“I signed a copy of East of Eden last night,” says Kristen Stewart. “I was like, what the …”
You’d have to see her to know she doesn’t believe this herself. There’s the ironic emphasis on Eden. There’s her self-deprecating smile gone awry. There is, in every Stewart interview, a certain undisguised incredulity at the people who’ve made her famous.
In 10 minutes she tells you nothing about herself, but in the inflection of 10 words she says everything.
This TIFF marks Stewart’s first public appearance since her first public scandal – and even more public apology. As you can’t help knowing, she was photographed kissing her Snow White and the Huntsman director Rupert Sanders (a married man) two months ago. Her boyfriend, Twilight co-star Robert Pattinson, was not in the picture. Within hours of Us Weekly’s publishing this frankly boring evidence, the girl who’d never said she was in love had to apologize in front of everybody. It was a sorry sight, for sure.
But on the red carpet for On The Road, a special presentation at TIFF, her fans had either forgiven or were smart enough not to care. She isn’t lying about Steinbeck, who is, by the way, her “favourite favourite author.” From the other side of the handrail, I watched her graffiti a fan’s brand-new paperback. Her right stiletto trembled more than her left.
Today, tucked into the Intercontinental Hotel for a round of tape-recorded torture, Stewart is wearing flats. She sits cross-legged and impatient, like a kid on a too-short chair.
After a few minutes I point into her lap and she thinks I’m complimenting the flats, which are very faux-punk pirate. No, I’m pointing to the splint on her middle finger. She laughs, then mimics herself: “Aren’t my shoes great?”
Stewart is so private that when I ask what happened, she says only that she broke her finger (duh). And in person she is chill but so fierce-looking and wounded, like one of those stray cats who despise your kindness, that I don’t ask again.
We talk more about books. Stewart loves not just male writers, but dude writers: Charles Bukowski, Henry Miller, and Jack Kerouac, who led her to the others. It’s his original scroll of On The Road, sensorial and vital and raw, that Walter Salles ( The Motorcycle Diaries) transmogrifies into this wish-fulfilling ramble of a film.
“I think if you were to watch a true depiction of the novel in every sense, if you could predict every line, it would be so not the experience of reading the book,” says Stewart, who read and fell in love with it when she was 14. “[Salles] didn’t change things just to have a beginning, a middle, and an end to satisfy people. I do really feel the same thing when you read the book: there are so many things presented to you, so many streets you could decide to walk down.”
Stewart has decided to walk the freeway. Before Twilight came out, she signed to On The Road as an indie darlin’. After Twilight , jokes her co-star Garrett Hedlund, she’s the reason On The Road got green-lit. (Hedlund and Stewart are doing all their interviews together, which one imagines is more for Stewart’s sake than his.)
A week before Salles began shooting, Stewart went on a road trip with two of her friends. Did she drive? “No,” she says in the eye-rollingest tone. “I was driven. On my road trip.”
They made it to Ohio. Ohio? That sounds like the saddest adventure. “It’s not sad! It was so cool.” She almost smiles. “It’s about the reach, babe.”
I know it is easy to fall in love with interview subjects, especially when they’re also intergalactic movie stars with morning-after hair and absinthe-green eyes. I know they do it to you on purpose. I’m in love.
Which is why I cringe asking her whether it was a relief, given the scrutiny she’s under, to play Marylou. Marylou, who does whatever she wants and never feels bad about it. Marylou, who is free.
A look crosses Kristen Stewart’s face that makes me want to quit my job and jump out the 10th-floor window, so don’t you ever tell me she can’t act.
“It’s funny,” she says, finally. “Getting to know the people behind the characters made it a lot easier to play her. I don’t want to say like a prop, but she’s … it’s just that she is like scenery a little bit. You can connect the dots and wonder what kind of person it would take to do that, but knowing her, she had a capacity for – honestly, I mean she’s really a female version of Neal. I mean, she, she grew up with him, she was kind of raised by him, um …”
Not until I play back the tape do I guess that Hedlund interrupts now to protect her. In seeming to answer the question about her character and not about herself, Stewart talked more about herself and her boyfriend than she should have.
