Kristen Stewart was warned not to make this film. She almost blew it

When Kristen Stewart read Lidia Yuknavitch’s cult memoir The Chronology of Water, she immediately felt herself to be part of the writer’s tribe. “There are certain pieces that unlock you, whether it’s a book or a movie or a relationship you have or just a conversation you have with someone, that can lead you to understand you aren’t listening to yourself the way you should be,” she says.

Yuknavitch’s book surges forward from her childhood with an abusive father and permanently sedated mother, through youthful addiction and tortured relationships, to her realisation – guided by her mentor, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest author Ken Kesey – that she is a writer. Stewart was only halfway through reading it when she contacted Yuknavitch to ask if she could make it into a film. Speaking in Cannes, where her adaptation was screening at the annual film festival, she calls the book “a lifesaving piece of material”.

“This book is like the keys to your own castle. And I thought when I read it that if I had this relationship to it, I couldn’t be alone. It’s such a personal interaction you have with reading a book, but I wanted to do it out loud and with other people.”

Thora Birch and Imogen Poots in The Chronology of Water.Credit: MIFF

Stewart, 35, has been famous – and famously uncomfortable with it – since playing a young woman in love with a vampire in the $US3.3 billion Twilight saga. Being Bella Swan made her reportedly the highest-paid actress in the world. Since that franchise wrapped in 2012, however, she has worked largely outside the mainstream, with independent directors including Olivier Assayas (Clouds of Sils Maria in 2014, for which she won a French Cesar), Kelly Reichardt (Certain Women in 2016) and Pablo Larrain (the 2021 film Spencer, an extraordinary performance that earned her Golden Globe and Oscar nominations). For a good chunk of that time she was also working on The Chronology of Water.

It was a formidable challenge, but nothing could dissuade her. “I’ve been associated with [producer] Charles Gillibert since I was 20. He told me when I sent him this script years ago, ‘You should not do this: it’s too big; it’s too expensive; find something more personal’. And I said, ‘Honestly, if you say that to me again, we’re not going to be friends any more’.” There were screaming matches but, in the end, he backed her.

“And he didn’t believe in it. I know that. I know him! But he did it anyway because I wanted it so much.” In Cannes, it seemed the gamble had paid off: reviews were glowing.

Stewart always brings a kinetic energy to her performances. In person, she is intense, agitated, fiercely alive and not a little unnerving. The Chronology of Water shares these qualities. What could be made as a conventional biopic – albeit of a fictionalised figure, since Stewart says The Chronology of Water isn’t actually a literal document of Yuknavitch’s life – is chopped about, shuffled and fractured, so that we must actively piece it together. There are scenes that flash backward and forward in time, like a metronome swinging between what just happened and what is about to happen. Simple actions are sliced up with jump-cuts; random sounds stream in from past scenes. “Time,” says Stewart, “is so non-linear.”

The Chronology of Water, Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut, will screen at the Melbourne International Film Festival. Credit: MIFF

At the heart of the melee is Imogen Poots, now 36, but playing Lidia from her teenage years as a high-school swimming champion to middle age. It is a vast span of years for any actor to try to cover, but she manages it by sheer force of conviction.

“She really had skin in the game,” says Stewart. “She’s been acting as long as I have – and therefore I know there are roles and safeguards and ways she has figured out how to protect the more tender parts of herself.

“And that actually doesn’t make for a good performance. But there is a whole cycle of holding back and letting go – and I just got her in the perfect moment. We looked at each other and she said, ‘I think I just want to let it all out, lay it all on the line’.

“Then we made it like a sports movie. She got two hernias making this movie, Literally, two! But she didn’t tell me ’til afterwards. And I was like, ‘You’re out of your f---ing mind, why didn’t you tell me?’ And she said, ‘I didn’t want you to pull the leash. I didn’t want you to think I couldn’t do it.’ I love her so much.”

Imogen Poots (left) and Kristen Stewart at the premiere of The Chronology of Water in Cannes. Credit: Getty Images

The production was fraught in other ways. Stewart’s scattered description suggests that her long-gestating script, written with Andy Mingo, was binned almost immediately they began shooting.

“The movie was a total shipwreck,” she says. “I had constructed what I thought was this unsinkable Titanic. And immediately it became a paper boat on the ocean. We were looking at death every day” – of her perfect script, of her careful preparation, of her treasured images – “which is totally what the movie is about, a rebirth after losing something.”

People told her that first films always felt like that. No, she says. This was worse. “It was a precarious situation.” She and the cinematographer, Corey Waters, “free-jazzed” the movie she had in her mind’s eye. In Waters, she says, she discovered a brother. Other department heads were sacked and replaced during production. That was risky, obviously, but “essential to protect the movie and create the life that it has”.

“And it’s such a lucky thing the movie was getting f---ed. When I got back from the shoot, I realised I was opening all these gifts. The movie had a life of its own, so it had a memory. And once we had created all of the pictures, they had an emotional connectivity and sense memory that you could see.

“If I had made the movie exactly as I wanted to make it, if I had executed the script in an exacting way, it would have been kind of clever and trite and embarrassing and stupid. And so it was kind of the only way to do it.” She almost strangled it, she says. “But thank god, I didn’t want to. And when I look at it now – god, I look smart!”

The Chronology of Water screens on August 15 and 24 as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival; miff.com.au.

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