The town’s film festival, held each year during the Labor Day weekend, has a reputation for intimacy—celebrities are not subjected to red carpets or corsetry, and the looming mountains have a way of making Hollywood seem garish and far away.
She was convincing as Joan Jett, in the 2010 bio-pic “The Runaways,” and as Marylou, the sixteen-year-old bride of Dean Moriarty, in the 2012 adaptation of “On the Road.” Now she was playing a different misfit, the twentieth century’s most famous princess.
“Spencer” has less in common with “The Crown,” the Netflix series about the Royal Family, than it does with “Rosemary’s Baby” or “Gaslight,” films in which the mental breakdown of the female lead is the rational response to conspiracy, and madness looks something like resistance.
Online, a host of memes appeared featuring images of Stewart with captions such as “Five movies, one facial expression,” or “I don’t always smile, but when I do, I don’t.” The jokes captured something about Stewart’s naturalism and restraint, qualities of her acting that some find captivating and others inscrutable.
He went on, “You can see sometimes a movie that is too transparent, so I don’t understand what I’m doing as an audience,” because the filmmakers are “giving it to me completely digested.” Larraín, who grew up in Santiago, Chile, is thoughtful and bearded.
Her Diana tries to shape-shift her way out of powerlessness—eyes downcast and voice breathy in moments of pliancy, chin raised with imperiousness when breaking rules, her moods oscillating unpredictably as she strides through the castle halls at a rapid clip, like a woman pursued.
Her friends, practiced in the art of standing on the sidelines, made their way to the bar as she shifted into professional mode, ready to be led around the room by a publicist.
“I wish I was able to go to some of the more micro festivals,” she said, before adding, “Not that your festival is micro!” She grabbed her foot and mimed putting it into her mouth.
The dry September air hung hazy above brown hills, hummingbirds sipped at flowers, and elderly men shuffled around the green.
If you Google Stewart’s name on any given day, you are likely to find, on several Web sites, detailed descriptions of what she wore while getting an iced coffee or picking up groceries.
Her dad was a stage manager, overseeing the rehearsals that precede a shoot, and her mother was a script supervisor, responsible for insuring that there was continuity between the scenes of a film.
“I think when I presented her with this she was, like, ‘Shit, I’ve told her she can do anything she wants, now I have to drive her to these fucking auditions.’ ” Stewart tried out for a number of commercials, but the artifice of advertising didn’t come naturally to her.
Foster, who began acting as a toddler and was famous by the time she was fourteen, told me, of her co-star, “I can’t say she’s my doppelgänger, but I do feel like, when she was little, I felt everything that she was feeling, and processed things the same way.” In Fincher’s film, Foster plays a recently divorced mom re-starting her life in an Upper West Side town house that is soon invaded by a dopey rich kid and his partners, who are trying to find a hidden stash of money.
What she remembers from her early years of acting is a fear of letting people down, which was often so intense that she came to the set feeling nauseated, with sweaty palms. She also remembers the satisfaction of pleasing grownups.
She preferred to learn her lines on set, right before filming, so that it would seem, on camera, as if they had just occurred to her.
When they filmed “Adventureland,” a dramedy about college kids working at an amusement park during summer vacation, Stewart had not yet been cast in “Twilight,” but Eisenberg felt distinctly that he was working with a movie star.
While they were filming, in Pittsburgh, Catherine Hardwicke, the director who had been hired to adapt “Twilight,” flew there to audition Stewart for the role of Bella Swan, the girl who falls in love with a tortured vampire named Edward Cullen.
One day, Hardwicke said, Stewart “just kind of mentioned that she was raised with wolves, real wolves—that the family took care of wolves.” Of the director, Stewart said, “I just thought she was—she felt crazy.” Stewart had seen Hardwicke’s teen drama “Thirteen,” which cleared her bar for authenticity.
Pattinson, she said, had an “intellectual approach that was combined with ‘I don’t give a fuck about this, but I’m going to make this sing.’ And I was, like, ‘Ugh, same.’ ” She picked up her club and smiled.
According to Hardwicke, Summit Entertainment, the studio that produced “Twilight,” thought that the movie was comparable in scale to “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants,” a 2005 teen movie that made about forty million dollars at the box office.
She had spent her adolescence being tutored during film shoots; “Twilight” was college for her.
Then, around the time that filming wrapped on the fifth and final part, she was cast as the lead in “Snow White and the Huntsman,” which execs envisioned as the start of a major franchise.
“There are times,” Stewart said, “when I will literally go over to her and be, like, ‘What the fuck are we doing with our lives? We need to get out of here.
