sábado, 11 de marzo de 2017

Kelly Reichardt y Olivier Assayas hablan sobre trabajar con Kristen en entrevistas



“Some friends of mine made a film with Kristen, Still Alice, so they gave the script [for Certain Women] to her. Her response was, ‘If it happens, let me know, and I’ll come do this’, but right up until the day she arrived on set, we were like, ‘Is Kristen Stewart really going to show up?’ And then there she was. It was like, ‘Oh hey, here you are.’”

“I had worked with Dakota Fanning and with Jesse Eisenberg [on 2014’s Night Moves] and they are two of her closest friends, so they put in a good word. I had had really fun experiences with both Dakota and Jesse, so I think because of that Kristen was game for it. But she was completely unperturbed by the size of the part. She’s not the lead. She plays a supporting part in the movie, and she made so much of that character.

“She let Lily Gladstone’s character set the pace and be the focus. She was so generous – a really generous actor, I thought. She helped give it some shape, because Lily’s a really different kind of actor, really intuitive and Kristen, likewise, is an intuitive actor, but she’s also been doing it a long time and she’s a technical actress. I thought that it played well in terms of who the two characters are. She had a barbecue for the crew on the day off and was just totally easy and not at all demanding.

“I loved her in The Runaways, that’s really what I loved Kristen in most. It’s an imperfect movie but all the women in it are really… I loved the real Runaways so I really did not want a movie of The Runaways, but she’s really good in it!”


Do you feel the characters were stuck in their surroundings then?

Well some of them were stuck and some of them are coming in to get a piece of the area, in the middle story Michelle Williams and James Le Gros’ couple are probably from California and are bringing their California money to Montana to get an authentic house built, whatever that means. Then there’s the Kristen Stewart character who wants to get out of there, so there are people who want to buy in and people that want to find their way out, and people who are a little more isolated and stuck.

What was it like working with the rest of the cast? Kristen Stewart has previously said she’s a big fan of yours.

Oh that’s nice, I’m a big fan of hers. Well Kristen and I met the day before we started shooting, well no she did come and take horseback riding lessons with Lily but I feel like suddenly we were on set together, that’s mostly how it is. We were communicating when we were getting her clothes together with our costume designer which was fun. Kristen was great, everyone was so game.

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"She kind of popped up on the set forty-eight hours before the shoot," Assayas says by phone. "I had given her a screenplay that was 'finished' more or less, but we actually finished it on the set."

The director describes their work as a process of nonverbal communication, of operating on similar wavelengths. He praises Stewart's grasp of cinema, of "understanding what is going on within a shot. She brings such incredible pace and rhythm, she recreates the characters from inside, but at the same time she's guided by physicality, by the body."

Assayas notes how Stewart can manipulate time within a shot, expanding or contracting scenes simply on the strength of her engagement in the moment. "She knows that she can try things," he says. "She knows that she can push things. I think when you have a bad relationship with actors, they won't be as daring because there's always the possibility that if they try something stupid, you won't be smart enough to edit it out. It's all about trust. I give her as much space and time as she needs within the shot and she gives me the risks she's taking. She gives me back the trust I give her.

"A lot of scenes or moments were very much shorter or slightly different in the screenplay. Every now and then Kristen would do something and I would turn to my continuity girl and ask her how long was this shot, and she would tell me like three minutes. And I would just freak out because I didn't realize it was that long. But I wasn't bored one second, I was discovering something new that Kristen was bringing."

[...]

"My experience is that Kristen functions in a similar way with other actresses in that emotion comes from music," Assayas observes. "I think she needs to build up her emotions listening to specific music, put herself into that kind of emotional state.

"But that's absolutely something I would not discuss even a second with an actor and even more so with Kristen. I just don't want to know how they do it. Here's the shot, the shot is you break down. If you cry, if that's your way of breaking down, good, but if you don't cry and you break down in another way, that's fine also."


I’m a huge fan of Kristen Stewart. She has shown incredible range since Panic Room. Twilight launched her into the stratosphere, maybe at a price, but you single-handedly secured her a spot in arthouse. What is it that makes her endlessly fascinating?

