In a sprawling video interview with The New York Times, Kristen Stewart bemoaned the current state of filmmaking, especially as it comes to making more niche, indie projects.
“We’re at a pivotal nexus because I think we’re ready for a full system break,” she said, “and I mean that across the board, and also specific to the world I live in, which is very exclusively the entertainment industry.”
The Chronology of Water director lamented that Hollywood has prioritized big-budget, tentpole movies over films that come from diverse perspectives.
“I don’t know, I think we need to, sort of, start stealing our movies,” the Oscar-nominated actress explained. “I’m so appreciative of every union; trust me, we would not survive without them. But some of the terms and some of the rules and some of the structures we’ve set up have created unbelievable barriers for artists to express themselves. I think that without being unfaithful, ungrateful, I think we need a little work-around. I think having it be so impossible for people to tell stories, and having it be such an exclusive and rarified, novel position to find yourself doing so, is capitalist hell, and it hates women, and it hates marginalized voices, and it’s racist, and I think that we need to figure out a way to make it easier to speak to each other in cinematic terms.”
She continued, “It’s too hard to make movies right now that aren’t blockbuster-y, whatever, proven equations,” expressing a sentiment that’s been echoed by fellow prominent filmmakers like Steven Soderbergh, Michael Bay and James Cameron.
“The next movie I wanna make: I want to do it for nothing, I want to make not a dollar, I want it to be a smash hit, do you know what I mean? It’s just so difficult to make movies, it just doesn’t need to be,” Stewart concluded. “So yeah, I’m just trying to think of some weird Marxist, communist-like situation, that other people can definitely think, ‘Oh, of course, this psycho is saying that,’ but I think it’s possible … The system has barred people and made it too difficult, to be honest.”
Despite diversity wins at the box office over the years, a UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report from this year indicated opportunities for people of color and women experienced drops and reversal after 2023 highs.
Ana-Christina Ramón, co-founder of the report and director of UCLA’s Entertainment and Media Research Initiative, found that “2024 saw a widespread reversal, as film studios retreated from racial and ethnic diversity in front of and behind the camera.”
Fellow co-founder Darnell Hunt added, “The writing was on the wall, as we previously saw the loss of executive positions and programs focused on diversity. For the studios, it seems that it wasn’t about investing in what our data has shown to be profitable. They went with what they considered safe.”
The Chronology of Water, Stewart’s directorial debut based on Lidia Yuknavitch’s 2011 memoir, is playing in select theaters now.