The Interviews (ft. Kristen Stewart, Jared Bush, Andrew Guest)

0:14Hello Pod, I'm Chris Hewitt and welcome to another episode of our brand new regular Lee Interviews which rounds up those cracking chats we have every week with the movie world's best and brightest. We've got a triple bill for you this week, starting off with the wonderful Kristen Stewart, who makes her directorial debut with The Chronology of Water, a bruising drama based on the book by Lydia Yuknovich, and which stars a career-best image and puts as Yuknovich as she makes her way through a challenging life. It's a film we gave four stars to, and Stewart's approach to directing is bold and uncompromising, telling a story in a strictly unconventional, non-chronological fashion.

0:56It's a hell of a debut, and when I chatted to her last October at the London Film Festival, we spoke about her approach to directing and how it's been shaped, or not, by the amazing directors she's worked with across her career. Here you go, Kristen Stewart. Enjoy. Kristen Stewart, director of The Chronology of Water. Welcome to the Opera Podcast. How are you? Great. There's so much to talk about with this movie. But before we get into the movie itself, I want to talk about your journey towards directing. Because I'm guessing this is something you've wanted to do pretty much since you got into the film industry, in a way?

1:29Yeah. And, yeah, I mean, I guess if I really think back on why that impulse was kind of in my bones from conception, likely because the exchanges that I have with directors feel so emotionally congruent that, you know, image creation and kind of cultivating a, for lack of a more kind of elevated term, like a vibe and making sure that the, I don't know, that the alchemy of the set, the cellular, you know, collaboration just feels like suddenly you start sharing a body. this sounds like kind of over intellectualized what i'm saying is how physical movie making is it feels like um of course like there's a lot of prep involved to to make sure that when you get to set the environment you've created is about discovery and not necessarily about execution yeah um but yeah i was it was just as a little kid when you find yourself on a movie set that is really singing like really the chorus is in tune there's nothing like it you just feel like you're a part of this massive machine this like emotional sort of bloodletting and uh yeah so i just i i i i knew that for me there's not like a massive separation between acting and directing my favorite directions of all time that i've ever received are non-verbal it's a glance it's like a look across the room going, I'm with you.

3:02Okay. Yeah. And so whenever you started directing on this, is that the sort of director you wanted to be the sort of directions and notes that you wanted to give where were the same nonverbal and creating that five? Was that something that you wanted to do? It was important? Yeah, it's important to not kind of. It's really difficult to make sure that you don't like step in all the snow and blow away the butterflies like a film crew comes in and just like destroys serenity yeah um you know you come kind of like barreling through with your like trucks and everyone's you know it's it's it's like it's it's difficult to remain delicate and you really have to because i'm such a honey badger on everything like such a control freak i've come in way too hot quite often and so i was like you know allow a little bit of that passion to inform like some gusto but at the same time get out of everyone's way because you want to kind of bury things for your collaborators to discover and it's nice it's nice for them to think that they came up with it themselves where you're like yep but i put that there for you to find so you're you're lacing clues around the set to sort of trigger limit to doing what you want to do without actually being prescriptive in that way.

4:19You're like a mastermind in some ways. Yes, that's right. Yeah.

4:25Let's go back to the sort of beginning of this journey. So David Fincher was obviously a director that you worked with very early in your career. What was that experience like? Was he one of the first directors that really made you see what you wanted to do, what directing was possible? What was possible in directing for you? um i was such a little kid i i was so obsessed with being a sort of crew member on that movie um and and it's it's a it's a rigorous approach i mean i know that he's like well known for doing lots of takes and it was my second film and so i and it was just following a movie that i had done um like in toronto with rose trochet which was a teeny tiny little indie movie and so the the the the structure was so different and um yeah i remember i kind of i liked the athletic approach it was like so physical and uh kind of about like how long you could last and so breaking through breaking through initial impulses letting the scene get kind of terrible before it gets great again it's like every time you think you know actors are always obsessed with newness and kind of coming to something for the first time but that doesn't always mean that it's the best one you have to have faith in yourself that you are human and you will remain that way even if you feel now that you're being repetitive or you're kind of like chasing something that had occurred previously it's like you can always push past that yeah yeah embarrassment of repetition and be like oh i kind of said that already it's like okay but anyway so yeah i mean I guess with him, um, it was also kind of a two part informative experience.

