Interview

Stewart grew up in Los Angeles in a Hollywood family of sorts—her mother is a script supervisor, and her father is a stage manager—and as a kid announced her interest in working in front of the camera. Her second film, David Fincher’s 2002 thriller, Panic Room, in which she played Jodie Foster’s too-quick, too-wise, too-over-it daughter, proved an early indicator of her ability to play young, smart, but not precocious. Her performance in more left-of-center projects such as Sean Penn’s Into the Wild (2007) and this year’s Adventureland has only reinforced that notion. But if there’s a thread that runs through her relatively small body of work, it’s one that’s closely connected to the idea that you don’t have to be old to have soul. With Stewart, you don’t get 19-going-on-35. What you do get is a visceral window into what it means to be young and struggling to make sense of your own life and the world around you—and all the alternating waves of darkness and confusion and brightness and possibility that come with that. In many ways, it’s the unwritten nature of Stewart’s own story now, with its surreal subplots and recent twists and turns, that makes her compelling to watch. It’s true that she might very well be a rebel anodyne to many of her bleached and sprayed-on contemporaries. Or, like Bella Swan, she might just be someone who comes from somewhere, found her way into something exceptional, and is on her way to someplace else. Either way, she’s got a solid arc.

In celebration of Interview’s 40th anniversary, we askedactor, director, writer, and photographer Dennis Hopper—whose connection to the magazine reaches across all fourdecades—to handle the interviewing duties for this cover story. He graciously obliged. He spoke to Stewart, who was shooting Eclipse in Vancouver, from the set of his cable series, Crash, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

DENNIS HOPPER: Before we start, I have a little six-year-old daughter here who’s going crazy right now because you’re on the phone. Could I just put her on for a second to say hello?

KRISTEN STEWART: Yeah, sure.

HOPPER: Okay, her name is Galen. [hands phone]

GALEN HOPPER: Hi!

STEWART: Hi! How are you?

GALEN: Good.

STEWART: It’s really nice to meet you, Galen. [pause] Hello?

GALEN: Hi!

HOPPER: [takes phone] She’s so excited.

STEWART: Wow, that made me so nervous!

HOPPER: It made you nervous?

STEWART: Yeah. I’m just sort of intimidated by kids. I didn’t know what to say.

HOPPER: Well, thank you for doing that. So how are you doing?

STEWART: I’m pretty good. I’m not very good at interviews, but this is a trip. Why in god’s name did you want to do this? You have no idea how cool this is for me.

HOPPER: Well, you’re a really good actress. And my daughter is your biggest fan, so I thought, What the hell? [laughs] I usually don’t do this, either. But you must be going through a lot right now, the way Twilight is hitting. You must have no peace at all.

STEWART: The sad thing is that I feel so boring because Twilight is literally how every conversation I have these days begins—whether it’s someone I’m meeting for the first time or someone I just haven’t seen in a while. The first thing I want to say to them is, “It’s insane! And, as a person, I can’t do anything!” But then I think to myself, God damn it, shut the fuck up.