
Sunday, January 29, 2012

Anna Kendrick – “She certainly hasn’t gone and changed on us… she’s the coolest chick you could ever hope to meet. She’s so down to earth, and such a pro.”

“I’m really proud of Twilight. I think it’s a really good movie. It was hard to do, and I think it turned out pretty good. But I take much credit for it. So when you show up at these places, and there’s literally like a thousand girls and they’re all screaming your name, you’re like, why? You don’t feel like you deserve it.”

“I love it because I love to tell stories. I like being in movies that have a great story. I’m so not interested in being a hollywood star. It’s a job, you know. When you wake up at six in the morning every day for a week, it feels like hard work.”

“As soon as I stopped trying to control everything that came out of my mouth, and every picture that came out, I felt happier.”
“I would never cheapen my relationships by talking about them.”

“The day I did the graduation scene of Eclipse, I had just finished high school myself the week before. Acting was the first thing I ever thrive at. But they support anything I want to do.
“I was just in Botswana in Africa. I wanted to learn something about the world. I just feel really ignorant whenever I leave the country. I don’t know a lot of stuff, and I really want to. I figure that traveling is a good way to start if you want knowledge. Like, if you don’t know something about a country, then go and check it out. That’s what I did.”






“Self-evaluation is not my strong point, and you’re constantly asked to critque yourself. You just spent three months on a set and your whole life is wrapped up in that and then it’s like, “Okay, define that right now in five seconds.” I can’t do that. I use to get so nervous that I would become a completely different person - and then they would think that was me. So I’ve tried to calm down, but no one’s ever going to write, “Oh, she’s actually just a pretty average chick who really loves what she does.” That’s not gonna happen.”




“Acting is such a personal thing, which is weird because at the same time it’s not. It’s for the consumption of other people. But in terms of creative outlets and expressing yourself, it’s just the most extreme version of that I’ve ever found. It’s like running, it’s exertion. When you reach that point where you can’t go anymore and you stop and you take a breath, it’s that same sort of clearing of the mind.”
Friday, January 20, 2012
Wednesday, January 11, 2012

“It’s a little weird, but it’s all because of it… the focus for us is the focus that the fans have, which is the movies… this is what you work for. Not the attention, but the fact that you have a common interest.”
Friday, March 11, 2011
Twilight Sage: Eclipse



"The outside world holds no interest for me without you." Edward

Renée is so much more… perceptive than Charlie in some ways. It was making me jumpy. Bella
"There’s something… strange about the way you two are together. The way he watches you — it’s so… protective. Like he’s about to throw himself in front of a bullet to save you or something. The way you move — you orient yourself around him without even thinking about it. When he moves, even a little bit, you adjust your position at the same time. Like magnets… or gravity. You’re like a… satellite, or something." Renee

"I believe that. But I want you to know something — when it comes to all this enemies nonsense, I’m out. I am a neutral country. I am Switzerland. I refuse to be affected by territorial disputes between mythical creatures. Jacob is family. You are… well, not exactly the love of my life, because I expect to love you for much longer than that. The love of my existence. I don’t care who’s a werewolf and who’s a vampire. If Angela turns out


I leaned into him, ducking my head under his arm and cuddling into his side. It probably felt similar to snuggling with Michelangelo’s David, except that

"Listen to your heart fly. It’s fluttering like a hummingbird’s


I didn’t have the faintest idea how to be seductive. I would just have to settle for flushed and self-conscious. Bella
"I had no right to want you — but I reached out and took you anyway. And now look what’s become of you! Trying to seduce a vampire." Edward
"We’ll go to Vegas — you can wear old jeans and we’ll go to the chapel with the drive-through window. I just want it to be official — that you belong to me and no one else." Edward
"Show me the damn ring, Edward." Bella
"You are the most dangerous creature I’ve ever met. I supposed it’s a little outdated. Old-fashioned, just like me. Isabella Swan? I promise to love you forever —every single day of forever. Will you marry me?" Edward
"I’ve chosen my life — now I want to start living it." Bella
"You don’t fight fair." Edward
"It’s a good thing you’re bulletproof. I’m going to need that ring. It’s time to tell Charlie." Bella

