s just something about the open nature of our physicality, and I mean that vaginally — the flow, the bleeding,” Stewart says. “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.”
In an industry in which Greta Gerwig can gross $1.4 billion turning a plastic doll into a treatise on feminism, one may expect that someone would see the potential value in helping one of the most famous and acclaimed actors of her generation forge her own psalm to womanhood. But that has not been Stewart’s experience.
“I’ve never made a movie before, and so I lack experience — and therefore, I lack credibility,” Stewart says, parroting the feedback she keeps getting. Stewart has directed before: She premiered her short film “Come Swim” at Sundance in 2017, and she directed an extended music video in 2023 for the group Boygenius. But, she says, that hasn’t been enough. “They’re like, ‘I don’t know if she’s right.’ I’m like, ‘Well, I am! I’ve done this forever.’”
Glass agrees. “She’s obviously been doing this all her life, and you can feel that when she’s on set. She’s very much one of the crew, really,” she says. “I would’ve liked to think that she found it easy to get funded, fucking hell. It’s ridiculous. Someone should make it.”
Despite all her setbacks, Stewart remains optimistic. She’s fairly certain she’ll end up making the film in Europe, and she’s hopeful that her impending trip to Sundance — where she plans to stay for the full festival — will allow her to connect with filmmaking peers facing the same issues.
“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 says, clapping her hands. “I can’t wait to go to fucking Sundance. I can’t wait to make my movie.”
