Divisive movies are often the most interesting to discuss, and “Personal Shopper” certainly fits the bill. The latest from “Clouds Of Sils Maria” team Olivier Assayas and Kristen Stewart took home Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival last year (tied with Cristian Mungiu for “Graduation“) and has been praised by many, but there have been just as many voices who didn’t roll with the movie. Regardless, Stewart’s star power, coupled with the reception, have given “Personal Shopper” the kind of attention most arthouses releases don’t receive.
Indeed, one only has to look to the pair’s appearance on “Charlie Rose” — guest hosted by Stephanie Zacharek — to promote the film, where they dove into the film that follows a personal shopper working in Paris, who also moonlights as medium, and in trying to connect with her late brother, starts receiving mysterious text messages.
Stewart talked a lot about her process, and in particular about the challenge of communicating authentic emotional moments, and her preference for those scenes to be more intuitive.
“…even on a big movie, there’s a certain job that an actor has to tell a story and hit certain emotional marks. And to be honest with you, I don’t do very well in that position. I don’t thrive. I feel like, you know, even on a larger — like on a movie like ‘Twilight,’ the moments that were written in the book or in the screenplay that everyone sort of, like, maybe were, like, deeply attached to, I always felt like I messed them up, and then the moments that were — the moments that just happened to bubble up on-set that maybe wasn’t such a huge moment in the script or in the book, those were the things — the things that surprised me were the things that were always like, oh man, I think we just got to it, and I think that’s actually servicing the story in a much better way than if I had cried at the right moment when he said the thing to me about the thing,” she explained.
Stewart also knows some of the answers to the mysteries to “Personal Shopper,” but isn’t sharing them just yet.
“I think that there is a concrete answer on who that person actually is that I’m texting, and I’m only aware of that as an actor, approaching the story as a screenplay that I’ve read, and so I know how everything plays out. But I think if I were to wipe that from my, you know, memory, the person or spirit or entity or whatever that she’s speaking to is this ever-evolving thing, and I think that that speaks to, like, the definition of one’s own reality. If you believe it, then it’s true. And so I think that there are times where she’s absolutely talking to herself. I think it’s an internal dialogue. And then there are times when she, you know, assumes that it’s, you know, another character within the movie, which is hard to describe, because, you know, I don’t know if people have seen this while watching this interview, but I think it’s weird because your phone gives you an ability to live quite presently all the time, but then at the same time, depending on how you use it, it does the opposite of that,” she said.
But the actress did have a concern about having a phone by her side. “The one thing I was worried about was it would not be very engaging cinematically, that it might be — that I might be boring or something. But those scenes had the most — for me, had absolutely the most tension,” Stewart said.
“Personal Shopper” is now playing.