Kristen Stewart Calls Out Hollywood’s Broken System and Says It Shouldn’t Be This Hard To Make Movies
Kristen Stewart, who recently directed The Chronology of Water, is in full “let’s fix this industry” mode, and her sharp comments are hitting a nerve with filmmakers and movie fans who are tired of watching original ideas get squeezed out by assembly line blockbusters.
In a wide ranging video conversation with The New York Times, Stewart laid out her frustration with how tough it has become to get smaller, more personal films made, and she didn’t sugarcoat the problem.
“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.”
Stewart has been championing indie storytelling for years, but as she prepares for audiences to discover her directorial debut The Chronology of Water, she’s wrestling with an industry that keeps pushing filmmakers toward tentpole formulas. She spoke openly about how Hollywood has boxed out the voices that need the most room to create.
“I don’t know, I think we need to, sort of, start stealing our movies,” she 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.”
Her point cuts deep because it reflects what so many filmmakers have been thinking and saying for years. The pursuit of safe bets and monster opening weekends has pushed out the mid-range and low-budget films that built entire generations of storytellers. Stewart connected her frustrations to a long standing trend.
“It’s too hard to make movies right now that aren’t blockbuster-y, whatever, proven equations,” she said, ns issue that has also been voiced by Steven Soderbergh, Michael Bay and James Cameron. Filmmakers from wildly different corners of the industry are all raising the same alarm.
Stewart added that she wants her next project to reject the machinery altogether. “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,” she said. “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.”
Audiences are loosing out because of this . Movie fans want discovery. They want weird little passion projects alongside the spectacle heavy franchises. They want cinema that comes from somewhere real. Not everything needs to be a big tentpole blockbuster.
Studios need to stop shutting its doors on smaller projects that tell original stories.
Source: Variety