6:07I worked with Jodie Foster, who's an incredible director and very, as an actor kind of has my favorite, she's kind of one foot in one foot out because she's so aware of process and she's so present and, and honest, but at the same time a technician. Yeah. And so really like leans into, um, well, it was just like really cool to watch the two of those people work at, I was 11 when I made that movie. I turned 11 on that movie. And I was like, okay, this is intense. Yeah. Yeah. Um, but no, I mean, I had a great time on that movie. I was, uh, I mean, I'm still here, you know, I, I, I didn't, I, it was encouraging.

6:49I wanted to be an actor forever. But then at that point, as you begin to make more and more movies, who's the director or directors that lit a fire under you, in a way, in terms of harboring or sparking that desire to be a director? Sean Penn, Kelly Reichardt, Olivier Assayas, Pablo Lorraine. Like, truly, these people are, like, just mad. and um i think with sean specifically he he would just like pick up the camera himself and like run up a mountain and if you could keep up with him and that night you were kind of like allowed to be in the movie and so he like just infused that film with like his vitality and i was like holy shit i just had never seen like such kind of like roughneck um impulsive truly alive um approach and then with Kelly she's just like the most I mean the movie that we did was quite composed but but it sprawls emotionally yeah and uh yeah I mean River of Grass is like like one of my favorite I mean I mean truly like I I I have just cut I covet that woman's work um I can't believe I got to work with her so all the time you're harboring this desire to direct and i know i read an interview with you where you said that you wish you'd done it sooner in a way so was there anything that was percolating bubbling around before the chronology of water came around for you um the chronology of water was a real like seal seal breaker yeah um yeah it's such an activating text and it really invites a cinematic approach because it's it's so it's uh the the writing emulates a a real memory wash dream state and that's really what i mean cinema can can can come so close to what it feels like to be to have an internal experience um and one that is non-linear uh like your memories or like your dreams when you go to sleep and yeah so this this book in particular i just thought had

9:07physicalized certain emotions that are secrets and kind of brought these underlying like like uh cacophonous feelings to this to to a surface that i had absolutely never seen before it was like the book's full of secrets and and we all have them and they are like so so common, pervasive, absolutely everywhere, permeates the way that our bodies move through this world. And I just thought it was not a book about the things that happened to this woman, even though it is a memoir. And it's, you know, you could have made like a kind of biopic version of this and allowed the piece to be reduced to the elements of the plot.

9:53But what we wanted to do really was to be able to deconstruct a life and then stitch it back together like a quilt. And so the movie had to have its own memory and its own body. And in order to faithfully adapt the book, we kind of needed to break it. It's about form. But sort of reorganization of details and prescribed stories and just realizing that reality is so malleable and it is in your hands to change if things feel kind of like unsustainable. When the things that happen to you are sort of unacceptable, you can sort of reframe them and enjoy them and de-stigmatize things that are painful and kind of like step into taboo in a way that feels repossessive.

10:49I mean, this is a book about repossessing words through your body. Yeah. So, yeah. Well, I was so taken by the rhythms of the film and the way you approached it visually. And I'm fascinated by the process of writing the movie, shooting the movie, editing the movie. Obviously, you make a movie three times, essentially. And I know that you shot a lot more than you used in the edit, but were you always looking towards that sort of staccato, a dream-like rhythm, almost replicating the way that water moves in a way, capturing that dream-like vision. Was that something that was in your screenplay, or was that something you discovered in the editing suite?

