The “undeniable” director who lit a stronger flame under Kristen Stewart’s arse
Kristen Stewart surely has to have one of the most interesting careers of the modern Hollywood age. For a good while, it seemed like she was doomed to rot away in the realm of teen flicks, but then in an instant, the industry sat up and started taking her seriously.
When an actor signs onto a franchise, it has to come along with major contemplations, especially when it’s a franchise bound to be as huge as Twilight was inevitably going to be, given the obsession with Stephanie Meyer’s novels; anyone cast to play a role had to give it serious thought.
Twilight, Hunger Games, Harry Potter, and even Disney releases like High School Musical or Camp Rock are all moment-defining franchises. For a certain age bracket, these films define late childhood or teenhood, and those characters are more than just figures in films, but are objects of youthful obsession.
Each had a fandom that went well beyond just box office statistics to become a cultural phenomenon exactly because they were targeted at the right age group that would cling on and stick around, growing up with these movies and then taking them into their adulthood as beacons of nostalgia.
Out of them all, Twilight stands out. The vampire flicks not only hit that teenage age bracket, but they specifically hit them right around the time of first crushes and first kisses. Naturally, with a cast as attractive as Stewart, Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner, and with the films telling the story of love and obsession, with a good amount of neck biting thrown in there, it was bound to become a thing that spiralled into something huge.
Saying yes to a role like Bella Swan, the leading lady of the franchise, had to come along with a serious consideration of whether Stewart wanted to take on a role that was inevitably going to become a defining one, but no matter how big the studio thought Twilight could be, they surely never predicted the levels it would reach.
By the time the final movie was released in 2012, though, Stewart was in a weird place. For a great example of how pop culture had her trapped, simply look at how she was treated when she was spotted kissing someone other than Pattinson and when their relationship broke down. The world wanted her to be Bella Swan and nothing else, or at least, they didn’t want her to age up into an adult and start taking on more serious roles away from the vampire world.
Stewart clearly did want that, though. She’d been working for so long, starting as a child actor, and clearly thought Twilight would open doors. After that, when it felt like the world might only ever see her as the shy girl in a supernatural love triangle, it was actually a French director who held the key.
A major turning point in her career came when she met Olivier Assayas, a director who finally granted her exactly the kind of grown-up role she wanted as Maureen in 2016’s Personal Shopper. Playing a grief-stricken American in Paris, trying desperately to connect with her dead brother, it’s a balanced role between horror and heavy internal drama. It was a role that required a more nuanced performance than your typical teen romance, and Stewart needed that.
“There is a flame that he lights under my ass that is stronger than I have ever felt,” she said about the director. For perhaps the first time in her career, she felt like Assayas not only trusted her creative intuition, but let her run with it, stating, “The idea that he can be the catalyst of a thought process and really allow me to have it and lets it be mine is a really good feeling like you are creating something with someone rather than satisfying someone.” Their chemistry as a team just clicked for her, adding, “there is a communication that is undeniable”.
No longer playing a set character from a book, or feeling trapped as an adult in a teenage figure, Personal Shopper granted her the freedom of a new era where she felt respected as a performer and spurred on by the director.
“It is a different version of the job. I like both, but I like this more,” she said, moving into a chapter that would lead to victories like Love Lies Bleeding or her own directorial debut, The Chronology of Water.