“I was thinking about that question,” Hedlund says. “And it’s like, we got to live a fearless life for a chunk of time before we had to go back to a life in which we had something to lose.”
Kristen Stewart doesn’t look up. She just says, yeah.
Kristen Stewart swears a lot. It’s great; it instantly makes her a human being rather than the tabloid icon she’s unwillingly become at age 22. (Long story short: She and her Twilight co-star Robert Pattinson split up earlier this summer. The reasons why are none of my business, and none of yours either, honestly. But the Twilight movies make hundreds of millions of dollars and there’s one more coming out in November, so apparently it’s news.)
Stewart’s come to TIFF to launch On The Road, an adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s classic Beat novel in which she plays Marylou, the sexually adventurous child bride of the charismatic Dean Moriarty. (Yes, there are nude scenes. No, they aren’t explicit.) On the press day, Stewart is paired with Garrett Hedlund, who plays Moriarty. And the two of them were their most animated when they were discussing the freewheeling, improvisational style director Walter Salles encouraged on the shoot.
“There are probably, like, 600 movies within the film that we shot,” Stewart says. “I think the only way to have done this, and be really true to how the book feels, is to not be so connected to [memorizing] lines. I mean, certain things just find their way into your heart, and you’re like, ‘I need to say that. I love that fucking line.’ And that’s fine, as long as you’ve opened yourself up to letting it fall out, rather than trying to do something a certain way.”
The challenge for the actors was keeping themselves in that headspace, which Stewart says she had trouble with.
“I tortured myself in the most amazing, wonderful way for four weeks,” she says, “and then as soon as the four weeks were done it was like, ‘You need to stop thinking, because if you don’t, you’re gonna regret this entire experience. You’re gonna look back and say: I fucked up. I thought too much.’”
Hedlund credits the resources that were made available to the actors over what turned out to be a very long pre-production period. Both he and Stewart signed onto On The Road in 2007, but it took four years to get to the first day of principal photography. Fortunately, that just let everyone soak up more material.
“We’d gotten so many wonderful stories,” Hedlund says. “From real-life characters like Al Hinkle, who was in the book as Ed Dunkel. Neal [Cassaday]’s son told me a lot of wonderful stories, we’d read plenty of stories from Carolyn Cassady’s Off The Road, wonderful stories from LuAnne Henderson’s audiotapes. We always had stories to go for if there was space for improvisational infusion.”
Stewart says the fact that she was playing a real person – the aforementioned Henderson, who was the basis for Kerouac’s fictional Marylou – made her a little more careful about her own improvisations.
“It’s always fun to have freedom and have, like, happy accidents where you go, ‘Wow, that’s cool, I didn’t expect that,’” Stewart says. “But when you’re playing somebody who’s [actually] existed, you know …” And she stops herself, rethinking her position on the fly.
“I don’t want to discredit what it feels like to play a character who’s been written by somebody,” she continues. “You feel just as responsible to the writer and the character to everyone who’s been affected by that person.”
There is no doubt in my mind that she’s referring to Bella Swan. And I have to respect her instincts; given how many millions of people worship the Twilight movies – and how worried everyone is that those Twi-hards will boycott Breaking Dawn Part Two because of Stewart and Pattinson’s recent breakup – it’s the savvy thing to do. But it’s also crap, and she knows it, because as soon as she’s finished that statement, Stewart returns to her real point and her energy shoots right back up.
“I’ve played Joan Jett,” she says, “and because she was on set every day, I couldn’t improv. I couldn’t. Everything I said, I spoke to her about it. You know – you can’t put words in their mouths unless you know. Unless you really feel it, and it’s coming from the right place.”
“Unless you felt trust,” Hedlund says.
“Precisely,” Stewart says, nodding emphatically. “Because of the time that we put in initially [with the material] and because of the heart that Walter, like, shoved down all of our throats, into our chests, it had to show up. It was impossible for it not to. “
Hedlund picks it up. “And once you know what your character’s instincts are, what their wants and needs are, it can free you up – there can be carelessness, recklessness. There can be emotion.”
