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Kristen Stewart: 'I Feel Like I Really Know Bella
Now'
Actress Kristen Stewart chats with iconic actor, Dennis Hopper,
about 'Twilight,' dealing with fame and more
By Dennis Hopper
Interview Magazine
The first decade of the 21st century, which is about to draw to a close, is
in serious danger of being remembered as the time when fame was measured in
pokes, tweets, and the ability to parlay a death-defying (and sometimes not so
death-defying) degree of persona recklessness into a reality-television deal.
But just as the door was about to slam shut on the double aughts, in walks—or,
more appropriately, saunters — Kristen Stewart.
At 19, Stewart has already earned a place in the annals of pop-culture
history. This is due to her starring role in "Twilight," which — in case you've somehow managed to elude
word of its all-encompassing death grip on young America — is a film based on
the first in a series of very popular books about vampires, werewolves, and
teenage life in the town of Forks, Washington. Stewart's character, Bella Swan,
is a newcomer to Forks who is forced to cope with the dueling pressures of
starting life at a new school and the fact that her prospective boyfriend, the
rakish Edward Cullen (played by the rakish Robert Pattinson), is a 104-year-old undead
bloodsucker.
Given the preoccupation of "Twilight" with the timeless themes of
misunderstood youth, troubled young love, and the intervening forces of
darkness, the film's success isn't all that surprising. (To date, it has grossed
more than $380 million worldwide.) Nor is the fact that more "Twilights" are in
the offing: A second installment, "The Twilight Saga: New Moon," hits theaters in
November, and a third, "Eclipse," is due out next year. But the growing
size and complexity of the Twilight machine has had some unavoidable
implications:
In the last 12 months, Stewart has become a tabloid regular and a
blog-stalked cynosure. The fact that her Twilight character is romantically
linked to Pattinson's in the film has also fueled nonstop speculation that they
are involved in real life. BUYING A HOUSE? and GETTING MARRIED? were just a
couple of the early autumn headlines. Between filming Twilight sequels, Stewart
did a turn as Joan Jett in Floria Sigismondi's new rock-band biopic "The Runaways"; even her hair for the film—which was chopped
and dyed to mimic Jett's late-'70s shag—inspired reams of media critique.
Stewart grew up in Los Angeles in a Hollywood family of sorts — her mother is
a script supervisor, and her father is a stage manager—and as a kid announced
her interest in working in front of the camera. Her second film, David Fincher's 2002 thriller, "Panic Room," in which she played Jodie Foster's too-quick, too-wise, too-over-it daughter,
proved an early indicator of her ability to play young, smart, but not
precocious. Her performance in more left-of-center projects such as Sean Penn's "Into the Wild" (2007) and this year's "Adventureland" has only reinforced that notion. But if
there's a thread that runs through her relatively small body of work, it's one
that's closely connected to the idea that you don't have to be old to have soul.
With Stewart, you don't get 19-going-on-35. What you do get is a visceral window
into what it means to be young and struggling to make sense of your own life and
the world around you—and all the alternating waves of darkness and confusion and
brightness and possibility that come with that. In many ways, it's the unwritten
nature of Stewart's own story now, with its surreal subplots and recent twists
and turns, that makes her compelling to watch. It's true that she might very
well be a rebel anodyne to many of her bleached and sprayed-on contemporaries.
Or, like Bella Swan, she might just be someone who comes from somewhere, found
her way into something exceptional, and is on her way to someplace else. Either
way, she's got a solid arc.
Check out more celeb interviews at Interview
Magazine.com
In celebration of Interview's 40th anniversary, we asked actor, director,
writer, and photographer Dennis Hopper — whose connection to the magazine reaches
across all fourdecades—to handle the interviewing duties for this cover story.
He graciously obliged. He spoke to Stewart, who was shooting "Eclipse" in
Vancouver, from the set of his cable series, "Crash,"
in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
DENNIS HOPPER: So how are you doing?
KRISTEN STEWART: I'm pretty good. I'm not very good at interviews, but this
is a trip. Why in god's name did you want to do this? You have no idea how cool
this is for me.
Well, you're a really good actress. And my daughter is your biggest
fan, so I thought, What the hell? [laughs] I usually don't do this, either. But
you must be going through a lot right now, the way "Twilight" is hitting. You
must have no peace at all.
The sad thing is that I feel so boring because "Twilight" is literally how
every conversation I have these days begins — whether it's someone I'm meeting
for the first time or someone I just haven't seen in a while. The first thing I
want to say to them is, "It's insane! And, as a person, I can't do anything!"
But then I think to myself, God damn it, shut the f--- up.
(Story continues on next page
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