Kristen Stewart has something to say about Hollywood’s lack of female filmmakers: The problem still exists.
“[There’s a] thinking that we can check these little boxes, and then do away with the patriarchy, and how we’re all made of it,” the Love Lies Bleeding said in a new cover story for Porter. “It’s easy for them to be like, ‘Look what we’re doing. We’re making Maggie Gyllenhaal‘s movie! We’re making Margot Robbie‘s movie!’ And you’re like, OK, cool. You’ve chosen four.”
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Stewart made clear that she wasn’t knocking the director of 2021’s The Lost Daughter and the producer of Barbie, respectively. Quite the opposite.
“I’m in awe of those women, I love those women [but] it feels phony. If we’re congratulating each other for broadening perspective, when we haven’t really done enough, then we stop broadening,” she said.
The USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative released a report in January that showed women made no major gains in Hollywood in 2023: “Of the 116 directors evaluated in 2023, 12.1% were women.”
Founder Stacy L. Smith said, “For the companies and industry members who want to believe that the director problem is fixed, it is nowhere near solved.”
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Stewart has worked to bring her movie, based on the 2011 memoir from Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water, to the screen for about seven years. And she’s spoken out about the challenges of financing it. In January, she told Variety that she was, “going to make this movie before I ever work for someone else.”
The official description of the book promises, “This is not your mother’s memoir.” It’s about Olympic swimming hopeful who accepts a scholarship that allows her to leave behind her abusive father and a mother who’s alcoholic and suicidal. “After losing her scholarship to drugs and alcohol, Lidia moves to Eugene and enrolls in the University of Oregon, where she is accepted by Ken Kesey to become one of thirteen graduate students who collaboratively write the novel Caverns with him. Drugs and alcohol continue to flow along with bisexual promiscuity and the discovery of S&M helps ease Lidia’s demons. Ultimately Lidia’s career as a writer and teacher combined with the love of her husband and son replace the earlier chaos that was her life.”
The Twilight alum noted that it’s tough to get anything made, especially if it’s different than what’s out there.
“My movie is about incest and periods and a woman violently repossessing her voice and body, and it is, at times, hard to watch… but it’s gonna be a f—ing thrill ride,” she said. “And I think that’s commercial, but I don’t think that I have any gauge on what that means.”
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“I think people would want to see that, but then… I think maybe people wanna watch movies about, like, Jesus and dogs.”