“Yes,” Stewart agrees. “Then you can forget everything, and just do it.”
TORONTO — It’s been tough for Kristen Stewart to be back out in public after revelations of an affair that led to her breakup with “Twilight” co-star Robert Pattinson.thestar:
Yet there’s no place she would rather be than at the Toronto International Film Festival alongside her colleagues for the adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s 1950s Beat Generation novel, “On the Road.”
Stewart said she never thought about skipping the festival, where the film played ahead of its U.S. theatrical release in December.
She said it was important to be there with director Walter Salles and co-stars that include Kirsten Dunst and Garrett Hedlund, who like Stewart had worked for years to get the film made.
“We have been waiting for this thing to be unleashed for so long. It was sort of one of those situations where you just have to put yourself in your body and go appreciate the moment,” Stewart said in an interview Saturday.
Recalling the film’s world premiere at May’s Cannes Film Festival, Stewart said, “I would have been happy standing at Cannes with the entire theater booing it as long as I was in that row with my cast and with Walter. We would have been fine. I feel so strong with these people, and it’s so appropriate. I belonged there.”
Since Cannes, Stewart’s personal life has unraveled as she admitted she cheated on Pattinson with her “Snow White and the Huntsman” director, Rupert Sanders.
The Toronto premiere of “On the Road” on Thursday was Stewart’s first public appearance since, and she was greeted by hundreds of “Twilight” fans who came out to show support for the 22-year-old actress.
“You expect a lot of people at a ‘Twilight’ premiere, but showing up at an ‘On the Road’ Toronto film festival screening and seeing that amount of people is absolutely, disarmingly amazing,” Stewart said. “It felt pretty cool.”
“On the Road” has been on Hollywood’s to-do list for decades, but previous attempts to adapt it for film always fell through.
Salles (”Central Station,” ‘’The Motorcycle Diaries”) spent years developing the film, which stars Hedlund as beat generation free spirit Dean Moriarty, inspired by Kerouac’s friend Neal Cassady, and Sam Riley as the author’s alter-ego, Sal Paradise.
Stewart co-stars as Dean’s first wife, Marylou, who joins him and Sal on some of their crazed cross-country adventures.
The novel was a consciousness-raising experience for Stewart when she first read it as a high school freshman.
“Marylou and Dean are the type of people that I was inspired by. Initially, at 15 reading the book, going, God, these are the sort of people I’ve got to find. The mad ones,” Stewart said. “And I am so not one of them, but maybe I could be. ...
“The great thing about ‘On the Road’ is that it really can crack open your shell, and I definitely realized things about myself that I didn’t realize before. That I can let my face hang out and not be too aware of it, and stop questioning myself and not be afraid of strangers, and stop being judgmental.”
Coping with photographers and TV crews at Thursday’s red-carpet premiere was a challenge.
“I was a little nervous, obviously. I’m always nervous before a red carpet,” Stewart said. “To be honest, I was just kind of telling myself, like, just don’t black out. Be there, don’t just figuratively put your head down and barrel though it. Be there, appreciate it. Luckily, very, very much I was able to do that.”
In November, Stewart faces some awkward public appearances when she and Pattinson will be promoting “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 2,” the finale of their vampire romance.
Stewart is confident they will get through that all right.
“We’re going to be fine,” Stewart said. “We’re totally fine.”
It comes as a shock to see Kristen Stewart curled up in a chair in a Toronto hotel room, looking considerably thinner and less poised than she did at the Cannes Film Festival in May.ottawacitizen:
The same film is being discussed: On the Road, the Walter Salles adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s totemic 1957 Beat Generation novel, which is receiving its North American premiere at TIFF before a year-end release.
The tense body language of Stewart, 22, says all that needs to be said about how difficult the past four months have been for her, during which she confessed to an affair that led to a breakup with Robert Pattinson, her boyfriend and Twilight franchise co-star.
It would be a mistake, though, to read too much into tabloid headlines. Stewart looked as glamorous on Friday’s Ryerson Theatre red carpet as she did on the scarlet walk outside the Palais des Festivals in Cannes.