Honestly—knowing Kristen, having worked with her twice now, and being friends with her—the more I know Kristen, the more I think she’s a completely exceptional actress, not to mention an exceptional human being. I feel extremely privileged to have been able to somehow document her transformation, you know? I feel that I’ve been the right person at the right time to be able to record on film the moment Kristen kind of became conscious of her talent and the reach of her talent. I hope I will work with her again because I think there are still things we can try together.

You went through a traumatic experience in 2014 when they suddenly pulled the plug on Idol’s Eye. What’s happening with that one? You’ve since called it your “ghost film.”

[Laughs] It’s more like a burden that I’ve been carrying around on my back. It’s super frustrating to not have done it. It literally fell apart a day before we were about to start shooting with the cast. I’ve been trying to revive it because I really believe in it. I think there’s potential for it to be a really good film. But it’s too expensive and we’ve been really struggling with that. So maybe it will be my next film or it won’t be my next film. It’s still certainly possible. It’s a very fragile project. 



Why is it so interesting for you to make Kristen Stewart someone’s personal assistant?

Yeah, that’s a good question. I’m not sure why. [Laughs.] It just happened like that. I think she’s unlike a lot of movie stars. She is very… she’s so present. She’s straightforward. She’s so simple. With her, she doesn’t inspire many characters that are bigger than life. She inspires me [to write] someone who is part of the crowd, and I think that’s because she is beautiful, she has such a powerful presence, but at the same time she is grounded. She is normal. So I think it’s really interesting to de-glamorize her because I think she’s someone you relate to on a very simple, natural, human lev
What do you have planned for the third installment of the “Kristen Stewart is a Personal Assistant” trilogy?

[Laughs.] It should be a trilogy.
You don’t have to rush it. You have time.

I want to make a period piece. I want to make a period piece with Kristen.
Can you tell me what you have in mind…?

No, no, no, I have no idea. That’s the concept, yeah.

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What is it about Kristen Stewart that she became your muse?

Honestly, I think she’s amazing. Really, I have been working with a lot of actresses, and I think she’s kind of unique. Sometimes I feel as if it was happening on my own eyes, when we were shooting Clouds of Sils Maria. I always liked her. I was making this film which was centered on Juliette Binoche, but I needed this assistant part, I needed the young American girl. At that point I thought she was one of the best of her generation, and I was very happy and honored to be making this film with her. I’ve known Juliette for twenty years. We function in very similar ways. I love to give freedom to my actors, and she loves to use that kind of space and freedom. I think it’s something that Kristen discovered when we were making the film. She saw, by watching Juliette, that there were other spaces for acting, that she could use things that are within her, elements of her own personality that she had never really been using, because she had never really been allowed to. She never had the opportunity to, and she never had the freedom to. I think that she kind of loved the idea, and she grabbed it. A lot of viewers understood her better when they saw the movie, but it applies also to me. I was watching her becoming herself, and I just happened to be the guy who opened that door for her.

But I’m not the one who had her run for fresh air into new areas and new grounds, and when we finished making the movie, it’s not that I was frustrated, I was extremely happy with what she brought to the film and the energy she gave the film. But thinking about it in retrospect, I had the feeling that this film was not written for that actress, and the space she was taking was not built-in, the character was not as multilayered as the character of Juliette, nor the character of Maureen in Personal Shopper. So I left, not with a frustration, but certainly with a desire to see what would happen if I could push her a little further. The thing is that through Sils Maria she got a kind of recognition in Europe, within the European film community, but very specifically in France where it was materialized by a prize, the César award. She’s this American superstar who got some kind of recognition in Europe through a small film. So, all of a sudden she’s been an adopted French icon.

I remember a few years ago in Cannes you said, ‘When I work with Juliette, I try to portray her in a very different way than her public image is.’ Do you have the same aim with Kristen?

I think that by now people are pretty aware that Kristen can do a lot of things. It’s not just her part in Sils Maria, it’s Woody Allen’s movie, it’s a lot of different stuff she’s been doing, and all of a sudden people see her for what she is. Even in retrospect, I think that for instance, for some reason the kind of artistic visibility that a movie like Sils Maria had, it’s not that it created it for Kristen. It’s that all of a sudden more people saw her as more complex and with more potential that what she had earlier. Now she’s fulfilling that potential. I think she’s only done half, or a small part, of what she has the potential to do. Now she has become a very respected actress.


