Thursday, September 6, 2012
Tuesday, September 4, 2012
New Kristen interview with The Age (Australia)
Kristen Stewart hadn't read Stephenie Meyer's Twilight when the role of
Bella Swan was offered to her. She was more interested in Jack Kerouac's
1957 Beat classic On the Road. She could relate to its sense of daring.
''It's rare to meet characters in fiction that live so much, that breathe so much,'' the sharply intelligent 22-year-old says. ''I thought, 'I've got to find people like this, people who push me and share my ambitions.' Not that I'm that unconventional, but I have slightly different limits and boundaries than most people, and the book says that is OK. The book celebrates it. I slept with On the Road on my dashboard when I got my licence. It was the first book that got me into reading.''
Kerouac's jazzy prose - which created uber-cool characters embracing drugs, alcohol and experimental sex as they travel the United States between 1947 and 1951 - had long been deemed unfilmable. Just after the novel's publication, Kerouac wrote to Marlon Brando hoping the star would play Dean Moriarty (based on Kerouac's friend Neal Cassady) while Kerouac would play Sal Paradise - based on himself.
Francis Ford Coppola also tried to make the movie after buying the rights in 1979. Yet it wasn't until The Motorcycle Diaries' Walter Salles came along that a film version finally went ahead.
About the time of Stewart's breakthrough role in Sean Penn's Into the Wild, Penn and Babel director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu suggested her to Salles for the role of Dean's wife, Marylou (based on Cassady's first wife LuAnne Henderson). The pair married when LuAnne was 15, and while they divorced and he had children with his second wife Carolyn (played by Kirsten Dunst), Cassady continued to hit the road with LuAnne and they remained close until his death.
By the time On the Road went into production, Stewart had become a household name and was keen for the women in the story to have more prominence. She points out that Kerouac's original tome featuring real people's names (he was forced to change them as well as parts of the story to get it published) was
far closer to the truth, particularly in terms of the women, and most notably LuAnne.
''It's funny because in the novel a lot of people's first impression is that LuAnne is just a plaything, that she is just f---ing and isn't getting much in return,'' Stewart says. ''[But] she just loves to love and is able to balance all of her desires, whereas the boys have a much harder time doing it. I think she [had] this beautiful, unique view of the world and was very ahead of her time.
''Afterwards the book's success definitely became something that a lot of people capitalised on … For LuAnne it was just so personal. It was never something she wanted to turn into a commodity or something she wanted to continue. It was just a stage of her life.
''She always said that it was so funny to her that people thought she was courageous. It was different for everyone, but LuAnne wasn't rebelling against anything. She was just unabashedly being herself.''
While fearlessly being herself is something the media-shy Stewart aspires to as well - ''I think it's so ridiculous when actors suddenly find themselves so interesting that they're willing to sell themselves'' - she admits having more in common with the book's narrator, Sal.
''As LuAnne I was a little worried that I wasn't going to be able to lose control; that I wasn't going to be able to let go. Luckily I did, but I don't think you can claim that you are suddenly a different person.
''Actors are playing characters … but I do find that you're just sort of unleashing qualities that are buried pretty deep.''
''It's rare to meet characters in fiction that live so much, that breathe so much,'' the sharply intelligent 22-year-old says. ''I thought, 'I've got to find people like this, people who push me and share my ambitions.' Not that I'm that unconventional, but I have slightly different limits and boundaries than most people, and the book says that is OK. The book celebrates it. I slept with On the Road on my dashboard when I got my licence. It was the first book that got me into reading.''
Kerouac's jazzy prose - which created uber-cool characters embracing drugs, alcohol and experimental sex as they travel the United States between 1947 and 1951 - had long been deemed unfilmable. Just after the novel's publication, Kerouac wrote to Marlon Brando hoping the star would play Dean Moriarty (based on Kerouac's friend Neal Cassady) while Kerouac would play Sal Paradise - based on himself.
Francis Ford Coppola also tried to make the movie after buying the rights in 1979. Yet it wasn't until The Motorcycle Diaries' Walter Salles came along that a film version finally went ahead.
About the time of Stewart's breakthrough role in Sean Penn's Into the Wild, Penn and Babel director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu suggested her to Salles for the role of Dean's wife, Marylou (based on Cassady's first wife LuAnne Henderson). The pair married when LuAnne was 15, and while they divorced and he had children with his second wife Carolyn (played by Kirsten Dunst), Cassady continued to hit the road with LuAnne and they remained close until his death.
By the time On the Road went into production, Stewart had become a household name and was keen for the women in the story to have more prominence. She points out that Kerouac's original tome featuring real people's names (he was forced to change them as well as parts of the story to get it published) was
far closer to the truth, particularly in terms of the women, and most notably LuAnne.
''It's funny because in the novel a lot of people's first impression is that LuAnne is just a plaything, that she is just f---ing and isn't getting much in return,'' Stewart says. ''[But] she just loves to love and is able to balance all of her desires, whereas the boys have a much harder time doing it. I think she [had] this beautiful, unique view of the world and was very ahead of her time.
''Afterwards the book's success definitely became something that a lot of people capitalised on … For LuAnne it was just so personal. It was never something she wanted to turn into a commodity or something she wanted to continue. It was just a stage of her life.
''She always said that it was so funny to her that people thought she was courageous. It was different for everyone, but LuAnne wasn't rebelling against anything. She was just unabashedly being herself.''
While fearlessly being herself is something the media-shy Stewart aspires to as well - ''I think it's so ridiculous when actors suddenly find themselves so interesting that they're willing to sell themselves'' - she admits having more in common with the book's narrator, Sal.
''As LuAnne I was a little worried that I wasn't going to be able to lose control; that I wasn't going to be able to let go. Luckily I did, but I don't think you can claim that you are suddenly a different person.
''Actors are playing characters … but I do find that you're just sort of unleashing qualities that are buried pretty deep.''
New pic of Kristen + preview of British Vogue Interview
Making her comeback on the front pages of a glossy magazine after her very public slip up when she cheated on Robert Pattinson with director, Rupert Sanders, the 22-year-old admits she struggles to play it cool.
‘I know if you haven’t thought about how you want to present a very packaged idea of yourself then it can seem like you lack ambition. But, dude, honestly? I can’t,’ she said.
She told Vogue: People expect it to be easy because there you are, out there, doing the thing that you want and making lots of money out of it. But, you know, I’m not that smooth. I can get clumsy around certain people.’
‘Like if I were to sit down and think, “OK, I’m really famous, how am I going to conduct myself in public?” I wouldn’t know who that person would be! It would be a lot easier if I could, but I can’t.’
Kristen Stewart
Kristen, who stars in new film On The Road, also moved to speak of her empathy for the Beat generation, on which the film is based.
'There is always going to be that seam of people who want things differently to the standardised version. It’s not necessarily a rebellious thing, it’s just who they are.
'That world back then, it just seems freer to me than anything I could ever touch and I’m fully nostalgic for it, even though I wasn’t even alive then.
'It’s the loyalty aspect of it all. I love being on the periphery with a group of people who have the same values that I do. People who don’t get off on fame, who just like the process of making movies and thrive.'
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