‘The Chronology Of Water’ Duo Kristen Stewart & Imogen Poots On Feeling “F**king Lucky” For Making Audiences Think Again

Seldom does a movie linger in your bones long after you’ve watched it. And Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut, The Chronology of Water, was built to pull your psyche deep down underneath the ocean waves. 

Based on the memoir of the same name by Lidia Yuknavitch, the visceral film, shot in a neurological, fragmented, dream-like structure, follows Lidia (Imogen Poots) as she seeks escape from an abusive childhood through competitive swimming in the 1980s. After falling down the rabbit hole of addiction, toxic relationships, and self-sabotage to mask the pain of her upbringing, Lidia tries to buoy herself to safety by trying to uncover her voice and find healing through the act of writing. To create this unique cinematic experience, Stewart and Poots endured rigorous trial-and-error shoots, tough training days in clandestine New York pool houses. They also built a seemingly long-lasting friendship in the process. “Working with an actor like that, there’s nothing [she can’t do],” Stewart told Deadline about guiding Poots through the most challenging scenes for the film. “I touched the fucking sky with her. You cannot get higher than that.” Stewart has explained the film as being designed as a reflective experience for the audience that unflinchingly shows the subconscious ways memory lives within the human body.

Below, Stewart and Poots talk to Deadline about hiding hernias, falling in love with raw, compelling stories and learning to succumb to the ebbs and flows of vulnerability.

RELATED: READ THE SCREENPLAY FOR THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER

DEADLINE: Imogen, you read this incredibly rich, dense and emotionally harrowing script. What’s the first thing going through your head? 

IMOGEN POOTS: Several to a million thoughts. When I got the script, I knew Kristen had adapted it and would be directing it. That makes a huge difference because you’re opening the page of something you want to love. And so often in this business, you want to love something and for whatever reason, it just doesn’t come through. The execution or the idea can be good, or the concept is interesting, but it doesn’t come together. And for this, I was completely enthralled. I read it quite slowly because I wanted to take it all in. I was so excited that Kristen was going to make a film. It’s different these days. There’s so many actors, directors and the artistic community is very vast. It’s hard to grab hold of someone and turn them around to you and be like, “Hi, I think you’re brilliant. Do you want to make something together?” That’s why I was excited to read this: I think Kristen’s one of the rare people working now who are really doing something very different, not in a showy way, but only in the [hyper specific] way she knows how to. This script is an extension of that. The character in the story is so brilliant. I love romantic comedies and animated movies, but most of the time I want to see the movies and relate to what is up there on screen. 

[Relating to people] doesn’t happen as much anymore because people are looking like they’re made of AI, and we don’t have mature actresses in leading roles in the way we should. So many people are left out of relating to what’s on the screen in front of them. I really related to this character, and I felt like a lot of women were going to because of her inconsistencies, because of her hopes, and dreams, and fantasies and the way she sabotages the good stuff, and how your own life’s work is to take responsibility for someone else’s problem that they have caused. It’s such a horrendous, but sort of fascinating story to tell.

DEADLINE: Kristen, what compelled you to take on this book adaptation for your first movie as its writer and director? 

KRISTEN STEWART: The book, I felt, is an internal landscape, and it has little pockets, corners, and tiny corridors that this woman feels like she can talk to herself and no one else. It kind of felt like it was scrawled across the interior of her epidermis, then turned inside out. It just didn’t feel like a book that was for other people. There was something about how it felt too hot to touch, like so dangerous that if you reveal certain aspects of your experience, how you’ve responded to stimulus in the world that we all live in, despite the details of your household or your upbringing. There was something, a little skirt lifting and secret talking about it, that I was just so proud of this woman’s ability to do it. And I felt like she did it to get other people to do it, to find community and companionship, and to be able to design and write your own self into being.

The story just felt like a scattering of experiences that was somehow so succinct in its mission, rather than holding the reader’s hand to make it more palatable and easier for them to understand where you’re coming from. You have to have a lot of patience when you read the book and to watch the movie. But it’s not because it’s a slog, it’s because you need to give yourself time.  Frankly, I think we keep making the same fucking movie over and over. And by doing that, it’s just taking everyone’s opportunity to think for themselves away on a daily basis, and we don’t even really know it. Then you see something that hangs a lantern on the fact that we’ve all been inoculated with just being entertained [and nothing more]. 

POOTS: We’re being inoculated by the patriarchy.

STEWART: So, when I read this book, I thought, “Gosh, this is such a diving board.” And ultimately, the movie really does reflect the screenplay, except maybe for large chunks cut out. It was very dense, like you said earlier, because we just overshot the hell out of it. But the coolest part is that you can feel that all these memories, everything’s in retrospect, there’s no present tense in the movie. All of this feels either cut off or elaborated on in a magical thinking way; nothing feels objective. Therefore, I just thought everyone could put themselves in this film because I could put myself in it. 