And the intense experience of making On the Road, which took years of planning and included “boot camp” readings of Beat writings, couldn’t help but have a transforming effect on all involved. That’s certainly the case for Stewart, and also with co-star Garrett Hedlund, who joined her for an interview with the Star.
“To say that this movie opened me up in a way, sounds really obvious, but it f--king did!” says Stewart, who first read Kerouac’s classic at age 15.
“I’m not just saying this. The book has had such a major effect on who I wanted to be at age 15, which is a pretty important and formidable time.”
Adds Hedlund: “How do you express the fire in which (Kerouac) expressed it? That’s the obstacle and that’s really what you’re thinking about the whole time. But at the end of the day, I feel I’ve become a much stronger person. The thoughts that I had to think, the feelings I’ve felt . . . made me much stronger.”
On the Road sets Stewart as enigmatic teen dynamo Marylou, the woman who rode with and made love to both the wild Dean Moriarty, played by Hedlund, and the cerebral Sal Paradise, played by Sam Riley.
To Stewart’s thinking, the mythmaking mileage of Moriarty and Paradise — pseudonyms for real-life pals Neal Cassady and Kerouac — might never have happened if it weren’t for Marylou, who is based on Cassady’s first wife, LuAnne Henderson, 15 years old when they married.
“It was this bridge,” Stewart says of Marylou/LuAnne’s relationships, both amorous and amigo, with Dean/Neal and Sal/Jack.
“I think that there definitely was a commonality that they could have because of her. They may have found it through something else if she didn’t exist, but there was a trust that they had just because they shared her.”
Adds Hedlund, 28: “She was like the gal in between twin brothers who had opposite amounts of patience.”
Stewart and Hedlund both wonder how modern audiences will react to the sex, drugs and all that jazz of On the Road. It shocked people so much in the late 1950s, many would often tear the cover off the book if they were reading it in public.
“It’s not so shocking to do drugs and have promiscuous sex anymore,” Stewart says.
“It’s not too shocking to see people naked. I hate to put it this way, but when I read the book I was 15, I think I was maybe a little more fascinated with pushing myself a little bit farther and being a bit of a rebel, or whatever at that age you do. You want to push yourself.”
Brazilian director Salles, who spent many years working to get the rights to On the Road and also getting a satisfying script written, says Marylou is a fascinating character and Stewart was exactly the right woman to play her. As soon as he met Stewart, after seeing her perform in Sean Penn’s maverick drama Into the Wild, he knew he’d found his Marylou.
“She knew On the Road very well, but she also understood Marylou in a way that was very, very unique. And I didn’t think twice. I invited her at that point, because I wanted somebody who could understand what motivated that character more than anything else.
“The fact that she had the passion and the desire but also the understanding of that character and what made her complex was very interesting.”
Salles was also impressed by how much Hedlund was already inside the mind of Moriarty/Cassady, when the young actor first auditioned for the role in 2007. Hedlund took a three-day bus trip from Minnesota to attend the casting session, during which he kept a journal.
“He said, ‘Do you mind if I read something to you?’ And he read what he’d written during his journey. It was if I was listening to Neal Cassady’s prose in his letters. He was so much in synchronicity with it.”
Hedlund says everything about On the Road was profound.
“I think it opened us up to having the ability to express ourselves in a much freer way and open way. I think before doing this film, if you asked me a question, I probably would have asked you to write it down and I would have been able to write you a response in the next few days rather than express myself better.”
Adds Stewart: “I’m still in that position!”
They were young and wild and free, and they took to the road in a whirlwind of talk and sex and good times. They were looking for a new way of life, and they inspired a generation of young people to look along with them.usatoday:
And those are just the actors. Kristen Stewart, the 22 year old star who has been hounded into what looks like exhaustion by the tabloid press, emerged in public this week for the first time in two months. The occasion was the North American premiere of On the Road, Walter Selles's jazzy interpretation of the Jack Kerouac book about a group of young people driving down the existential highways of 1950s America.