11:33We pushed it in the edit. There was a sort of trickle effect, kind of like a flip book of memories, in order to blend time and not have it feel jarring. We kind of figured out how to kind of tease an image before jumping into a new scene because there was a sort of emotional catalystic uh occurrence in one scene that would sort of rocket you into the next yeah and so if you didn't feel the reason for the trigger i think it would have been kind of too abrupt and stark and weird and and the scenes we needed to make like a smoothie of a movie it needed to blend and there are patterns and repetitions realized visually that do you know step in for the kind of main central metaphor of the film is that it's about breaking pattern it's about it's about reclassifying trauma and not allowing the things that echo to pull you under and destroy you and so we needed those echoes and then we needed to kind of

12:42we needed to find emotional connective tissue that felt discovered instead of planned but we always planned to find that chaotically i mean in the script there's all the flashes are written in there but i think what ended up happening is the flashes the images changed because we found new ones yeah and they were better than what i planned um yeah so the only ones on set or new ones in the edit suite as you were as you were going new ones on set that we then brought into the edit and used amazing yeah wow and a lot of that will obviously come from your interaction with your your actors as well the work Imogen does in this movie is phenomenal it's insane yeah she's she's a national treasure over here oh my god really because I say that all the time I was so happy to come I was so happy to premiere the movie here last night because I knew like her whole family was in the audience and you know I just was like yeah I don't think there's nothing there's nothing she can't do I don't think she's amazing I want her to do a one woman show just on anything at all or anything that pops in her head or would you write this one woman show no no she has to write it this is all about her absolutely would you direct it god I'm really showing I'm really like tipping my cards there's something that I want to make with Imogen that's kind of percolating right now that I would want to make a kind of meta textual scenario in which she played herself trying to do a one woman show but like in a sort of Well, let me pitch you the movie.

14:12Ready? Here it goes. I'm ready. I'm not going to do it. I'm going to keep this one. Shut up. I'm ready to green light it, you know. I have two things for Emmy that I'm sure it would be a huge mistake to not do. So I have to push those forward. Amazing. Because I know that... Was this a role that you might have played? No. Ordinarily? No? No. I mean, look, if somebody sent it to me, I would probably have jumped on it. But... Yeah, I mean, I have a different, there's like a kind of luscious, there's kind of a luscious, vicious openness that Imogen has. I think the body of her, I think she just really represents this kind of like, she's got a sensuality, but she's so pragmatic and she's so strong and she's got such a formidable physical presence.

15:08while being somebody who's really shy and vulnerable also. Like, she covers it up with her kind of, like, British Muppet, but really it's not. She's a delicate creature. She's so hyper-intelligent. I mean, to cast a writer is really difficult because, like, you just can't fake it. I mean, she's somebody who becomes a... At the end of the movie, you should believe that this woman can, you know, spit some wisdom. And who actually reads, you know? No one does that anymore. where she's, no, it was never me. I'm just like way sharper. I just have way more edges. She needed to be this like soft, open, like kind of sometimes a little bit blurry maniac.

15:50Like she just, but yeah, I just think she's so perfect for this. But when I saw, she auditioned for the movie, which blew my mind because I've just been such a obsessive fan for so long. And I thought maybe it would be cool to discover someone that we had never seen before. So the net was like so wide. And then it was like, hire the best actress you've ever met. That's maybe the best idea. So it was an unnecessary audition. 100 % halfway through. I was like, please stop. We need to be filming this. Yeah, this is insane. Stop it. When did you first meet her? When did you first recognize what you were working with?

16:26Gosh, I mean, I saw her and everything she's ever really done. I mean, she's like so incredible in Green Room. We have a bunch of mutual friends, oddly. there was like uh it was bizarre that we had never actually crossed paths she sent me an audition tape i mean it was like just in the slew of it was in this very large pile of uh self-tapes and yeah i mean there was just like never anyone else and then i was in london i think we were doing like spencer stuff and i had like stayed up all night before our meeting and it was like, I was half a person when I met her. And I think she had read the book, but maybe not the script yet.

17:06And I could be wrong. And I don't know if you talked to her, but no, but we had a, we had a really great kind of weird fever dream of a meeting. And it was like, we're done here. I mean, we're going to work together for the rest of our lives. So talk to me then through the process of directing her and working together to get this performance. was a lot of non-verbal glances and the directions that you talked about earlier on. Did that manifest in this movie? Yeah, but I also think I was a little up her ass. Everyone else, like, whatever. But she... It's such a dual performance. I mean, like, we're both in this movie.