DEADLINE: Imogen, what was the physical training like for this? 

POOTS: There was a lot of swim training because I wanted to learn the form and the strokes, obviously, for portraying it on camera accurately, but also, I wanted to get into Lidia’s mind. I also read Swimming Studies by Leanne Shapton, which is a wonderful swimmer’s memoir full of beguiling facts about what it’s like to live your life as a swimmer and how there’s this rapacious, bottomless appetite that comes with swimming. And Lidia, as a person, has that in so many ways in relation to her life. I also met all these amazing people who were like child champions, and I love doing that. It’s really cool as an adult to learn new things because we stop doing that when we’re teenagers [laughs]. We just kind of go, “Well, I’ve learned everything I need to know, I guess.” But it’s not the fucking truth at all. 

Weight training was very important to me. I wanted to feel strong in my body, and sometimes your body can be a stranger to you. One of the coolest things you can do is understand how to be in your own body, which is easier said than done. When you’re moving through the world in a way where lots of different types of people are trying to translate your body into a language they can better digest, it has bad effects on you. So, I think understanding what your body is capable of is cool. That training was helpful for playing the part because, in a way, her strength is juxtaposed against the fragility of a person like her. And then after the fact, I found it weird having this body now that I wasn’t playing Lidia anymore. So, that’s when it hit me how important it was to have had a different type of physicality to play the part.

STEWART: I need to add that Imogen got two hernias while training for this and didn’t tell me about it and just held her guts in and bared down and told me after we finished shooting. There was a line in the book that moved the ever-living hell out of me, but it just didn’t end up in the movie because her body took the place of this line of dialogue. But there’s a point where she’s standing off with her dad in a sort of not literal way and a sort of atmospheric, emotional, transient in terms of time. And she goes, “I was stronger than I’d ever been in my entire life.”

POOTS: Oh, yeah.

STEWART: And Imogen was probably stronger than she’d ever been in her entire life when she made this movie.

POOTS: It’s tough in this day and age to consider [the way you look at] yourself in a good way. And Kristen made me feel beautiful. That’s a huge feat for someone to do for someone else, and for a woman to do that for another woman, an actress to do that for another actress. It’s such a cool symptom of the film because the body really matters. 

DEADLINE: Speaking of the body, there are so many close-ups on intimate body scenes and stylized choices that make the film feel like a retro home video. What were your inspirations? 

STEWART: Well, I was really obsessed with accomplishing a first-person perspective that didn’t feel hokey, especially in the beginning. There are really embodied angles. There are things that Lidia is looking at that normal filmmaking would not frame or design because it just doesn’t tell enough, because you need to feel stuck in certain positions at the beginning of the movie, because it’s supposed to make you feel this oppression that matches this physical cage experience that this young kid is having. I thought about the sound of the house, with this internal rhythm that holds the viewer and tells you she did get out. And the whole thing is the climb. It’s like you realize that the movie has this engine of: get the fuck out of that house.

Then, when she leaves the house, she can’t get out of it. It follows her, like this haunted experience and memory. Those flickers or flashes were used to show intrusive thoughts or moments of wonder. It’s sometimes less straightforward, too, to show time folding in on itself and displacing awareness, because certain memories, wishes, or projections into the future can sometimes take up more space than the current moment you’re living in. That’s such a personal experience that we don’t share with other people. As Lidia gets older, the movie takes on a more concerted composition, and sometimes we step back from the body to look at her because she’s somebody who’s defined those terms. Therefore, they speak for themselves, so it doesn’t feel voyeuristic. I never wanted to feel a third body in the room. The only time we really feel it is when we slam into this really objective wide shot while she is touching herself against the door frame, and it just felt like all of a sudden it was so hard-earned. The times when we decided to just all of a sudden cut to Imogen head-to-toe against an entire atmospheric background are so fucking shocking. And she’s such an animal that she just blows your fucking hair back. So, we needed to be confined and contained and let her break out of that emotional prison. 

By the end of the movie, it’s very chill, kind of boring in a beautiful way. Everything is really standard. I had a lot of faith and trust in odd angles, and this was the funnest thing I have ever done in my entire life, being able to design these weird experiences, for example, of having sex with a person instead of watching two people fucking, which is something I never need to see again. You get to see something like that from the inside out, from the inside of someone’s body – disgustingly [laughs]. 