Stewart plays Marylou, a freespirited teenager who marries the animating spirit of the long and jazzy road trip - a charismatic excon named Dean Moriarty and played by rising Garrett Hedlund - for a life of drugs and open sexuality and a search for a new kind of life. The book became the defining document of the so-called Beat Generation of young hipsters in postwar America.
"As a sensitive girl of this time who is maybe a bit more conventional - ha ha - I kind of was curious about how you could have the strength to do the things she did," Stewart said the day after On the Road had its public premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. "And it's not that at all. It takes a lot of strength to be super-vulnerable. She was so so so open to the world."
Stewart, though, seemed guarded and tired. There was an unspoken subtext about her Toronto appearance: the revelation of, and apology for, an affair she had with the married director of her previous film Snow White and the Huntsman. It resulted in the breakup of her relationship with Twilight co-star Robert Pattinson.
No one was talking about it at the festival, but it hung in the air during interviews, in which Stewart was paired with Hedlund, who did most of the talking. She seemed tired, but she was game, partly because of the passion the film's actors feel toward Kerouac's book and the five-year process of making the film.
"If you approach it as a completion of the process, there are things that would never occur to you if you weren't asked the question," Stewart said about the interviews. "Sit down and have 10-minute conversations with 15 different people; if you don't take something from that, you're a sociopath."
Hedlund added, "At the end of the day we both know it's the end of a long road we've been on."
It's a road that has, in some way, been going on since Kerouac published the book in 1957, disguising himself (his character, played by Sam Riley, is called Sal Paradise) and his friends (Dean Moriarty is actually proto-hipster Neal Cassady) as they roared down the two-lane blacktop of a simpler, less-crowded country, looking for kicks and for truth.
"It's the expression of youth," Hedlund said. "Wanting to grasp everything and have it at the same time. Live long and never die."
Hedlund visited San Francisco to hang out in the spots where Cassady was raised: a museum to his memory, the City Lights bookstore that published many early Beat Generation poets, the restaurants where Kerouac, Cassady and Alan Ginsberg and the rest would hang out. He said he was coming out of a bar when a bum asked him for $20, and so he asked the man - who turned out to be a former football player just recently released from San Quentin prison - what the beats meant to the city.
"Ah the beat generation is all dead and gone now," Hedlund quotes the man as telling him. "Back then it was social consciousness. Now you've got rich kids coming out at 21 or 22, driving their parents' BMWs, trying to live this life, but it's a hoax.
"It's not a style, it's a feeling, it's a how you express yourself out of your innermost honesty and truth and how you are as a whole completely and uncensored and not caring. It's everything you are and if you live in this manner you might qualify to be somebody that somebody says re-semble the Beat Generation."
Hedlund read all the literature and met with members of Cassady's family, and he discovered a man who wanted to experience everything in life. "Things were happening and he wanted to be there. Someone said parties exist without you being there, don't worry about it, get your rest at night. He wasn't that. He wanted to be at that party."
Marylou, Stewart's character, isn't as well known.
She was really a teenager named Luanne Henderson, but Stewart said she left behind a long record of her thoughts about that era.
"I have what was possibly the easiest job," she said. "I would have done anything to be part of this movie. I would have played (peripheral character) Chad King. So that's how I approached it. I loved the book so much, I wanted to be around Walter, I wanted to be around the people interested in it. I just wanted to do anything."
Together they've made a world that seems freer, in some ways, than today's culture: for instance, Dean and Marylou are shown taking part in group sex with friends, and no blame is assigned. Hedlund says that while the highways are more polluted now, with billboards and telephone lines, it's still possible to hit the road.
"It's a level of your ambition and drive," he says. "It's a matter of where you want to aim your arrow. The things that have changed in time are the highways and the road. It's not as free. There's not as many hitchhikers, not on the main roads. To get where you want to get faster, you have to take the back roads. There's wonderful experiences to be had. When you're young you think you can achieve anything. The world's at your fingertips. And then reality starts to hit you. But I think it's always possible: we all want to get out of our parents' homes and not go to school and not have curfew. Some people fail. Some people succeed. some people have wonderful stories and some people have tales of sadness. It's all relative."
usatoday:
Three books that have changed Kristen Stewart's life:
1. "Going way back, I did a movie of it too -- a book called Speak. As a young girl, it was fairly emotional for me for fundamentally obvious girlie reasons."
