Fresh off Kristen Stewart‘s nomination for portraying Princess Diana in Spencer and Imogen Poots‘ starring in the Oscar-worthy The Father, the pair are set to keep those Academy vibes rolling along with a prestige memoir adaptation. This time, Stewart will be behind the camera, making her feature film directorial debut and co-writing the screenplay for The Chronology of Water with Andy Mingo.
Based off Lidia Yuknavitch’s creative non-fiction work of the same name, the movie will feature Poots as a woman overcoming familial sexual abuse and violence, discovering her own sexual identity alongside her identity as an artist. Stewart joked(?) in May that if she didn’t get to make the long-gestating film this year, she’d “die.”
“Lidia’s memoir honors corporeal experience, radically,” Stewart told Deadline. “To make that experience physical feels vital to me and what this impulse means … is that it absolutely must be a film. This project has been cooking for five years with the help of Scott Free, whom I could not be more privileged to have as partners and friends. Imogen Poots will carry this movie and the staggering weight of Lidia’s life. She can hold it. I am beyond lucky to have her.”
It’s a bold, audacious project from a singular writer. Yuknavitch is a staple of the Oregon writing scene and wrote the memoir partially because of a good-natured ribbing from Chuck Palahniuk who joked about not seeing much value in the form (but who proclaimed he’d read any memoir she wrote). Stewart is an exciting voice for this, and it’s positioned perfectly to shoot, lounge around Cannes, and then bound onto screens next fall. There’s no official timeline for it, but don’t be too surprised if that’s how it goes down.
(via Deadline)