POOTS: [I’ll add to that about close-ups]. I think intimacy, on and off camera, is something we are trying to understand, especially when the formative experience of intimacy has been kind of rebranded by someone else. Kristen has said this a few times that Lidia’s backstory, being what it was with her father and with child abuse, is this person’s story. There’s also a different version of that story, which is what we were talking about earlier: how does moving through the world affect your experience as a woman in your body? Many people have been like, “You’re so open.” But I’m also quite protective and steely, and, of course, like everyone else, I have moments of vulnerability. And so, attempting to get close to what that is on camera is also vulnerable. But the safety of working with people who are not only very talented at what they do, and of course, they’re going to take care of you, there’s just something at play where everything’s worth it. And I think some projects aren’t worth being that exposed for, and this one just had to be this way. If we’re going to tell this story, that’s exactly what we’re there to do. And so, I think that’s always challenging, but at the same time, that’s exactly why I wanted to do it. And it was one of those experiences where the film gave me a gift back, and I think everyone involved felt that way. And so, there’s just a kind of, in terms of what’s challenging to me as an actress, I mean, I want that.

STEWART: You really understood the assignment in a way that is, like, the mutual recognition after so many years of screaming into an echo chamber and auditioning honestly 500 girls and everyone who’s ever made a movie and never made a movie. And I’ve known everyone, I’ve met all these fucking women. And then all of a sudden this person comes along as a friend, as a fellow. And I know you to be steely and not reserved. In fact, Imogen has to be reserved because there’s just so much in there. There’s a preservation thing that you do as an actor sometimes, because if something’s not good enough, then you can’t break down those walls. It’s just not worth it. But I look back on this, and I go, I can’t believe what you put yourself through for us, for me, for yourself, for us together. And because of that, we have a totally different relationship.

What you did during that little month and a half, I can’t believe it. There’s one scene for me that I still wonder to this day how it was possible, which I think makes the film. There was a deck for one particular sequence. There’s a love scene between three women that I didn’t know would work. It relates to certain elemental nature aspects, and it insinuates or implies that we are organic material, and it’s a very sort of impressionistic and pretty and potentially sterile because there’s no fucking in it. But to achieve this, Imogen had to, for several hours, make the scene with me, trying to make this [makeshift] photography book of intimacy, and then all of a sudden the whole movie and her whole life fell on top of her. And instead of making a sterile kind of collage of sexy suds and waves, it became about Lidia, and it became about Imogen. It became about intimacy itself, about being a woman, and about holding that space. And it became a scene. And that’s an actor who’s not playing scenes. She’s living the entire life of it. And to find that, I mean, honestly, I don’t know if that would’ve been successful to just cut out of that without some kind of segue back into reality. Working with an actor like that, there is nothing. I touched the fucking sky with her. You cannot get higher than that.

POOTS:  I’m going to cry. It’s interesting because, at moments, the character, through her own volition, creates this space because of the life she’s had. She’s an incredibly lonely person. It’s interesting to play someone who is that lonely, even though she has this kind of relationship with her sister. She’s deeply lonely. And it’s funny, on the other hand, it’s like moving through the world; if I hadn’t met Kristen, I don’t know what that looks like. I don’t know. You can really miss that. You can potentially miss a very crucial moment where someone is just pushing you further into what you’re already on the scent of. And it’s those people, whether it’s someone who takes you seriously when you’re younger to do something or whatever, but there are almost transcendent moments in terms of a creative life, because otherwise you might just miss it. And that’s OK too, but it’s cool to know that this was meant to be, or at least I believe it was.

STEWART: It’s so rare. It comes along just a couple of times in a lifetime, if you’re fucking lucky. 

DEADLINE: What would you both like people to take away from this moving story that you two have created? 

POOTS: Let’s make more films like the movies that we all miss and adore. Let’s keep making great films, finding the right people to work with and getting them financed. There’s a line from Kim Gordon in her book Girl in a Band, which is like, “People will pay a lot of money to watch other people believe in themselves.” And she’s talking about that in terms of being a musician, but it’s interesting to think about that in a sense of people paying money to hear what women have to say or people paying money to watch a character go through so much. 

I do think the movie is uplifting, and it’s uplifting because it’s not straightforward. And I don’t think it’s this kind of Hollywood pat, truncated statement buzzword thing. It’s raw, messy and badass. It’s epic and mundane. And it’s something you can actually move through and push through the membrane, but it might just look different from what you’ve been sold. And that’s absolutely fine because that’s what it’s like to live a life. It’s really reassuring to see people living their lives, and it’s often the interstitial stuff that matters. 

STEWART: Someone texted me last night that was like, “Thanks for getting me to think again.” It was nice to hear Immy go through that because, just to put it plainly, it’s about daring to think for yourself. So that we can actually believe in ourselves and not in other people’s ideas of who the fuck we should be.

[This interview has been edited for length and clarity]