17:49We were really in lockstep. And she had so... I mean, she had to traverse, like, four decades of a life. and trust me we didn't shoot it in order we were all over the place she would play like 18 and 40 in the same day there was a lot of dialogue I think it was like for me she would come to set and I'd be like okay do you remember this part of the script so it's when this happens and then before this happens and then after this happens but I would like I guess I would make her do it over and over and over and inevitably use like take one or two because I just couldn't see. I just wanted to make sure that we dug and dug and dug and got to the very bottom.

18:33But her first instincts were much better than the way that I sort of dragged her around. And what's next for you? Beyond directing Imogen Poots in a metatextual one-woman show. Oh, God, so cool. If I had the money on Greenlighter right now. Honestly, I want to do it for absolutely nothing. I want to do a weird communist version of a movie set where my whole crew is like basically working for free but i make not a dollar and then you go cool if this movie makes anything at all it's all yours thank you for your three weeks i like that i know we can do it tomorrow yeah um yeah i don't know i'm trying to figure out how to do stuff like that i'm trying to figure out kind of how to like break break away from the system of the industry and change process because if we keep doing the same if we keep emulating the same process we'll keep making the same film over and over.

19:22I think reality is breaking for us all. So it's time to kind of redesign it. Damn straight. What a pleasure it's been. Kristen Stewart, thanks so much for your time. Hell yes, dude. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, that was Kristen Stewart. And a reminder that the chronology of Water, which is not part of a loose unofficial trilogy, with the weight of water and the shape of water, is in cinemas now. Also in cinemas right now is the film directed by our next guest because you can still find a cinema showing Jared Bush's Soutropolis 2 after all at$1.7 billion and counting at the global box office since it opened late last year it is the biggest animated movie of all time and can still pack him in to auditoriums but his time in cinemas is winding down and his time on PVOD has just begun and so it was the perfect opportunity to talk to Bush who wrote and co-directed the sippy animal-based sequel to Oscar and BAFTA-nominated effect, and possibly winning effect as well, when he flew into London earlier this week.

20:22And I went along and had a lovely natter with him about the success of his movie, about Nick Wilde, Judy Hopps, major A-list cameos, and much, much more, including, as it turns out, my surname. Enjoy. We are delighted to be joined on The Emperor Podcast by the writer and director of Sutropolis us to Jared Bush. How are you, sir? I'm doing great. Good, good, good. I hear you just landed. I literally just landed like 45 minutes ago. Okay. How are you? Are you all right? I mean, this is the best. Are you kidding? It literally travels my favorite thing, so being here is fantastic. What about being taken from a plane straight into a hotel room to talk to idiots like me?

21:00Is that your favorite thing? Well, see, you're talking to an idiot like me, so I think we both have that working for us. Our idiocy will count each other's idiocies out. This is not going to go well. That's always a good start. I wanted to talk about Hewitt, first of all, which is my surname. Yeah. And it's your son's first name. It is. And your son voices a character in St. Topolis 2. Talk us through that. And also, I've never heard Hewitt as a first name before. Yeah. So, you know, this is very self-indulgent. Sure. But I need to hear the story behind that. First off, name for you. You know, we've been big fans forever.

21:35So that's how that happened. Of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I can tell you. So my son, Hugh, who's 18, in the first Zootropolis, like 12 years ago, he was about, he must have been five years old at the time. We had a very different version of the story back then. And he played this little, adorable polar bear. And he had like a major part because we like, it's not like there's five-year-olds everywhere. And then we did a story change and I had to fire my own son at age five. And so he now plays Armpit Pete. It was a lizard that shows up in the reptile bar in Nick Wilde's armpit. And that was my way of apologizing for firing a child.

22:14Wow. Okay. What was that conversation like? It wasn't great. It wasn't great. Because it turns out five-year-olds don't understand story changes very easily. No, I guess they don't. I guess they don't. Oh, well, I'm glad you patched things up. That's good. We did. We did. Very, very quickly. Hughett as a first name? Yeah. That's an amazing... Yeah. You know what? More people should do this. First off, we love the name. We spent a long time, my wife and I, trying to figure out, like, what do we name my son? And it was just a name that for some reason just kept on popping up. And, yeah, I'd say that for me, we wanted something that felt unique.

