NYFF Report: Kristen Stewart on Her New Movie ‘Personal Shopper’ and ‘Some of the Sexiest Stuff I’ve Done Onscreen’
Kristen Stewart plays a personal shopper in Olivier Assayas’s new movie, Personal Shopper, a gofer tasked with picking out — and picking up — designer clothes and jewelry for a French celebrity. It’s not a position Stewart has sought to fill in her own entourage, although she does have someone who helps her with her distinctive style. “I have a stylist — she’s rad and really talented,” the actress told the audience at a press conference following the film’s New York Film Festival screening on Thursday. “We borrow stuff, say thanks, and give it back.” In the film, her character, Maureen, carts around Cartier and other high-end products, but Stewart declines to specify which labels populate her own closet. “Various companies,” she says simply.
Stewart and Assayas were more forthcoming when describing their second collaboration after the acclaimed 2014 drama Clouds of Sils Maria, which earned the actress a César Award (the French equivalent of an Oscar) for Best Supporting Actress and her director’s eternal admiration. Here are some highlights from their conversation with the NYFF press corps.
Stewart believes in ghosts … kind of
When she’s not serving as a personal shopper, Maureen is also a part-time medium, spending nights at the French estate her recently deceased brother owned hoping to pick up a trace of his spirit. One dark and chilly night, she does come face-to-face with something, although it may not be related to her beloved sibling. Both Stewart and Assayas confess to feeling that paranormal activity isn’t outside the realm of possibility. “There’s so much we don’t see that we know to be true,” Stewart said. “It’s a self-protective reduction to say, ‘Do you believe in ghosts or not?’ I don’t know what the f*** energy is, but there’s something that doesn’t go away. Whether I’m making that up, or I’m being left with some residual debris, I feel people f***ing intrinsically. I think [we] leave shadows.” Assayas chimed in to connect belief in the paranormal with the process of mourning. “Mourning is about having some dialogue with the deceased person, and ‘ghost’ is just a code word for that,” he said. “‘Paranormal’ is a normal way to describe what’s happening in our thoughts.”
That said, don’t call Personal Shopper a ghost story
Since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, Personal Shopper has been described as Assayas’s version of a ghost story. But it’s a label he’s not necessarily comfortable with. “Like all my films, this one is a collage,” he said. “It’s a genre movie, but I’m trying to make films that are outside the box in a certain way.” At the same time, he does acknowledge that Personal Shopper grew out of his desire to fully pursue some of the paranormal elements that were part of Clouds of Sils Maria. “Clouds was a kind of a ghost story, and because I got away with it there, I tried to go one step further with this film.”
Related: Cannes Report: Kristen Stewart’s Spiky, Scary ‘Personal Shopper’ Gets Booed — and Praised
Getting sexty
Like any young person today, Maureen moves through the world with her iPhone more or less welded to her hand. It’s one of her primary modes of communication; in fact, there’s an entire extended sequence in Personal Shopper in which Stewart’s only dialogue is relayed via text message to an unknown sender, who may be the ghost she believes is following her. “Maureen wants to be entirely invisible, but at the same time, really seen,” Stewart says of her character’s addiction to her smartphone. “I don’t have any social media things that I engage with, but at the same time, I have this weird preoccupation with people [online] that’s distracting. We kind of all stalk each other; I stalk people, and I get stalked. Even when you’re doing it totally alone, it gives you this false impression that you’re connecting. In this movie, some of the sexiest stuff I’ve [ever] done onscreen, I do alone.”
Assayas and Stewart can talk without speaking
Although Personal Shopper is only their second movie together, Assayas says that he and his star have their own (nonverbal) language. “We understand the complexity of what we’re doing,” he said. “What’s extraordinary with Kristen is that she understands the most intricate complexities of filmmaking. She brings such an incredible pace and rhythm to every scene. There were a lot of scenes that were shorter in my original screenplay, but within the shot, Kristen would emphasize things in the character and story that resonated with her. Sometimes I’d turn to my continuity person and ask how long a shot was, and she’d say, ‘Three minutes.’ I wouldn’t even realize it, because I wasn’t bored for one second! The pacing of the film is a combination of Kristen’s work and mine.”
Personal Shopper started from nothing
Many of Assayas’s most recent films have grown out of periods or specific subjects that he has researched. In the case of Personal Shopper, the script was simply born out of his sitting down and staring at a blank page. “I wanted to start from zero and see what I came up,” he said. “And the character that came up was Maureen, or some primitive version of her.” That development process was one of the things that captured Stewart’s imagination about the role. “It’s interesting that nothingness was the start of it,” she told her director. “You can’t always take credit for something that comes through you. This is the first time you’ve approached something like that, and this film is what happens.”
