While Kristen Stewart may display a take-it-or-leave-it attitude when discussing her down in the dumps pouting Bella in the Twilight series, inhabiting rebel girl rocker Joan Jett for the movie The Runaways is an entirely different matter. Also up for discussion is the fame game, all those annoying blogger fans that go along with it and recollections about feigning rock star moves on stage.
Q: What’s the big difference between being Bella and Joan Jett?
KRISTEN STEWART: Bella’s effect on the world obviously wasn’t as great as Joan’s. Obviously! And I never got to meet Bella.
Q: Hey, you know what I mean.
KS: Yeah, totally. It’s completely different!
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Q: But people are wild about seeing you as both of them.
KS: Right. So that’s awesome for them, and I love to make cool movies for them. But it becomes personal, and it’s my responsibility to not destroy like what people are going to take from the most important part of my friend’s life. And Joan has become really a big part it.
She’s awesome, and I really love her. And if we hadn’t told the story right, people wouldn’t know who The Runaways are. People don’t know The Runaways in our generation. So because they’re going to see them through us, it’s a much different experience than making an original, fictional story.
Kristen Stewart (R.) in The Runaways
Q: Do you feel you’re like Jett in any way?
KS: Yeah, I guess. We have been professionals from a young age, which is hard. But her in such a different way, when she was younger. The biggest adversity I face is, like, bloggers! But she had people throwing bottles in her face and telling them, “Sit down you ugly loud mouth!”
But to see how assured she is now and to know that she wasn’t always like that, it actually took a lot. And that what she has now is a really, really thick and developed armor. And you see that happen in the movie. Hopefully! Or at least that’s what I felt I wanted to do.
It’s like a hardening, but she’s very in tune with herself. And I think she’s really cool, she’s really honest. It’s a self-preservation sort of thing, and she’s really sort of a survivor. And at the same time, she demands to live her life the way that she’d like to. She’s just a very smart and inspiring person.
Q: Do the bloggers mess with your mind?
KS: Hearsay is sometimes really awesome, but it’s sometimes very destructive. You hate rumors, whether they’re really huge or really small, I don’t care.
Q: Have you ever played before, or did you go in cold?
KS: I played guitar.
Q: Joan has a very specific way of moving on stage. How did you go about getting into her style?
KS: We all had like two weeks where we had band practice, where all the girls came in. I mean, they played the song that we recorded. I think there were like five or six that we did, that we had to have down. They played them over a speaker, but then we were actually trying to like, play as a band to it.
It’s exhausting, especially with the guitar, and you don’t know it. It’s like, “Oh my god.” So I would be exhausted at the end of a rehearsal. I’d be like, “My shoulders are killing me!” But it was fun.
Q: The sexuality of this movie is very important. Was it hard to recreate the tone of that sexuality unique to that period back then?
KS: Sure, because we’re so sort of, nowadays like…younger kids! I mean, I guess I wouldn’t know this for sure, but there was a sexual revolution going on, and that’s had an effect on us now. So people feel much more comfortable at a younger age doing stuff like that.
But these girls, they really were the ones to rebel first. It wasn’t normal for girls to be sexually aggressive in any way. So I think it would be different, for instance in a movie like Thirteen, when they kiss and they’re not in love, but they’re friends. It is a completely different thing.
But it was always pretty subjective, too. You don’t know what they’re doing, they’re just sort of together. It was never written in the script, like: hardcore sex scene. It was like, well, Dakota is 15. So we can’t do the hardcore sex scene.