Welcome to the Riley's



Thursday, March 10, 2011
Kristen Stewart: Coming on Strong

In other words, Stewart projects the kind of wary, rebellious edge that is so much more typical of her age group—she is 20—than gleeful high spirits, which is probably one reason she is head and shoulders above her peers in Hollywood’s power pyramid, and a director’s darling. Scott heard about her from his friend Sean

On a fall weekend in a quiet, suburban part of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the town where the Breaking Dawn set is located (under much secrecy and heavy confidentiality agreements), Stewart, a sylph in tomboyish jeans and a lumberjack shirt, is moving around the kitchen of a friend’s house, cracking her knuckles as she talks. She gets nervous dealing with the media—TV interviews in particular, she says, make her squirm—and she is sometimes accused of being downbeat and defensive in her public appearances, not least because she rarely smiles. She nurses some bad-girl tics, smoking and littering her conversation with expletives, and maintains an insouciance in the face of her big career. “I choose things that are so overly ambitious, and if I can’t do stuff like that, I don’t want to be doing this,” she says. Scratch the surface, however, and the attitude seems more about the passion and perfectionism she feels about her work than the opposite. “A compulsion absolutely fills you,” she says of finding a good part, and admits that she sometimes has difficulty letting go.
Today she is stoked from having just returned from shooting On the Road with Walter Salles, the masterly Brazilian director of The Motorcycle Diaries and Central Station. She plays a character based on Neal Cassady’s first wife, LuAnne Henderson, opposite Garrett Hedlund and Sam Riley. It was an intense improvisatory experience that left her “crying my head off,” she says. “I didn’t want to leave.” Installing herself in Baton Rouge for the foreseeable future was “like going back to school. . . . Twilight is a different beast.” A massive production planned to the millisecond and freighted with dollar signs waiting to happen, Breaking Dawn brings several years of Stewart’s life to a climax. She feels the weight of portraying Bella Swan, “a character who is embedded in so many people’s psyches at this point. It’s starting to enter my head a lot more than it used to because it’s at the end and it’s come such a long way. I just want the fans of the book to be happy.” She laughs. “I don’t necessarily care about anyone else.”
To a large segment of the population, Stewart may have sprung fully formed onto the screen as an incarnation of their favorite heroine. (At last count, Stephenie Meyer’s books have sold some 100 million copies worldwide.) But, despite her youth, Stewart has made more than 20 films, many of them independent and nearly all of them stellar, and pulled off such pitfall-ridden roles as a teenage rape victim and a girl disabled by neurological illness. She grew up in the Valley, the daughter in a family on the more nuts-and-bolts side of the industry—her mother is a script supervisor, her father a TV producer; her brother is a grip. After being spotted as a child at a school performance, Stewart walked straight onto the A-list, taking her first proper role in 2001’s The Safety of Objects, an adaptation of an A. M. Homes story collection, alongside Glenn Close and Patricia Clarkson, and her second in Panic Room, a virtual two-hander with Jodie Foster. “At that time I just thought it was fun,” she says, grateful that she began her career before adolescent insecurities set in. “I don’t think I would ever have been able to be an actress had I not started at nine years old. I would have been the last person to stand up and say, ‘I’d like to star in the play.’ ”
Some facts about Stewart: Currently on her nightstand are Dave Cullen’s Columbine; Into the Wild author Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven, a study of radical Mormonism; and Anna Karenina. On her playlist, the Shins, Broken Bells, and Jenny Lewis, the L.A. musician who puts Stewart in the unusual position of being starstruck herself: “She’s the only person I’ve ever met that I can’t function around.” (Stewart also plays guitar and was thrilled to portray Joan Jett, whom she got to know, in The Runaways.) Her favorite movies are John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence, starring Gena Rowlands, and La Vie en Rose, with Marion Cotillard. She loves Jane Fonda in Klute. Her new hobby is cooking, no doubt encouraged by the fact that she lives in a somewhat isolated way: “You build a perimeter of people that are really important to you.” Friends tease her for watching the Food Network with a stern frown of concentration on her face. “I’m such a dork.” (The frown pays off. For lunch, she prepares an elaborate, and delicious, Mexican tortilla soup with numerous condiments, along with pulled-pork sandwiches.) She also likes golf, a sport that has the advantage of involving private membership and small numbers of people over large areas. So far, a regular if interesting young woman. In other ways, not regular at all. If she sees a teenage girl, Stewart will literally duck and cover. “There’s no way to eloquently put this,” she says. “I just can’t go to the mall. It bothers me that I can’t be outside very often. And also to not ever be just ‘some girl’ again. Just being some chick at some place, that’s gone.”
She can pinpoint the week she stopped being “some girl” and entered the land of 24-hour security, lockdowns, and endless speculation about her relationship with her costar-boyfriend Robert Pattinson, which she refuses to discuss. (“It’s not my job.”) She had completed the first Twilight movie, which had not yet been released, and just filmed Welcome to the Rileys in New Orleans, where, she says, “I feel so good walking down the street by myself,” before correcting herself: “At least I used to.” She went back for an extra week of work during editing, and suddenly she couldn’t walk down the street anymore. “It really erupted,” she says. “It was a weird thing to watch.”
Stewart, who is careful never to complain about the mixed blessing of the Twilight phenomenon, is smart enough to understand the nature of her particular celebrity. “Masses of girls

