Kristen Stewart and the Movie Actor’s Dilemma

Kristin Stewart’s recent comments about the film “Clouds of Sils Maria” touch on the state of the industry—and of acting—over all.Photograph by Axelle / Bauer-Griffin / FilmMagic

Picasso expressed the sublime wish “to live like a poor person, but with lots of money.” Kristen Stewart, an artist in her own right, expressed a similar paradox in a fascinating interview with Scott Feinberg, of The Hollywood Reporter, in which she discusses the pleasure of performing in the French director Olivier Assayas’s film, “Clouds of Sils Maria,” which opens Friday:

“It’s two women sitting in a room basically talking about being women and movies and their lives and their perspectives,” she says, “and it never really cuts away from that. That would never be greenlit in this country, especially at the level that it was. [$6.6 million].”

The number in brackets was an editorial aside, and it plays like a stage whisper: if the movie is really just two women sitting and talking in a room, what were the six million dollars spent on? Since the other woman is Juliette Binoche (and a third woman, Chloë Grace Moretz, eventually makes a relatively brief appearance), there’s a hint that perhaps the movie is being made with stars working in conditions not too remote from those to which they’re accustomed. The same is true of the audience: that budget buys so-called production values—a manicured lighting scheme that’s achieved only with a large battery of equipment and a large crew to deploy it, which gives this movie of intimate confrontations the polish of a high-budget film and enables it to compete in the market with other high-budget films.

In effect, Stewart suggests that they’ve made an ultra-low-budget movie, but with (relatively speaking) lots of money. Among her noteworthy observations in Feinberg’s piece is her interpretation of the film itself, but what Stewart says about it reaches far beyond the confines of this movie and touches on the state of the industry—and of acting—over all:

In Stewart’s view, the film does the service of showing moviegoers how, in real life, actresses like the Binoche character (“who are interesting and good and strive to do cool stuff and do stuff that makes people think”)—the sort she clearly sees herself as—must coexist now, more than ever, alongside people like the Moretz character (“surface BS, put-together commercial/commodity-type actresses”).

Stewart captures, on the wing, a dichotomy that runs through the whole history of movies—but that often cut differently in the old days. Among classic movie stars, there were basically three types: thespians, showgirls (for men, hoofers), and pinups (men: beefcakes). For instance, Barbara Stanwyck was a Broadway star in serious dramas before going to Hollywood; Joan Crawford was a chorine; Lana Turner was discovered in a drugstore. Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis were actresses; Rita Hayworth and Audrey Hepburn were showgirls; Ava Gardner and Kim Novak were pinups—models chosen for movies because of their pretty faces. (Of course, the apotheosis of the pinup star is Marilyn Monroe.) There’s another category, child stars who grow up on-screen (Judy Garland, Elizabeth Taylor) and those who don’t (Shirley Temple).

In other words, some of the greatest performers in the history of movies were hired on the basis of “surface BS” and employed as “put-together commercial/commodity-type actresses.” For that matter, plenty of good movies were mistaken for “commercial/commodity-type” films at the time. Some of the movies in which actors “do stuff that makes people think” are populated by “surface BS, put-together commercial/commodity-type actresses,” whether it’s “Vertigo” or “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?” or “The Barefoot Contessa” or “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” or “Johnny Guitar.” (It’s worth noting the astoundingly condescending reviews that Crawford received for that last film at the time.)

Pointing this out isn’t meant in any way to contradict or correct Stewart. As one of the exemplary young performers in contemporary Hollywood (she shines even in such a narrow and inconsequential film as “Still Alice”), she experiences its paradoxes and conundrums with an exemplary force, and she expresses them trenchantly. But it’s useful to see those tensions in the light of the aesthetic history that they respond to.

In modern movies, theatrical technique has come to the fore, a shift that started in the postwar years, due largely to the success of Marlon Brando in “A Streetcar Named Desire” (a play turned into a movie by a director who was a master of stage productions). Of course, Brando didn’t need the Method, or any method; he had character. His explosive, wrenching performances in movies owed much more to his own emotional intuitions and inclinations—to his way of carrying himself when not acting, as seen in this clip—than to any training.

The conflicts that Stewart expresses in this interview arise from the conflicts and torments that are the very essence of movie-making. In theatre, the actor gives; in movies, something is taken from the actor—something which may not at all be what the actor is trying to give. The performer’s best intentions are beside the point; what comes through is what the camera takes—and what the director (if he or she is a strong one) looks for. The very idea of modern training in acting is to provide a sense of control and to give actors confidence that the technique they use to maintain control isn’t applied from without but supplied from within. It’s a high-pressure, high-stakes, anxiety-inducing, existentially terrifying profession—one in which each new image, which exalts the actor’s person and creates the actor’s persona, threatens to expose the actor to humiliation or ridicule. The desire to exert control is natural and normal, but doomed—not because of any failing on the actor’s part but because the relationship with the director, and with the camera, is the essence of what’s on-screen. The actor’s performance is largely the creation of others—even as the actor bears its physical and moral risk.

The spotlight is now all the more nerve-wracking: studio publicists no longer have the pull with journalists and officials to keep embarrassing stories out of the news; social media give people in the public eye ever new ways to screw up; and the Internet gives the screw-ups both an echo chamber and a permanent archive. But the even more nerve-wracking light is the one on the video camera—not the demand to fill the screen with one’s own emotion but to capture and to keep the camera’s love.

The best of movie acting is done in repose; the very test of movie acting is the ability to convey worlds while doing nothing. (Here’s Brando again, auditioning, in 1947, for a preliminary version of “Rebel Without a Cause”; he’s surprisingly ordinary when he’s acting but irresistible when he’s doing nothing.) Technique is a way of trying to hold the camera with something that doesn’t depend solely on the ineffable spark, but rather is increased by the actor’s devotion and exertion, intention and effort. The substance of a project—its apparent importance in the world, by dint of political significance or other social value—is another of way of protecting an actor from the power of the camera. As some Oscar winners show, ostensible social value is a sort of cinematic insurance policy, a way of eluding the problems of performance, charisma, and technique. If a movie is important, it hardly matters whether it (or the performances in it) are good.

Yet along with the infinite unresolved tensions between appearance and performance—between the camera’s eye and the actor’s mirror—there’s now emerging another category of acting and, for that matter, of movie-making: the up-from-nowhere category. This is the virtually-no-budget independent cinema, made by a generation of actors and filmmakers who work with friends and family, often literally at home, filming events close to their lives, and who prove the existential immediacy of actors’ connection with directors and with the camera by the nearly instant stardom that it has generated for such performers as Greta Gerwig, Lena Dunham, Amy Seimetz, Kate Lyn Sheil, Mark Duplass, Kentucker Audley, Alex Karpovsky, and Joe Swanberg, who, as a director, is the very engine of this new tradition.

With films made for sums that are, in Hollywood terms, trivial, this group and others established a new standard of quality, originality, and authenticity. It’s yet another challenge for a performer such as Stewart, who has more or less been carrying a big part of the industry on her back, through the strength of her art and character, since she was a teen-ager. This fracture in the business comes through in the sort of of the professionally produced yet artistically ambitious movie. The co-existence of the industry mainstream with independently financed off-Hollywood productions that achieve acclaim—and that, in turn, are squeezed from below by the success of ultra-low-budget filmmaking—is the issue of the time.