In terms of working in English, how much of that is a commercial decision, and how much is creative?

It certainly is not a commercial decision because… we lost all the French privileges, we had like basically no support in France. We had no tax credit, we couldn’t apply anything. So it’s very much a difficult decision. But also in this film it had to do with the fact that I wanted to do the film with Kristen. She was the obvious actress for this film, and I could not imagine a French actress to play her role. So I suppose that the name of Kristen, the fact that movies have been traveling, it means that we could recoup some of what we lost, in terms of French financing, through international sales.


At last night’s Toronto premiere of “Personal Shopper,” you said that the picture is as much Kristen’s film as it is your film.

There are some movies, even great movies, that have a lead role that you could imagine being inhabited by another actor without it affecting the core or the fabric of the film. In the case of “Personal Shopper,” whatever this film is about is defined by the way Kristen appropriates it. “Clouds of Sils Maria” is a movie about the interaction between two characters, so it’s defined by the dynamic that is created between two specific actresses. As a filmmaker, you have to somehow frame that dynamic, and you have to channel it. Here, Kristen’s on her own, so it’s not so much about channeling. It’s about being in sync, about being completely aware of her instincts, and being able to adapt to the way she is appropriating the material. She is the one person who is there within the shot, and she’s determining her own pacing as well as the way that the emotions build up within her.

The scene where Maureen changes into her boss’ clothes has a rather beautiful quality to it, in part because of the Marlene Dietrich song, which is heard in its entirety.

Yes, twice! I think all filmmakers are always a bit shy when they are dealing with nude scenes and with how an actress is going to react to them. There is always some kind of voyeuristic dimension to those scenes, whether you want it there or not, and that is not what my movies are about. My movies are hopefully about reality, about giving as much flesh and blood to a specific situation. Kristen understands that entirely. I would’ve understood if she had told me, “This is weird ground. I don’t feel comfortable.” I would’ve respected it. But throughout the process of making this film with Kristen, I knew from the first day onward that she wasn’t going to be shy and that she was going to go all the way. Even when I was like, ‘Are you sure you know where we’re heading?’, she would take the leap.

In regards to the scene where she takes off her clothes and puts on her boss’s dress, she was always going to do it. I was a bit scared that the scene would be too long, but Kristen is such a dancer. She has such an incredible sense of body language that makes her movement in a scene fascinating. I thought I was going to cut the scene, use a few bits and pieces and patch them together. Eventually I realized that if I keep it in real time, it’s actually beautiful. She has a way of occupying space that is unlike any other actress. If you give her something like this where she has a million practical things to do, she’s going to absorb them and she’s going to make something astonishing out of it. The beauty of that shot—which is extremely long—is really a tribute to her skills.

Has this experience made you want to have a third collaboration with Kristen?

Yeah anytime—tomorrow! My experiences with many great actors leave me feeling that we haven’t exactly gone all the way, but we’ve covered a lot of ground. Actors are excited by the opportunity to do something they haven’t done or that you haven’t done before, because there’s always a risk of repeating yourself. I think I could make another movie with Kristen that would be completely different, and I hope I will have the opportunity. I’ve always loved and admired her, and I thought she would be perfect for the part in “Clouds of Sils Maria.” But when we were shooting the film, it felt like she had unlimited potential. I was left with the feeling that there was potential to go much further in our collaboration and try many other things. “Clouds of Sils Maria” was more about the dynamic between the three actresses. I knew that if Kristen was on her own and had a fully fleshed character to create, she could go to some pretty exciting places. That’s what drove us.

As for casting Stewart, who has racked up an impressive recent list of heavyweight collaborators – including Ang Lee, Olivier Assayas and Woody Allen – Reichardt says she decided on the Twilight star after watching outtakes from Still Alice, Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland’s Alzheimer’s drama starring Julianne Moore. Stewart played Moore’s daughter. “I thought she was interesting in the dailies [rushes],” Reichardt says. “She’s just not getting to find out all the directions she can go in.”

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“She inspired it,” the director explained to Page Six on Thursday morning. “I was writing for a young American woman. My experience of being around a young American woman is basically with Kristen. I was not sure she would do it. I was not sure she’d be interested.”