Stewart carries a lot on her slender shoulders for a young woman barely out of her teens. But her transition to adulthood will be a boon to moviegoers. She herself may doubt that she will eventually be able to move past the Twilight juggernaut—“At this point it seems like ‘We’ll see what the Twilight girl did. Let’s see how she’s trying to be different’ ”—but others disagree, and a generation for whom the tattle about KStew and RPattz is not so compelling and the Twilight movies perhaps a guilty pleasure rather than a fervent passion can look forward to seeing her flex her muscles in adult roles. Her nerviness and cool on-screen are interesting to watch, qualities grown women would like to see their reflection in. “She’s one of the smartest actresses I’ve ever worked with,” says Condon. “Not only does she have astonishing technical ability, she has an incredibly incisive and serious approach to character. She has just unlimited potential.”

Wednesday, March 9, 2011
2011 People Choice Awards



Favorite Movie - The Twilight Saga: Eclipse
Favorite Drama Movie - The Twilight Saga: Eclipse
Favorite Onscreen Team - Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner and Kristen Stewart (The Twilight Saga: Eclipse)
Favorite Movie

Wednesday, July 14, 2010
ELLE June 2010





Stewart arrives in the ornate lobby of California’s Four Seasons Hotel Westlake Village, a venue chosen for its proximity to a middle-class section of the San Fernando Valley where Stewart was raised, the only girl among a bevy of brothers. There’s Cameron, her biological brother, who is 24; Taylor, who is Stewart’s age and was adopted at age 13; and Miles and Obie, friends of Cameron’s “that we’ve like helped along the way,” she says. “I’ve always said I’ve had a bunch of brothers because we have a bunch of boys who are like family.” Cameron is a film grip; her parents, John and Jules, also work in the industry (Mom is a script supervisor, Dad a stage manager).