22:54And he's a unique guy. So it's perfect. Fantastic. Excellent stuff. Well, let's move on to congratulations now. Perfect. Now that we're done talking about my son, let's get to me. Thank you. Because I think you've been nominated for, well, everything, right? I mean, this is Oscars, BAFTAs, Golden Globes, Emmys, Grammys, World Arts Championships. You've done them all. This is amazing. Congratulations on that. Thank you very much. And also, I mean, the incredible success at the box office. This movie has taken, last time I checked,$1.7 billion. Yes. That's not bad, Jared. That's not bad at all. It is one of those things where it doesn't seem real.

23:36I'd say that one of the things that everyone at Disney Animation is excited about, like 700 people worked on this movie. And the thing we're most excited about is we talked so much about trying to make a movie that would bring people to theaters. It has to be worthy of getting people off their couches into a theater. And when we see those box office numbers, that just means people are going out to see it. The best part is usually that means at this stage, it means people are going to see it again, which is amazing because so many little details have been put in there by our artists, like these little Easter eggs in every single moment.

24:10And to me, that's one of the most exciting things because people are starting to pick up on those. Yeah, because there's so many background gags. Yeah. You wrote this as well. And I imagine one of the reasons why it took nine years to make Sootropolis 2 is because you were going through every possible permutation of animal-based pun you could think of because they're all in here. I wish I could take credit for all those puns. I will say 100 % that is a team effort. I think a lot of people don't realize that as we're going through, before I got to Disney Animation, I was like, how long are these scripts?

24:42Because there's so many jokes all over the place. How is it possible? and it's just everyone adding their own two cents and their own jokes and their own little bits throughout the entire process. So Corey Loftus, who's our production designer, any sign you see in this world, largely he's the one that made that sign and he may like puns more than I do, which is saying a lot. It's a sickness for him. And so for me, as Byron and I, my directing partner would watch it, we kept on seeing signs we'd never seen before. Like once the movie was done, like in theaters, I'm like, oh my God, I didn't know that pun was there so oh really yeah he's a madman okay so things like uh for example in the uh in the opening action sequence of the film there's the uh nitrous oxide canister of gas yeah yeah is that a jaron bush pun or you know i i uh it's it's i i wish i could take credit for nitrous point side yeah sorry it was all me no i i believe that that was probably cory that seems like a cory special but But it couldn't have been another one of our VizDev artists.

25:43Yeah, I mean, we had the joy of sitting there and we're going through scenes and someone says, how about this idea? And you're like, immediately, 100%. Yes, it's such a fun, joyful, playful world to spend time in. And I think everyone that touched this movie knew that and just wanted to go in there and have a great time. Did it take a long time to crack this nut? Yeah. And at what point did it begin to come together for you properly? Honestly, it's a great question. Our movies take about five years from sort of the nugget of an idea until it's in a theater. So on this one, everyone looks at nine years and says, oh man, nine years, that took a long time.

26:20Byron and I, my directing partner, and Yvette, our producer, after Zootropolis won, we went and did Encanto. So that was five years on Encanto. And then the remaining four or five years was Zootropolis. So for us, weirdly, that time skip is almost a blink. Like I don't think of it as being that much time that went by. I will say that early on, we knew that we wanted to tell the story of reptiles coming to the city. That would be the big part of the mystery. Even as we were working on the first one, reptiles weren't a part of it. There's this mammal. Was that a conscious choice in the first place to leave them out?

26:51Yeah. And the big reason for that, we talked about bias and stereotypes, specifically between predator and prey animals. Yeah. In the mammal world, that delineation is very clear. and for birds and for reptiles predator and prey is a little squishier because there's sometimes kind of both of those things yeah and so as a result of that we wanted to just focus on the very clear mammal divide for that but we knew that there's reptiles out there and so really the question was what kind of story can we tell and we knew that we wanted to continue this i don't know to dig into this bias and stereotype and that really became a story about differences specifically between a mammal and a reptile but of course this is a relationship story So you have Nick and Judy who are very different types of animals, but the way they see the world is very different.