“In ‘Personal Shopper,’ I think I’m going more in the direction of forgetting about Kristen the movie star and more of a character,” he said. “She’s half a character and half herself. The movie star element is out of the equation.”

But as big of a Hollywood star as she might be, Assayas said that it’s Stewart’s humanity that makes his “weird” coming-of-age ghost story work so well.

“I think because Kristen is so real, she’s so grounded, she’s so straightforward in her own way, that she makes everything real,” he said. “So I knew that writing for her, something that has to do with how we communicate with the invisible, how we try to get all of us — we try to get in touch with our inner selves. I know it sounds weird, but she would bring it to reality. She generates empathy. I think she connects with audiences.”

And this ability to make even the most fantastical story come to life is why Assayas feels that he and Stewart aren’t done collaborating yet.

“I have to come up with something, but I would love to. It’s a good partnership and sometimes with actors, even if you have a great relationship, you know that at some point you’ve exhausted it or you know that you don’t want to make that one film too much, but with Kristen, I know there is much more to her,” he said.

Kristen Stewart is obviously the main character in this and you’ve made her a big French star now with two back to back films. In our previous conversation when you were presenting Clouds of Sils Maria, you said that Stewart’s biggest assets are her youth and her power to go against a legend like Juliette Binoche in that film. How did this continued working collaboration come about?

I think so much of filmmaking is about grabbing opportunities when they come to you. I’m not sure why— well, I kind of know why. Connecting with Kristen has been an inspiration in a sense that, I would not have imagined that we would click the way we clicked. I mean we met and talked. I liked her work and she’d seen a couple of my films that she liked. I thought that it was interesting that this young American actress is interested in my work. I thought if we were gonna work together, something interesting would come out of it. But then I realized that we connected way beyond that. There was something deeper- how we approach filmmaking, how we idealize filmmaking in a certain way, how we live for movies.

There is something very genuine in her in approaching filmmaking. And she is very ambitious in the best sense of the word. She always wants to go beyond whatever she knows how to do or has been doing. She has this feeling that filmmaking is an open space for her.

I’ve been trying to break the boundaries of French filmmaking. I always felt trapped, not as much as limited. I am a product of French independent filmmaking in many ways. But simultaneously, it’s been frustrating to see that there are certain things you can do and can’t do in any film culture. At some point there is this framework and I’m always excited by what’s beyond the framework.

Kristen brings another dimension, which is youth. It’s essential. It’s vital. Independent filmmaking is kind of losing touch with the young audience.


True.

You know I think it’s happening all over the world - the indie film crowd is aging. But I think filmmaking has so much to do with youth because the youth is the real audience for cinema. It’s a medium for young people so you don't want to lose that audience. You just hope that you connect with it. Beyond anything we do together, Kristen brings me that.

And as a director and an actor, it goes both ways right? And what I can give her is space, time and freedom. Like my movies, indie European films - often we create then while we are doing it. It’s not always possible to do that in an American indie framework, unless you are Malick or someone who has been doing that for all his life.

What did she first think about the Personal Shopper script?


She was in Paris for couple of days. And we were like 'lets have a drink together'. We kind of sat down and she asked me what I’m up to and I said I was working on a screenplay and she was like, 'oh can I read it?' 'well, yeah sure.' (laughs) And she sent me the document saying that she loved it and would love to do it. And that was pretty much it. I suppose we had couple of short conversations afterwords but nothing much.

What I love about Kristen is that she doesn’t ask questions. Most actors, including most interesting, great actors I’ve worked with, want me to discuss the psychology of the characters and why this and why that. Kristen doesn’t function like that. She connects physically with a character and she considers making sense of it as an actor which is their job. Other actors would take it as that they ‘should somehow contribute’. Because I’m the director and writer, they want to please me and want to go in my direction. But I don’t want that. I want them to bring their own imagination to bring the spark of life to my screenplay. When I finish writing a screenplay, I already went as far as I can go. I need someone to take over the character.






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Q&A





Nuevas Fotos de Kristen camino al JFK desde su hotel - 10 de Marzo


Kristen en el Q&A de Personal Shopper en The ArcLight Cinemas Hollywood - 10 de Marzo (Añadido nuevo video)

   

Entrevista de Kristen en la alfombra roja de la premiere de Personal Shopper en NY (Añadida entrevista con ExtraTV)

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