Kristen Stewart says she 'won't make another movie' until this thing happens

After more than 20 years in the business, Kristen Stewart wants to be able to do her own thing in Hollywood.

Back in 2018, Stewart announced that she would be making her feature-length directorial debut with an adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir The Chronology of Water. Since then, she’s been struggling to get funding for the project, leading to a new announcement that came in this month’s Variety cover story.

“I’m going to make this movie before I ever work for someone else,” Stewart told Variety. “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.”

Stewart, who says “the current climate is a real, capital N ‘No’ for anything that has not been proven already,” had two movies debut at this year’s Sundance Film Festival – the dark and violent lesbian thriller Love Lies Bleeding and the philosophical sci-fi romance Love Me – and has a role in the upcoming road trip comedy Sacramento, but after that, she plans on taking a break to focus on her own film.

“I think there’s an entire, yet-to-be-written female language,” Stewart says about adapting the book’s stream-of-consciousness prose into a script. “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.”

Stewart says that investors are reluctant to work with her because “I’ve never made a movie before, and so I lack experience – and therefore, I lack credibility.” But she is confident in her knowledge after spending two-thirds of her life making movies.

“They’re like, ‘I don’t know if she’s right.’ I’m like, ‘Well, I am! I’ve done this forever,’” she said.

Before attending the Sundance Film Festival, Stewart told Variety that she was excited to connect with other filmmakers facing similar issues there.

“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 said. “I can’t wait to go to fucking Sundance. I can’t wait to make my movie.”