News Roundup: Kristen Stewart Interviews for ‘On the Road’ at TIFF

Kristen has been very busy at TIFF this weekend promoting On the Road. Here are some additional interviews!

Ottawa Citizen

They were young and wild and free, and they took to the road in a whirlwind of talk and sex and good times. They were looking for a new way of life, and they inspired a generation of young people to look along with them.

And those are just the actors. Kristen Stewart, the 22 year old star who has been hounded into what looks like exhaustion by the tabloid press, emerged in public this week for the first time in two months. The occasion was the North American premiere of On the Road, Walter Selles’s jazzy interpretation of the Jack Kerouac book about a group of young people driving down the existential highways of 1950s America.

Stewart plays Marylou, a freespirited teenager who marries the animating spirit of the long and jazzy road trip – a charismatic excon named Dean Moriarty and played by rising Garrett Hedlund – for a life of drugs and open sexuality and a search for a new kind of life. The book became the defining document of the so-called Beat Generation of young hipsters in postwar America.

“As a sensitive girl of this time who is maybe a bit more conventional – ha ha – I kind of was curious about how you could have the strength to do the things she did,” Stewart said the day after On the Road had its public premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. “And it’s not that at all. It takes a lot of strength to be super-vulnerable. She was so so so open to the world.”

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Source via KstewartNews

Associated Press

The Toronto premiere of “On the Road” on Thursday was Stewart’s first public appearance since, and she was greeted by hundreds of “Twilight” fans who came out to show support for the 22-year-old actress.

“You expect a lot of people at a ‘Twilight’ premiere, but showing up at an ‘On the Road’ Toronto film festival screening and seeing that amount of people is absolutely, disarmingly amazing,” Stewart said. “It felt pretty cool.”

“On the Road” has been on Hollywood’s to-do list for decades, but previous attempts to adapt it for film always fell through.

Salles (”Central Station,” ‘’The Motorcycle Diaries”) spent years developing the film, which stars Hedlund as beat generation free spirit Dean Moriarty, inspired by Kerouac’s friend Neal Cassady, and Sam Riley as the author’s alter-ego, Sal Paradise.

Stewart co-stars as Dean’s first wife, Marylou, who joins him and Sal on some of their crazed cross-country adventures.

The novel was a consciousness-raising experience for Stewart when she first read it as a high school freshman.

“Marylou and Dean are the type of people that I was inspired by. Initially, at 15 reading the book, going, God, these are the sort of people I’ve got to find. The mad ones,” Stewart said. “And I am so not one of them, but maybe I could be. …

“The great thing about ‘On the Road’ is that it really can crack open your shell, and I definitely realized things about myself that I didn’t realize before. That I can let my face hang out and not be too aware of it, and stop questioning myself and not be afraid of strangers, and stop being judgmental.”

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Source via Kstewartnews

The Toronto Star

It comes as a shock to see Kristen Stewart curled up in a chair in a Toronto hotel room, looking considerably thinner and less poised than she did at the Cannes Film Festival in May.

The same film is being discussed: On the Road, the Walter Salles adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s totemic 1957 Beat Generation novel, which is receiving its North American premiere at TIFF before a year-end release.

The tense body language of Stewart, 22, says all that needs to be said about how difficult the past four months have been for her, during which she confessed to an affair that led to a breakup with Robert Pattinson, her boyfriend and Twilight franchise co-star.

It would be a mistake, though, to read too much into tabloid headlines. Stewart looked as glamorous on Friday’s Ryerson Theatre red carpet as she did on the scarlet walk outside the Palais des Festivals in Cannes.

And the intense experience of making On the Road, which took years of planning and included “boot camp” readings of Beat writings, couldn’t help but have a transforming effect on all involved. That’s certainly the case for Stewart, and also with co-star Garrett Hedlund, who joined her for an interview with the Star.

“To say that this movie opened me up in a way, sounds really obvious, but it f–king did!” says Stewart, who first read Kerouac’s classic at age 15.

“I’m not just saying this. The book has had such a major effect on who I wanted to be at age 15, which is a pretty important and formidable time.”

Adds Hedlund: “How do you express the fire in which (Kerouac) expressed it? That’s the obstacle and that’s really what you’re thinking about the whole time. But at the end of the day, I feel I’ve become a much stronger person. The thoughts that I had to think, the feelings I’ve felt . . . made me much stronger.”

On the Road sets Stewart as enigmatic teen dynamo Marylou, the woman who rode with and made love to both the wild Dean Moriarty, played by Hedlund, and the cerebral Sal Paradise, played by Sam Riley.

To Stewart’s thinking, the mythmaking mileage of Moriarty and Paradise — pseudonyms for real-life pals Neal Cassady and Kerouac — might never have happened if it weren’t for Marylou, who is based on Cassady’s first wife, LuAnne Henderson, 15 years old when they married.

“It was this bridge,” Stewart says of Marylou/LuAnne’s relationships, both amorous and amigo, with Dean/Neal and Sal/Jack.

“I think that there definitely was a commonality that they could have because of her. They may have found it through something else if she didn’t exist, but there was a trust that they had just because they shared her.”

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Source via KstewartNews

Now Torronto

Stewart’s come to TIFF to launch On The Road, an adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s classic Beat novel in which she plays Marylou, the sexually adventurous child bride of the charismatic Dean Moriarty. (Yes, there are nude scenes. No, they aren’t explicit.) On the press day, Stewart is paired with Garrett Hedlund, who plays Moriarty. And the two of them were their most animated when they were discussing the freewheeling, improvisational style director Walter Salles encouraged on the shoot.

“There are probably, like, 600 movies within the film that we shot,” Stewart says. “I think the only way to have done this, and be really true to how the book feels, is to not be so connected to [memorizing] lines. I mean, certain things just find their way into your heart, and you’re like, ‘I need to say that. I love that fucking line.’ And that’s fine, as long as you’ve opened yourself up to letting it fall out, rather than trying to do something a certain way.”

The challenge for the actors was keeping themselves in that headspace, which Stewart says she had trouble with.

“I tortured myself in the most amazing, wonderful way for four weeks,” she says, “and then as soon as the four weeks were done it was like, ‘You need to stop thinking, because if you don’t, you’re gonna regret this entire experience. You’re gonna look back and say: I fucked up. I thought too much.’”

Head HERE to read the entire interview.