Kristen Stewart on growing up, fear, losing inhibitions

KRISTEN in “On the Road,” a fitting move for her post-“Twilight” career.

LOS ANGELES—“I have been asked a lot about growing up lately,” Kristen Stewart said in a recent press conference, in reply to a question about what she had learned about herself, especially this year which saw her go through a turbulent few months.

“One solid thing I can say is that fear is not necessarily a bad thing,” declared Kristen, clad in a Stella McCartney dress and sporting Christian Louboutin shoes. “It’s something that, as you get older, you can get a bit more comfortable with. Fear is a very motivating thing in life. You should not be crippled by it—use it instead.”

Kristen said that with the release this week of “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn–Part 2,” the media interviews were making her feel like she was “graduating from high school.” The actress remarked, “Everyone’s asking, ‘What have you learned at the end of this ‘Twilight’ experience? What did ‘Twilight’ do to you?’ You pick up, drop off so many different inhibitions and you’re never going to have none. Fear is a good thing.”

Back stories

Is this really the end of the “Twilight” series? How about prequels and sequels? “We’ve spoken to Stephenie (Meyer) about it since the beginning,” came Kristen’s quick reply. “Are there going to be more books? I think Stephenie has decided that Edward and Bella are allowed to be happy forever now. We’ve gotten them to a really good place. I think we should leave them alone.”

Then Kristen offered a tantalizing prospect to “Twilight” fans: “There are so many back stories that haven’t been explored. There’s the wolf pack …”

On the final movie itself, which costars Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner, of course, she had this to say: “Bill (Condon, director) really does twist the knife at the end of this one for anybody who doesn’t really want to say goodbye yet. I still feel like I don’t have to say goodbye, though. That’s the beauty of making movies. They’re not going anywhere.”

Last shooting day

ROBERT Pattinson and Kristen Stewart say goodbye to the “Twilight” era.

She added: “There have been so many times when everybody thinks that the moment’s going to hit them. There are various degrees of letting something go. I don’t know if it’s more of me as a fan of the series, from an outsider’s perspective. It’s strange that we’re not going to sit here and talk about it directly anymore. It’s strange that we’re not going to be all together anymore but we all still have it. It’s not going anywhere.”

Kristen recounted the last shooting day: “[There were] two different times when we thought that we had finished. We wrapped on the majority of the production with the wedding scene and the entire cast was there. It was one of those moments that didn’t hit. It was almost like we all knew that we weren’t done yet.

“We had to go and do a little bit of additional footage for the honeymoon in St. Thomas. The sun was coming up. We had to stop shooting. We must have been finished hours before but we just kept going. It was weird. Nobody was tired at the end of the day. Typically, after a long day in the ocean, standing on apple boxes, everyone would be exhausted but there was this serious lightness that was unlike anything I’d felt.”

She continued to share her thoughts on the end of her “Twilight” era. What we’ve always liked about her is that she weighs the words that come out of her mouth. She does not just blurt out any empty statements. “At the end of a movie, whether it was like five weeks or five months, nobody really wants to let it go,” she pointed out.

“We got to live in this world for so long that it was like, suddenly this weight was lifted. There are so many beloved moments that weigh on you for years. The fact that it was all done—it was strange to actually miss the worry, to suddenly go, ‘Whoa, I don’t have this worry anymore.’ That’s when the pain gets you. You’re suddenly like … I’ve really desperately wanted someone to take it off my hands for so long. Suddenly, I want it back.”

Asked about Jodie Foster, whom she announced as the next recipient of the Golden Globes’ Cecil B. DeMille Award, Kristen said of the actress who played her mom in David Fincher’s “Panic Room”: “[At my age at the time] she was the perfect example to be around. This may not be the most remarkable thing about her. It’s always shocking for people to see—which is strange—that when she’s doing a movie, she’s like a hired hand. She completely understands that it takes a lot of people to make a movie. There’s no hierarchy with her. It’s a group effort. Most actors take themselves incredibly seriously. She’s just incredibly normal. I’ve always really identified with that. I have that mentality, possibly partly due to her.”

When a reporter touted the usual question about what special power she would like to have, Kristen graciously obliged with, “I would like to be able to teleport. I’d love to be able to jump. And that would be different a few years ago.” In her calm demeanor, she dished this year’s understatement: “I might be really obvious and say that I would want to fly but that would draw a little bit too much attention nowadays—if I started flying now.”

On her other film, Walter Salles’ adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s iconic novel that defined the Beat Generation, Kristen said, “I read ‘On the Road’ for the first time when I was a freshman in high school. One thing that’s said about the book is that it really does change as you get older. If you pick it up again and read it, you do start realizing that you can choose the people that you surround yourself with. You start to feel the choice in your life. You start to feel that you can actually reach out and grab something. Even if you don’t know what it is, there’s just that itching beneath the surface.”

In a fitting move for her post-“Twilight” career, Kristen boldly plunges into her role as Marylou and appears in a threesome bed scene with Garrett Hedlund and Sam Riley. “When I read the book, I was so taken by how the characters were with each other,” she stressed. “I wanted to find people who pushed me like that. I wanted to move. I’m seriously opposed to anything that stays too stagnant. I do really appreciate things being fluid and there’s nothing more fluid than that book. It runs like water. I wanted to chase after it. It’s a pretty universal feeling, too.

How to escape

“A lot of people would say that I was fairly young to read that book. Between 15 and 25 is a big gap but it’s a period so completely full of desire. It was like okay for them to explore that and it was fun.”

At the AFI Fest gala screening party of “On the Road,” Kristen, fetching in an all-black outfit (she quickly changed from her red-carpet Balenciaga attire), surprised us with her answer on what challenged her the most in the movie. She said it was the dance scene with Garrett—a wild, uninhibited one to percussive rhythm. Sitting nearby at the party was Robert.

In the press con, Kristen offered this reply about how she escapes from it all: “I really love my car. I’m from LA so any time I can get behind the wheel, I feel good.” On the road. Of course.

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