2. "On the Road got me started reading a lot. It led me to The Stranger. It reminds you that you are, very much, alone."
3. "East of Eden because it blew my mind that someone could be so many people. It's so universal and all-encompassing. It's a whole world. It blew my head off."
Kristen Stewart did what most actors in her situation wouldn't: in the midst of personal scandal, she stepped out to promote her small, intimate and very personal film, On the Road.
"Thanks, man. Thanks," says Stewart, when told it was good of her to put herself out there, given the scrutiny she's been under.
Granted, she did her interviews with costar Garrett Hedlund and director Walter Salles. But she put herself out there and for that, I respect her.
The film is based on Jack Kerouac's seminal American novel. Hedlund plays Dean, who has what could be generously described a very unconventional relationship with his teen bride, Mary Lou (Stewart).
Plus,Twihards, she's just a cool chick who's smart and well-read, with On the Road being a favorite. "I was it a freshman when I read it. I was projecting to the future a little bit. Is that what's on its way? It was about knowing that I wasn't there yet. I hadn't realized what my ambitions were. It made me less insecure and a little bit more hungry.
"She's not kidding."I would have done anything on the movie. I would have been any crew member. I would have followed the crew in the car as a fan just to be around it," said Stewart. "Getting to know the woman behind the character -- she's not the main character and you do wonder what kind of person would live like that?"
"Personality-wise, we're so different. I am just a little bit more locked up and with time, I think that's going to go," says Stewart. "I don't think it's possible to change who you are.
For Hedlund, the book was "something special and changed the way I was writing. Most of the time, I was alone, working in different countries. I had so much downtime and I was writing more and more. The notepad seemed to be Kerouac's friend."
His Dean dumps his pregnant wife. He's a lost man, easily bored, with few boundaries. How did Hedlund get into character? "I was able to take drives alone. There's a lot of obstacles you overcome along the way and wonderful people you meet along the way. You have to be open and accepting and it really created conversations."
Hedlund and Stewart's characters have loosely, effortlessly passionate love scenes in the film. "None of them were events. Professionally, from an actor's standpoint, you do what you have to do. I think it's about feeling safe with who you're with and that you're both there for the right reasons," says Stewart. "The only way to do Mary Lou justice was to feel free and natural doing it. It was always easy. It was done so quickly."
For the actress, the film was a nice break from her blockbuster Twilight series."I have been pretty lucky. I've gotten to switch things up. Five years of one thing ... it would asinine," says Stewart.And the most important question of the day: why is her finger in a splint? She broke it, shrugs Stewart.
Granted, she did her interviews with costar Garrett Hedlund and director Walter Salles. But she put herself out there and for that, I respect her.
The film is based on Jack Kerouac's seminal American novel. Hedlund plays Dean, who has what could be generously described a very unconventional relationship with his teen bride, Mary Lou (Stewart).
Plus,Twihards, she's just a cool chick who's smart and well-read, with On the Road being a favorite. "I was it a freshman when I read it. I was projecting to the future a little bit. Is that what's on its way? It was about knowing that I wasn't there yet. I hadn't realized what my ambitions were. It made me less insecure and a little bit more hungry."
She's not kidding."I would have done anything on the movie. I would have been any crew member. I would have followed the crew in the car as a fan just to be around it," said Stewart. "Getting to know the woman behind the character -- she's not the main character and you do wonder what kind of person would live like that?"
"Personality-wise, we're so different. I am just a little bit more locked up and with time, I think that's going to go," says Stewart. "I don't think it's possible to change who you are.
For Hedlund, the book was "something special and changed the way I was writing. Most of the time, I was alone, working in different countries. I had so much downtime and I was writing more and more. The notepad seemed to be Kerouac's friend."