Stewart, who turned 20 in April, has worked consistently for the past decade, often in independent films, but she admits the Twilight frenzy has taken her by surprise. “Somebody knocked on my hotel room door and asked for a light, then said that they were a big fan. I was like, ‘Do you really need me to light your cigarette? How do you know what room I’m in?’ ” She mourns the loss of her privacy. (“I can’t be by myself, and I like being by myself,” she says.) “Who wouldn’t who has a soul?” says Jodie Foster, who starred with an 11-year-old Stewart in Panic Room. “It’s a very different time from when I was growing up. We didn’t have those lenses that were 150 feet long, or maybe we had them, but there was still a real delineation between the public and the private.”
What’s mystifying to Stewart—and likely to anyone with either a shred of empathy or a tendency to clam up in public—is the looking- glass reality in which her manner, rather than eliciting sympathy or mere shrugs, has made her a figure of derision. “I think it’s funny that when I go onstage to accept an award, they think I’m nervous, uncomfortable, and awkward—and I am—but those are bad words for them,” Stewart says. She still frets about her MTV Movie Awards appearance last year, during which she fumbled her award, a carton of golden popcorn (then blurted, “I was just about as awkward as you thought I was going to be. Bye!”). “I fucking flung my award on the stage…and I was like, Everything I just said? Gone. Gone. I might as well have just erased it. And they were like, ‘I love how she goes up there and tries to be so serious. She is so pretentious. Why does she always try to sound so smart when she’s not smart?’ ”
Stewart conveys her star-system discomfort (or maybe tries to deal with it) in ways that tend to be perceived not as self-protective, or even self-expressive, but as rebellious. Especially since her choices often thwart mainstream expectations of young women in Hollywood—particularly one who portrays a character beloved by millions of preteens and their mothers. She attends events in sneakers. She was photographed allegedly puffing from a pipe on her front stoop in broad daylight, and in a bikini with a marijuana leaf decorating each breast. She swears like a trucker, just because. “I have a bit of an authority issue,” Stewart replied when David Letterman asked her, in that now-famous 2008 interview, whether she had “any interest in going beyond high school. Maybe college or something?” Let it be said that she has a loyal cohort who love her for all this, but they’re less vocal than her critics. “[I]f a woman isn’t happy and un-opinionated and long-haired and pretty, then she’s weird and, like, ugly,” she sighs, “And I just don’t get it.”
“Let’s go smoke,” she finally announces. We walk outside to a balcony overlooking a faux waterfall. She removes two cigarettes from a pack of Camel Lights, noting that she doesn’t care if people “go onto the Internet and say I’m ugly.” She minds only when they criticize “the effort I put in.” She lights a cigarette, leans forward, and talks with the forbidding intensity evident in her work. “I hate it when they say I’m ungrateful, and I fucking hate it when they say I don’t give a shit, because nobody cares more than I do. I’m telling you I don’t know anybody who does this that gives a shit more than I do.”
“There’s a threat to her health in the way she works, in that she can’t project feelings she doesn’t feel herself,” Weitz says. “If you shoot a scene in which she has a nervous breakdown, that’s potentially what you’re going to get. I have found myself concerned for her at moments.” During the filming of Twilight, studio executives found themselves concerned about Stewart and Pattinson. “Both of them have the tendency to go deep, to find the emotional core of a scene,” says the first movie’s director, Catherine Hardwicke. “I think the producers were worried—and they were right in some ways— that it was going to be one-note, all brooding, all serious.” At the mention of this, Stewart swings: “Well, they’re thanking their lucky stars now that we were serious about it,” she says. “They wanted us to smile more. They literally just thought it was not light enough, not fun enough, that it wasn’t like a love story. But I’m sorry, when you’re in love with someone, you’re not laughing. Well, maybe you are. But not in this story.”
A recurring theme among the directors of Stewart’s films—a steady stream since an agent spotted her singing “The Dreidel Song” in a school pageant at age eight—is her honesty as a performer, her finely calibrated compass for authenticity. “She has a great bullshit detector,” says Greg Mottola, director of Adventureland. “Kristen has an unflinching sense of truth. She doesn’t lie,” says Mary Stuart Masterson, who directed Stewart in The Cake Eaters. “She has to truly believe what she is doing…which is a great gift but can also feel like a curse, because then the material has to be something you believe in too.” Hardwicke adds: “Kristen especially likes to feel good about her lines, as though it would really come out of her mouth. Respecting that would have me doing quite a bit of rewriting on set.”