In sweet but slowly devastating two-handed scenes, she wears the kind but frozen expression of someone who doesn’t want to acknowledge another person’s vulnerability.
In response, he wrote “Clouds of Sils Maria,” an English-language film set in Switzerland that can be seen, in part, as a critique of the dominant machinery of contemporary movies, in which the greatest actors of our time are subjected to the indignities of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and audiences watch minor variations on the same six or seven characters every three or four years until we die.
Assayas offered Stewart the role of Jo-Ann, but she told him that she would rather play Maria’s assistant, a young woman named Val, who talks Maria through her anxieties and, in one scene, defends the incorrigible Jo-Ann, who was ultimately played by Chloë Grace Moretz.
Somewhere else being herself.” Binoche told me that she was struck by Stewart’s openness, and also by “her capacity of learning lines in a minute.” She added, “As for me, it takes ages—it’s like I need to go over and over and over so it gets into my body.
For her performance, Stewart won a César, the French equivalent of an Oscar.
After “Sils Maria,” Assayas wrote “Personal Shopper,” which centers on another assistant, Maureen, whose visits to the Chanel showroom, on behalf of the model who employs her, become an element of the plot.
“I felt that I was directing the film from the outside and she was directing it from the inside,” Assayas told me.
She recalled a particular video, of Diana on a boat, in which she turns and lights up at the sight of her children, and another in which she emits a strange and incongruous laugh.
Mathon shot on film, frequently in closeup, and, to Stewart, it felt as though the trio became a “three-headed animal,” whose movements were propelled by Larraín’s “fervent, insane, psychotic confidence.” Upon entering the set, Larraín would tell Stewart to “inhabit the space,” an old mantra from his days in the theatre.
Diana, caught between the end of her marriage and the life still to come, spins down castle halls and runs through gardens, pivoting and gliding to Greenwood’s surging score, wearing iconic outfits that represent various stages of her life.
“It’s like doing yoga and you suddenly stretch your hips in a certain way and start crying, and you’re, like, What is that?” What resulted is a scene that, for a few moments, gives you a glimpse of a person who was not allowed to exist.
In the past decade, it has awarded Best Actress to Meryl Streep for playing Margaret Thatcher, to Olivia Colman for playing Queen Anne, and to Renée Zellweger for playing Judy Garland.
Afterward, in a wood-panelled reception room outfitted with gilt chairs and fairy lights, the audience gathered for a British-themed reception: cucumber sandwiches, shepherd’s pie, fish and chips.
Bartkowiak had a few minor issues with “Spencer,” he told me, but not with Stewart’s performance, which he described as “captivating” and “flawless.” This seemed like a good sign: despite the Academy’s efforts to diversify in recent years, men of Bartkowiak’s approximate generation and credentials remain an important demographic.
Stewart has already filmed “Crimes of the Future,” with David Cronenberg, and she’s about to shoot “Love Me,” which will co-star Steven Yeun.
The ways that she acknowledges being embarrassed, and self-hating, but that it also really turns her on, is one of the really difficult and complicated relationships we have with being women in this body in a fully patriarchal society.” The memoir follows Yuknavitch through a stillbirth, multiple husbands, and the pursuit of sexual experience with lovers male and female; it has cameos from literary mentors including Ken Kesey, Kathy Acker, and Lynne Tillman.
The memoir’s prose is visceral, and its structure is decidedly unchronological; it does not seem, at first glance, easily adaptable, and Stewart has been toiling at the script for years.
In the weeks since I’d last seen her, she’d travelled to Paris, for Fashion Week, and to London, for the British première of “Spencer.” She was starting to get a little tired of talking about the movie, she confessed.
She had a MacBook open and was chatting with a close friend, who briskly excused himself even as I apologized for being early.
In addition to “The Chronology of Water,” Stewart is writing a TV series with Meyer and developing a gay ghost-hunting reality show with a friend, which she has described to me as “a paranormal romp in a queer space,” with elevated aesthetics.
She hoped to find someone familiar with the writers who appear in the book—an actress in her early thirties, preferably, who doesn’t look too old for the scenes when the character is in her twenties or too young for those set in her forties.
“Like, someone could be so good at it, you know?” Whenever she talked about directing, something in her manner changed—a hungrier self emerged, a side of her enlivened by the prospect of being undefined, and concerned with making the right impression.
The scene that the actresses read for their auditions was a conversation with Ken Kesey, who offers the lead character some of the first encouragement she receives as a writer.
I asked Stewart if she was looking forward to being in charge, but she said that, for her, directing would be a kind of letting go.
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