Kel­ly Reichardt on how she got to Kris­ten Stewart

To mere mor­tals watch­ing from the side­lines, all direc­tors and actors whose films make it into cin­e­mas have achieved a flick­er of immor­tal­i­ty. But behind-the-scenes per­son­al icons are tiered accord­ing to main­stream appeal.

Kel­ly Reichardt works res­olute­ly out­side of the Hol­ly­wood sys­tem, mak­ing integri­ty-fuelled art, and so mon­ey and indus­try reach are not her cur­ren­cy. Mean­while, despite an ongo­ing for­ay into fas­ci­nat­ing indie projects, Kris­ten Stewart’s post-Twi­light glow is like a light­house beck­on­ing all com­ers. So how did the for­mer side­step the crowds around the lat­ter in order to cast her as Eliz­a­beth Travis in Cer­tain Women?

“Some friends of mine made a film with Kris­ten, Still Alice, so they gave the script [for Cer­tain Women] to her. Her response was, ​‘If it hap­pens, let me know, and I’ll come do this’, but right up until the day she arrived on set, we were like, ​‘Is Kris­ten Stew­art real­ly going to show up?’ And then there she was. It was like, ​‘Oh hey, here you are.’”

“I had worked with Dako­ta Fan­ning and with Jesse Eisen­berg [on 2014’s Night Moves] and they are two of her clos­est friends, so they put in a good word. I had had real­ly fun expe­ri­ences with both Dako­ta and Jesse, so I think because of that Kris­ten was game for it. But she was com­plete­ly unper­turbed by the size of the part. She’s not the lead. She plays a sup­port­ing part in the movie, and she made so much of that character.

“She let Lily Gladstone’s char­ac­ter set the pace and be the focus. She was so gen­er­ous – a real­ly gen­er­ous actor, I thought. She helped give it some shape, because Lily’s a real­ly dif­fer­ent kind of actor, real­ly intu­itive and Kris­ten, like­wise, is an intu­itive actor, but she’s also been doing it a long time and she’s a tech­ni­cal actress. I thought that it played well in terms of who the two char­ac­ters are. She had a bar­be­cue for the crew on the day off and was just total­ly easy and not at all demanding.

“I loved her in The Run­aways, that’s real­ly what I loved Kris­ten in most. It’s an imper­fect movie but all the women in it are real­ly… I loved the real Run­aways so I real­ly did not want a movie of The Run­aways, but she’s real­ly good in it!”

Cer­tain Women is released in cin­e­mas 3 March. Read the LWLies Rec­om­mends review.