27:34And in our world right now, talking about differences felt really important. Can you talk about the writing process for you? Do you shut yourself away? Do you sit down? Because the plots of these things, I mean, obviously there's lots of nods to things like Chinatown and whatnot and film noir. And as a result, they're very labyrinthine. So do you have to get all your T's crossed and your I's dotted before you can sit down and write a word? Honestly, it's one of the things I love the most about Disney animation. So in those five years it takes to make one of our stories, at the very early stages, the first year, and you're outlining, you're coming up with story points, you're pressure testing that with other folks.

28:13Typically a writer, in this case me, but in other movies sometimes that's more than just one person, starts to then work on a first draft. Once you get that first draft of a script in, you don't have another finished draft until the movie's in theaters because you're constantly changing it. It's evolving. Over those five years, you're screening it internally about six to eight times in storyboard form. So not final animation, storyboard time version of that. When you do that, you find things and people have better ideas or you say, we can beat that thing or it's just not coming together the way I wanted it.

28:46So it's constantly being reinvented. And so as a writer for me, it's a wonderful place because you get to iterate constantly. that's honestly my favorite thing to do what's the last major piece of the jigsaw that fell into place and how late did it fall into place oh man well i think the the pro and con of animation is you can go pretty late sometimes um movies finished just until i know yes i think that's true um i'd say that like the biggest significant thing was we did a story structure adjustment so that our midpoint, about a year ago right now, so not that long ago. Oh, wow. Okay. A story adjustment where the midpoint used to be that Burning Mammal Festival.

29:29And we changed it, put the Burning Mammal Festival at the end of the second act. And the midpoint became them climbing up a cliff and going to that honeymoon lodge where the pen was destroyed and they're separated. That was an idea that came in about a year ago. Oh, really? Yeah. And the reason for that was we had them at the end of the movie, that big moment where they have this conversation that sort of both of them say how they really feel about each other. All the neuroses come out and they self-diagnose. Right. So that had been a scene for about three years, but we needed to earn it. And so the reason we changed that midpoint was because we needed some other stepping stones.

30:01So by the time you got to that moment, it felt organic and real and emotional. And we needed a bunch of other stepping stones to achieve it. Had you always separated them for the second half of the movie? Yeah. It was always separation, but how that happened, why that happened, was it a conscious decision or not? Those were things that we would pressure test. Sometimes if you pushed Judy and she said, I'm leaving intentionally, then you're like, she would never do that. Why would she do that? Or same thing for Nick. It just doesn't feel organic. So it had this moment where they just had this argument.

30:32So emotionally, they were feeling separated, but they weren't physically separated. But then the plot separated and felt like the best way to do those things. Yeah, and then to have them pulled apart at that point. because at that point as well in the movie is your voice cameo and Byron's voice cameo as well thank you for noticing that some outrageous accents going on there Jared I think you mean beautiful sophisticated are those the words you were looking for? nuanced, tasteful well observed also is that also in there as well? the goats came at the same time so about a year ago the goats came into this movie part of that was something you find is as you're going through, we had these really heavy scenes.

31:13We had the end of the movie, very heavy for a while. We knew that breakup was going to be really heavy. So we felt like we needed a little bit of a lift because we'd just gone through this crazy chase through these water tubes. I mean, to me, it's so, there's a lot of drama in that, but we found if you went straight from that drama and that anxiety into another tense scene, then the audience didn't have time to take a break so the idiot goats were there designed to give you a little bit of a break and to say man they could have done better with that voice acting and they were right and then back to judy and nick you guys knock it out of the mountain park there's there's no question about it was that something that you it was always going to be you guys no doing the voices no no um you know i'd say um this movie has like 71 speaking parts it's the it's the most we've ever had ever, I think.

32:06And so we were going back and forth like, well, maybe we could find somebody else, but literally just ran out of time. And we're like, all right, well, we're idiots and we can probably pull this off. And both Byron and I took a lot of German when we were growing up in junior high and high school. And so I think we had a kinship to these guys. And last year, Unrelated But Perfect was the first time I've ever worn lederhosen. So it all came full circle for me. Was that Fordley voiceover gig? It wasn't. Or was it unrelated? No, unrelated, but perfect. Oh, wow. Okay. That's for another day. No, and even though, when did you wear lederhosen?