His Dean dumps his pregnant wife. He's a lost man, easily bored, with few boundaries. How did Hedlund get into character? "I was able to take drives alone. There's a lot of obstacles you overcome along the way and wonderful people you meet along the way. You have to be open and accepting and it really created conversations."
Hedlund and Stewart's characters have loosely, effortlessly passionate love scenes in the film. "None of them were events. Professionally, from an actor's standpoint, you do what you have to do. I think it's about feeling safe with who you're with and that you're both there for the right reasons," says Stewart. "The only way to do Mary Lou justice was to feel free and natural doing it. It was always easy. It was done so quickly."
For the actress, the film was a nice break from her blockbuster Twilight series.
"I have been pretty lucky. I've gotten to switch things up. Five years of one thing ... it would asinine," says Stewart.
And the most important question of the day: why is her finger in a splint? She broke it, shrugs Stewart.
instyle:
On the Road star Kristen Stewart (in a Balenciaga jacket) loved getting into her beatnik generation character, thanks to some special help from costume designer Danny Glicker. "He is so caring and specific about details that literally even if you didn’t see something you’re wearing underneath, like an undergarment or something, he would ask, 'Do you feel pretty?'" she said. "I’ve never worked more closely with a costume designer."movieline:
Kristen Stewart fans may have been disappointed that the Twilight superstar did not make an appearance at last week's MTV Video Music Awards, but crowds here in Toronto had the chance to see the actress on the red carpet for the North American premiere of Walter Salles' On The Road along with fellow cast members Garrett Hedlund, Kirsten Dunst, Amy Adams and Sam Riley. Stewart spoke with ML about the part she had actually landed before she filmed her first Twilight installment. Stewart shared her thoughts on the steamy relationship between her character Marylou and Hedlund's Dean Moriarty - a life-long relationship that was rife with affairs, drugs and a wild ride on the road.
"They really are 'simpatico.' It was a tumultuous relationship. And it's hard to love like that, but they were so in love with each other and you don't know this from reading the book, but they stayed lovers until the end of his life," Stewart said during a conversation with ML at a Toronto hotel over the weekend.
Stewart first read On The Road as a high school freshman. A short time afterward, she was approached by director Walter Salles who had been told to consider Stewart for the part of Marylou after fellow filmmakers saw her in Sean Penn's Into The Wild and suggested that he consider the young actress. The project took a number of years before the actual shoot commenced and in the meantime, Stewart began doing the enormously popular Twilight series, propelling her fame into the stratosphere.
"I got the [On The Road] job on the spot and I drove away vibrating," Stewart said.
In the film version of the book written by Jack Kerouac, Stewart plays the unconventional free-spirit Marylou, the former wife and still frequent lover of Dean Moriarty, a fast-talking charismatic with an insatiable libido. Dean and best friend Sal (Sam Riley), a young writer whose life is shaken after Dean's arrival take to the road. Marylou frequently accompanies Sal and Dean's travels across the country in adventures fueled by sex, drugs and the pursuit of the "It" - a quest for understanding and personal fulfillment.
"He kind of raised her and she always had a place in his heart, even though there were a lot of spots in that heart, but she was definitely one in the center and the same goes the other way around," Stewart said of Marylou and Dean, the On The Road names of the real-life individuals described by Kerouac. "They both helped each other grow up."
One of the seminal works of literature of post-war America, On The Road took decades to be made into a film, even after Francis Ford Coppola acquired the filmmaking rights to the story. Stewart said she believes that society may have not been ready to see On The Road in theaters in the immediate years after the book was published, acknowledging that the film, which has not yet been rated, is racy.
"I think it's a good time to see this story visually because we are not shocked by some of the things that we were so shocked by before and it would have veiled it," said Stewart. "It would have been so shocking seeing people doing drugs and having sex that you wouldn't have seen the spirit of [On the Road]. You wouldn't have seen the message behind it. Maybe it would have been good because it would have forced people to look, but maybe they weren't able to do it then."
She also expressed the need for young people to have dreams and a zest for life, similarly to the characters in the film, even if those dreams are not fully comprehended.
