'Big Tit Energy': Kristen Stewart Talks Breaking the Rules with 'The Chronology of Water' at Cannes

Elle

17-05-2025

Beneath the blazing Côte d'Azur sun, on a terrace as red as her conviction, Kristen Stewart lit a match under the old rules of filmmaking. Ahead of the Cannes premiere of her directorial debut, The Chronology of Water - an uncompromising adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch's cult memoir - Stewart explained why she refused to cast a big-name star or take the lead herself to secure financing, instead opting for English actress Imogen Poots.
'Everyone's like, 'Why didn't you do it? And what about [Poots], why?' She doesn't have big tits or anything, but she seems like she does,' she deadpans at Campari's beachfront location. 'She has Big Tit Energy. It's like Big Dick Energy - she has BTE. I was like, I just feel like you have these big tits and you just have to play this part.
'The list of women and men that can finance a movie in the entertainment industry are so beyond me. They change quickly, and I don't understand them at all. There's just no way to make something with a face or a voice without making truly intrinsic decisions based on instinct.'
Speaking at the Campari-hosted event with Breaking Through The Lens - a global nonprofit creating pathways to finance for women, LGBTQIA+, and other marginalised filmmakers - Stewart was quizzed on announcing her intention to direct the film back in 2018.
'I probably shouldn't have said it out loud in 2018,' she laughs, remembering her Cannes promise. 'But thank God I stamped my feet - without that public tantrum, it wouldn't have happened.'
For years, the project languished in development purgatory: too bold, too messy, too uncompromising for typical financiers. 'I won't make a f*cking-nother movie until I make this movie,' she has warned in the most Kristen Stewart way possible.
A film carved from instinct rather than market trends, The Chronology of Water is, as Stewart described it, 'difficult… full of secrets, because women have been forced to hide everything that hurts—and everything that feels good.'
Based on Yuknavitch's memoir, The Chronology of Water is a sensory cannonball into the life of a woman shattered - and then remade - by trauma, grief, addiction, and the radical act of reinvention. It traces Yuknavitch's real-life journey from Olympic-level swimmer to self-destructive drifter to literary phoenix. The film includes harrowing scenes of sexual abuse by her father and her spiral into drug use, juxtaposed with the poetic salvation she found in water.
In Stewart's hands, the story becomes a fragmented, poetic howl of female pain and pleasure—delirious, violent, sexual, tender, and defiantly un-neat.
'People say, 'What's the movie about?' and I'm like, 'Oh f*ck, I don't know—life?'' she shrugged. 'It's about being in love. It's about losing people. It's about your parents fcking you up. It's about writing. It's about making art. It's about how memory works. It's about the ocean. It's about the body. It's about hating the body. It's about loving the body. It's about desire. And it's also just this vibe.'
To sculpt the emotional tornado of Yuknavitch's life into cinema, Stewart leaned on her chosen family of film women. Sofia Coppola, a friend and unofficial mentor, read the script and offered notes. 'She's so cool about it,' Stewart said. 'Just like: 'Hey, what if this one thing was tighter?''
She also personally wrote Fiona Apple a letter to request permission to use two of her songs in the film. 'My hands were shaking!' Stewart said of reaching out, before adding, 'It worked - and she wrote me a letter back.'
Stewart knew making this film risked alienating a mainstream audience used to arcs and resolutions. And she didn't care. 'This isn't a movie that's trying to get an A on a test,' she said. 'It's not about logic. It's about feeling. It's about letting yourself drown and see what's still there when you come up.'
Her advice to young directors? Build your own process. Don't copy anyone else's. 'If you accept a standardised series of events, you're going to make something that we've seen before. And who wants that?'
By 2008, Stewart had become a household name as Bella Swan in Twilight. The five-film franchise grossed a combined £2.4billion worldwide and starred Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner as her love interests.
The Chronology of Water received a four-minute standing ovation on Friday night - and left many in the crowd wiping their eyes, as Poots's performance and Stewart's unflinchingly raw directing style were praised by critics.
The long-in-the-works passion project premiered in the festival's Un Certain Regard sidebar, which this year also features actor-director debuts from Scarlett Johansson (Eleanor the Great) and Harris Dickinson (Urchin). In addition to directing, Stewart co-wrote the screenplay with Yuknavitch's husband, Andy Mingo.
'Making movies is like being in a gang,' Stewart said. 'You have to pick your people and then ride or die.'
The Chronology of Water isn't just Stewart's debut. It's her battle cry.
Kristen Stewart was speaking at The Breaking Through The Lens event at Hyde Beach by Campari.