Stewart tends to play adolescent women who are independent-minded yet still uncomfortable in their own skin, much like she is. Telegraphing their neuroses is, in fact, her strength as an actor: Her characters can be truly discomfiting to watch. Yet she also projects a riveting precociousness. Anyone who has seen Into the Wild will find it hard to forget a young, gangly Stewart as 16-year-old Tracy Tatro, perched on a bed in white cotton underwear, vulnerable as a colt yet trembling with need, offering herself to Emile Hirsch’s clueless, idealistic Christopher McCandless. “Kristen can express all that longing and desire and anxiety with a look or a smile,” says Jon Kasdan, director of In the Land of Women, in which Stewart portrayed a teenager with a crush on her twenty-something neighbor, played by Adam Brody. “She doesn’t have to say, ‘Oh, I’m so filled with longing’—she can just do it.”
Enter Bella Swan. Bella is the epitome of longing. She is yearning when every other quality has been stripped away. Stewart’s ability to convey this to the near-total exclusion of all other emotions is surely responsible, at least in part, for the immense popularity of the Twilight franchise. The (mostly) female fan base may be pining for Edward Cullen in the wispy form of Robert Pattinson or Jacob Black in the decidedly more buff embodiment of Taylor Lautner, but Bella is the vessel for the audience’s collective desire. Stewart calls Bella “the most sort of undeveloped character I’ve played” and notes, “I had to bring myself to [the part].” But whatever real-life aspects she transferred to Bella, the unsung brilliance of her performance is that she also left her sufficiently skeletal so that viewers can do the same. “I think that’s partly why the movies are the phenomenon that they are, and it feels like she’s not getting a tremendous amount of credit for that,” Kasdan says. “Yes, women love the guy and so forth, but they’re loving him through her.”
A few months later, Stewart and I meet again, this time in the corner booth of a dimly lit hotel restaurant in Hollywood. Again she is dressed all in black—her hooded sweatshirt reads nuns with guns: praise the lord and pass the ammunition—but her hair is lighter and longer, and she seems calmer, not as tightly coiled.
The Twilight pressure is off, for the moment anyway—at least until Eclipse arrives in theaters and inevitably arouses the scary lunacy its predecessors did. This time around, Bella learns “that there are, like, different levels of loving someone,” Stewart says vaguely. Or, as David Slade puts it: “Bella is at the verge of the abyss in this film, and she knows she has to step off.…” Two hours of good, cathartic longing.
But Stewart is looking not so far beyond this month to the fall release of “the coolest movie ever,” Welcome to the Rileys, directed by Jake Scott. She plays a 16-year-old stripper-prostitute, “an open wound” of a girl, as she says, befriended by a middle-aged couple (Melissa Leo and James Gandolfini) grieving the death of their daughter. The premise sounds like indie sap, but it works, and the sparely written script showcases the actors’ talents. Stewart renders her wild, damaged character with a complexity and control not evident in her previous performances. To prepare, she lived on junk food, learned to pole dance, chain-smoked, and stayed up all night. The rough living took its toll: Her legs bloom with bruises and her sallow skin with blemishes, all of them real. It’s difficult to imagine another young actress subordinating her looks so completely to her performance. This may well be the role that loosens the association between Kristen Stewart and Bella Swan, poster child for teenage angst.
For the moment, though, there are plenty who see her as Bella. Preteen girls begin to cluster in the booth across from ours, birds of prey gathering to examine their find. The ecosystem of the restaurant has altered. Stewart knows she’s been sighted. I nab the moment to ask her the question on everyone’s mind: “In real life, would you be Team Edward or Team Jacob?”
“Oh my God, did you seriously just ask that?” She laughs. “Shhhh.” Those buzzwords make her nervous; she’s been mobbed before. “I would never cheapen my relationships by talking about them. People say, ‘Just say who you’re dating. Then people will stop being so ravenous about it.’ It’s like, No they won’t! They’ll ask for specifics.” (A possible clue exists on the Kindle she has brought with her: Among the downloads is Guy de Maupassant’s Bel-Ami, the movie version of which Pattinson is filming.)
“I want a cigarette,” Stewart announces. It’s almost a dare. The little girls swarm. She poses for a picture with them. Cigarettes in hand, she slips out the door.
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