"At that stage of your life there's so much ahead of you, at least it feels that way. At that age you need to have a faith and feelings you can't articulate yet because at some point you need to hold onto them and you'll find the words to describe them."
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Before Twilight and even before Kristen Stewart was first approached to be in On The Road by Brazilian-born director Walter Salles, the young actress read the Jack Kerouac novel for school. She told Movieline that she picked up the book because it was an assignment given, but her experience with the now American classic evolved. "I found the book fun," she said. But after reading and studying it more, it became much more compelling and taught her personal life lessons about growing up, making choices and dealing with inhibitions. She also emphasized that while she played the comparatively wild Marylou, she does not judge her uninhibited character.
"I learned through the book that you really have a choice about who you surround yourself with. [As a young adult] you realize you can choose who you're surrounding yourself with," Stewart told ML in Toronto where On The Road debuted over the weekend. "Up until that point you're really circumstantially with your family or whatever but at some point you can 'choose' your family.
"I have a great family by the way, but you need to find people who can pull something out from you that might be otherwise unseen. And when I read the book, I thought, 'Gosh I need to find people like that.' I'm definitely not the Marylou type. But as I continued reading it as I got older, the weight of it started to mean something more."
In the film version of the book, Stewart plays Marylou who was first married to, then divorced from, and ultimately a lifelong companion/lover/fellow free spirit to Dean Moriarty. The story centers on Dean (based in real life on Neal Cassady) who meets up with close friend Sal (writer Jack Kerouac's own stand-in) as the two travel across the U.S. as well as into Canada and Mexico. Like Dean, Marylou is anything but monogamous and she dabbles in pleasures that are alien to the wholesome fun of the prevailing culture of the conservative 1950s.
Stewart and the rest of the cast, including Garrett Hedlund (Dean), Sam Riley (Sal) and Kristen Dunst (Camille), met and spoke with relatives of the real-life characters they played in addition to other research before embarking on On The Road. Stewart said that she didn't want to simply approach Marylou as a rebellious young woman with loose morals, but explained that while she gained understanding of her, she remained, to some degree at least, an enigmatic figure.
"To play a part like Marylou, she's very vivid and colorful but also on the periphery," said Stewart. "You don't know her heart and head and the how and why she does what she does. By the time that it came to film, I didn't want to play her simply as this character that is just a wild and sexy girl. With the research we were able to do, applying the whys and getting to know the people behind the characters makes you think about the book differently."
Stewart continued, "It's not easy to live a life like that and that's what makes these people remarkable. I did always wonder how she could take it. How deep is that well? how much can you have taken from you? What I found about her is, that uniquely to her — and not to the time she lived in — was her capacity to see through people's flaws and see past them, which was unbelievable. She was just such a wonderful woman. She was infectious. And, no, I did not judge her."
Kristen Stewart appeared at some moments very pensive and at other moments playful in describing her role and unusually long attachment to On The Road. The period coincided with being catapulted to the height of fame through the Twilight franchise, which morphed into zealous attention from so-called Twi-hards who lived vicariously through her and her equally lauded co-star and real-life boyfriend, Robert Pattinson. And as the world now well knows, that relationship hit the skids in the glare of legions of fans through an onslaught of media spectacle.
Just weeks after the tidal wave of attention, Stewart bravely faced media for On The Road, though handlers were clear before assigning interview time — the subject needed to remain "on topic." Still, Stewart talked about herself personally, saying that the experience she had with On The Road had provided her some life lessons both professionally as an actor and also as an individual.
"If this has taught me anything, it's just that if you stop thinking and just breathe through it, you're such a better actor. You just have to do the work initially and then trust that you've already done that work and not get too analytical. You have to trust that you've already completed that effort," she said.
And beyond the work, Stewart said she now has more confidence to say what she thinks with less fear than in her earlier years.
"It's opened me in a way that's probably more appropriate to my age. I think I'm a bit less inhibited, and not thinking too much before speaking. It's not about being shameful, I'm just a bit more unabashedly myself because of this thing, and it probably started at age 15. I can be around people and say what I think without fear."
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