Kristen Stewart calls out Hollywood for ‘phony’ support of female filmmakers

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse Loughrey

Get our The Life Cinematic email for free

Please enter a valid email address

Please enter a valid email address

SIGN UP

I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy

Kristen Stewart has called out Hollywood for appearing to support female filmmakers but then turning its back once it has uplifted a certain number of creative voices.

The Twilight star, 34, who is set to make her directorial debut with an adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s 2011 memoir, The Chronology of Water, vocalised her gripes in a new interview with Net-A-Porter.

“There’s a thinking that we can check these little boxes… 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,” Stewart said.

“And I’m in awe of those women, I love those women,” she clarified, before adding, “[but] it feels phony. If we’re congratulating each other for broadening perspective, when we haven’t really done enough, then we stop broadening.”

The Spencer actor has previously directed movie shorts, an episode of 2020’s Homemade and music videos, including Boygenius’s The Film in 2023. The Chronology of Water will mark her first feature-length film.

Teasing the forthcoming project, Stewart revealed that it 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.

Stewart currently stars opposite Katy O’Brian in Love Lies Bleeding, a lesbian love thriller.

Helmed by Rose Glass, the movie follows a reclusive gym manager Lou (Stewart), who falls in love with an ambitious bodybuilder Jackie (O’Brian). Their love soon leads to violence after they become entangled in the crimes of Lou’s family.

In a four-star review, The Independent’s chief film critic Clarisse Loughrey wrote: “The feeling that permeates it all is desperate frustration – specifically, a woman’s yearning for the kind of power that could finally even the odds.

“Stewart is brilliant here, in a way that adds Love Lies Bleeding to her own, expanding catalogue of desire on screen, from her wholesome romcom Happiest Season to the giddy perversions of David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future.”

Love Lies Bleeding is out in cinemas now.

Last week, it was announced that Stewart would be returning to her vampire movie roots in Panos Cosmatos’ Flesh of the Gods.

She has been cast to star alongside Oscar Isaac in the movie, which is said to follow a married couple, Raoul (Isaac) and Alex (Stewart), who descend each evening from their luxury skyscraper condo and head into an electric nighttime realm of 1980s Los Angeles.