Kristen Stewart drew a packed house of festivalgoers, locals and fans at France’s Deauville Film Festival for her masterclass titled My French Cinema and organized with Chanel. For the occasion, Stewart curated a list of her all-time favorite French movies and candidly discussed why they inspired her as an actor and filmmaker.
Ranging across different eras and styles, the films she chose have in common a certain boldness, from Louis Malle’s “Elevator to the Gallows” (1958) to Alain Renais’ “Hiroshima Mon Amour” (1959), Catherine Breillat’s “A Real Young Girl” (1976), Leos Carax’s “The Lovers on the Bridge” (1991), Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “The Double Life of Veronique” (1991) and Michael Haneke’s “The Piano Lesson” (2001).
In her typical unfiltered, brainy and self-deprecating fashion, Stewart made the audience laugh as she admitted that she actually struggles to watch entire movies.
“It sounds fucking absurd coming from me,” Stewart said, “considering it’s what I want to do with the rest of my entire life. But I have to strap myself into a seat to stick with an entire movie. I drift in and out.”
And although she’s able to talk in granular detail about movies that have marked her, and has also served on the juries of Cannes (in 2018) and Berlin (2024), she “wouldn’t say that there’s one filmmaker that (she) can tell you everything about this person top to bottom.”
The first film she spoke about during the Deauville masterclass was “A Real Young Girl,” a film charting a 14-year-old girl’s sexual awakening, written and directed by Breillat, who is known as a subversive French filmmaker.
Stewart said she watched Breillat’s movie shortly before she started filming her directorial debut “The Chronology of Water,” an adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir of the same name starring Imogen Poots as a woman who emerges from an abusive childhood and channels her trauma into competitive swimming, sexual exploration and addiction, before eventually discovering her voice as a writer.
The actor-director, who premiered her film at Cannes’ Un Certain Regard and won the Deauville Film Festival’s Revelation Prize on Saturday, said watching Breillat’s “A Real Young Girl” “was specifically unlocking in a way that was very actionable because (she) went and made (her) movie like 30 seconds later.”
She said she was struck by Breillat’s movie, because she’s “just not used to seeing coming-of-age stories that look at shame in a way that is also celebratory” and she felt the movie was an “internal experience.”
“You watch it and you’re like, ‘Oh, it’s straightforward. She gets on a train and she’s going home, and she’s with her parents, but then she sticks a spoon inside of herself beneath the table. And you’re like, maybe this isn’t real,” Stewart said, also drawing a parallel with “The Chronology of Water” in which there is a scene where Poots “is reaching deep inside of herself and pulling out a viscous and scented representation of what she is and savoring it and self-devouring.”
“When you’re a kid and you’re discovering yourself in all of the soppy, smelly, disgusting ways that you do, it’s so easy to be embarrassed (…) and I guess it’s just very rare in a film to see somebody lap it up.”
Stewart also talked about “The Piano Teacher,” Haneke’s cult film starring Isabelle Huppert as a piano teacher with repressed dark desires who embarks into a sadomasochistic relationship with her much younger pupil (Benoît Magimel). The role won Huppert a best actress award at Cannes.
“It’s just one of my favorite movies of all time,” Stewart said, before adding that it’s also “one of my favorite performances,” referring to Huppert. She explained she was fascinated by the singular and ambivalent psyche of Huppert’s onscreen character, Erika, because “she has no respect for anyone. She’s so isolated by her genius and her intelligence and so just completely locked in this body of self-laceration.”
But at the same time, Stewart argues that “she’s not unhappy,” and even if “that’s not necessarily true, there’s something about it that’s like, if that’s how this woman was constructed, she’s actually doing a pretty good job. There’s just something about the way that she protects what she wants.”
“The Piano Teacher” was adapted by Haneke from a novel by Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek.
“I think it’s one of the most genius adaptations that I’ve ever had the pleasure of both reading and watching,” Stewart said. “It was very similar to ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ because there’s an internal experience going on in the literary form of this that is so articulate.”
“It’s a first-person perspective book, and she is consistently rattling off about what she is thinking in all of these environments,” Stewart said.
Kieslowski’s “The Double Life of Veronique” also compelled Stewart because “It’s razor-sharp in terms of how it makes you feel.” The film tells two parallel stories about two identical women; one living in Poland, the other in France. Irene Jacob, who plays both roles, won best actress at Cannes for the movie. Stewart joked that she “almost fell off (her) chair when (Jacob’s onscreen character) sings herself to death.”
“It’s like you can enter an interior life and make a movie that is hyper specific about an internal feeling and not have to explain it,” Stewart said. Kieslowski “paints it with the light and the first-person perspective. He’s able to accomplish it without being weird in such penetrating and daring ways.”
The film has also made her reflect on herself. “Sometimes you get sad that you’re incomplete or something, and you’ve killed off this old version of yourself. But they still live in you,” she said.
Carax’s “The Lovers on the Bridge,” meanwhile, is another favorite film of Stewart’s because she views it as “a very quaint relationship movie.”
“He’s closed off. He’s afraid that if If she can see the whole world, then she won’t want him. He’s running after her. She’s out of reach until she’s so exhausted that he play acts that he’s leading her in this waltz. But then ultimately, she spins off a top,” she says. “It’s like, you can’t control the things you love. I’m so sorry but if you did, you wouldn’t want it.”
The Bridge is a big metaphor for not just deviation and destruction,” she says. “You live in a world with a lot of other people and a lot of beauty that can distract you from the immense passion that is existing in this little microcosm between the two of you. But you can’t live on a bridge forever.”
While in Deauville, Stewart also attended a glitzy dinner hosted by Chanel and Canal+, the festival’s two major sponsors, alongside her friend Charles Gillibert who produced “The Chronology of Water,” and a raft of French and American stars. The bash followed the special screening of Richard Linklater’s “Nouvelle Vague” which was supported by Chanel.
The Deauville Film Festival, headed by Aude Hesbert since 2024, wrapped Sunday and gave its Grand Prize to “The Plague,” Charlie Polinger’s debut starring Joel Edgerton.
