42-year old actress Chloë Sevigny (T&A), 26-year old actress Kristen Stewart (Breasts) & Kim Dickens in Lizzie (2018) [1]
At the climax of her new film, “Lizzie,” about the infamous suspected murderer Lizzie Borden, Chloë Sevigny strips naked and thrusts an ax into her stepmother’s skull.
Sevigny says that playing the scene in the nude helped drive home the idea that the murders, while utterly depraved, helped to liberate Lizzie: “At first, Lizzie can’t believe that she’s actually doing it. But then she’s also enjoying it, and it becomes this sexual, cathartic release.”
It’s not even close to Sevigny’s most provocative moment on-screen.
“Oh God, my poor mother,” jokes the 43-year-old husky-voiced actress of her boundary-pushing body of work. Sevigny, who made her acting debut as a hard-partying NYC teen in 1995’s “Kids,” was nominated for an Oscar for her performance in “Boys Don’t Cry,” as the big-hearted girlfriend of a transgender man, based on the story of real-life hate crime victim Brandon Teena.
But it was her role in the 2003 art film “The Brown Bunny” — in which she notoriously performed oral sex on director and co-star Vincent Gallo — that shocked audiences the most.
Sevigny says “the sex stuff” doesn’t bother her: She’s much more concerned about being involved with any project that glamorizes violence. “Lizzie” doesn’t, she contends. “Me and Kristen are naked, but no, it’s not glamorous,” she says. “We’re cowering and crying and crazy.”
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| chloessevigny (Nov 19 2016): #birthdaysuit * Filming for “Lizzie” took place in November and December 2016. Filming location: Savannah, Georgia. * |
Interview: Director Craig William Macneill Discusses His Experiences Working on ‘Lizzie’
Karen Peterson/Awards Circuit: How did you first get involved in “Lizzie?” Was the script already completed, or were you part of that development process?
Craig William Macneill: Yes, the script was completed before I came on board. My agents sent me the script and asked if I’d be interested in reading. The fact that Chloe was attached to play Lizzie is what intrigued me the most. I’m a huge fan of her work. I enjoyed the script and put together a look book which detailed the visual and tonal approach I would bring to the project. I then met with Naomi [producer, Naomi Despres], Bryce [writer, Bryce Kass], and Chloe. Shortly after that, we attached Liz [producer, Liz Destro], secured financing, and began refining a shooting draft of the script.
KP: Lizzie’s tale has been told on film and on the page many times before.
How much of this film is inspired by other works and theories, and how
much comes from your own artistic imagination?
CWM: Bryce did a great deal of research while he was drafting the screenplay. I think most of his inspiration came from the court transcripts and police reports. But at some point all the information leads to a void – August 4th, 1892 — the day of the murders. We’ll never know what happened in that house. Only our imagination can fill in the gaps.
KP: This film introduces some ideas that were taboo for the time period, including things like sexual assault and a lesbian relationship. Often these topics are used as excuses to exploit actresses and become salacious. You avoided going down that path, however. What were some ways you ensured that you could tell the story you wanted to tell while also remaining respectful of the women as characters and as actresses?
CWM: I made sure to keep an open dialog with Chloe, Kristen, and the producers when it came to the intimate and violent sequences. My goal was to make sure Chloe and Kristen were as comfortable as possible. The murder scenes were scripted to be in the nude so we decided to do the sex scene clothed – and not overly glamorize it. We shot that particular sequence handheld which gave the moment an energy and a rawness that helped ground the scene.
KP: In addition to playing Lizzie Borden, Chloe Sevigny also serves as a producer on the film. Can you describe your collaboration with her both as star and producer?
CWM: It was really great working with Chloe. Her enthusiasm was contagious and helped dictate the tone on set. She was extremely prepared and eager to explore and take chances both as an actress and producer. We’d usually bounce around a few ideas before each scene and tweak as we went along. It was thrilling to watch her elevate what was on page to the screen. I love her performance in the film.
Chloë Sevigny’s Lizzie Borden Biopic Isn’t The Ax Murderer Movie She Originally Imagined
The tale of Lizzie Borden has been axed to death, just like her father and stepmother. And yet, on Friday, another dramatization of the alleged killer’s cloistered 19th-century life premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.
“Lizzie” has been Chloë Sevigny’s passion project since 2010. And who is a better fit to play Borden than Sevigny, best known for dark roles and cool-girl eccentricities? But the movie underwent a circuitous route to the big screen ― one that wasn’t as serendipitous as the actress hoped.
Sevigny was first inspired to develop the film when an artist friend of hers ― Lily Ludlow, whom Sevigny described as “esoteric” and “witchy” ― dressed as Lizzie Borden for Halloween. Taken with the imagery of this Gilded Age commoner who suffered fainting spells and fantasized about escaping her stodgy parents, Sevigny did her research, delving into Borden’s past as a tried ― and acquitted ― ax murderer from Fall River, Massachusetts. Sevigny, along with screenwriter Bryce Kass, quickly mounted a film project, transforming it into a miniseries in order to get a greenlight from HBO, where she was nearing the end of her employment on the drama “Big Love.”
“So much has been said [about Borden]. But I think that we just really wanted to focus on how she went about finding [her freedom] and how important that was to her and what that meant to her,” Sevigny told me at Sundance. “Whether it was through the relationship with [her maid] or ultimately killing her parents for money ― because money equaled freedom then. It still does. I wanted it to be this rousing, smash-the-patriarchy piece, and then she gets everything she wants monetarily — the capitalist dream. She gets the house on the hill, and Bridget leaves her. Her sister leaves her. She ends up alone.”
Seven years later, the movie that premiered at Sundance was not what Sevigny conceptualized. According to her, HBO dawdled on the film’s production, and when the powers that be finally opted to move forward, they were scooped by Lifetime, which released “The Lizzie Borden Chronicles,” a TV movie starring Christina Ricci, in January 2014. As a result, HBO pulled the plug.
“You can’t imagine how heartbroken I was,” Sevigny said. “I was really like, I can’t go on. This is the end of days for me. It was an emotional roller coaster.”
Sevigny and Kass, who’d partnered with Tom Hanks’ production company, had to retrieve the rights to the script from HBO, after which Kass culled the four-hour miniseries into the feature film he and Sevigny first envisaged, which would convey an erotic relationship between Lizzie and her family’s Irish live-in maid, Bridget Sullivan, portrayed with shy sensitivity by Kristen Stewart. Sevigny and Kass quickly lined up producers. The first director who signed on, Pieter Van Hees, dropped out due to scheduling conflicts. Craig William Macneill, who made the 2015 thriller “The Boy,” replaced him, but Sevigny said he had his own ideas about how to frame Borden’s story.
Sevigny was hoping for “Black Swan” meets “Capote.” But on set and in the editing process, Macneill apparently trimmed and expunged scenes, including some of Sevigny’s punchier moments ― for example, “exclamation points” ending heated exchanges with Borden’s parents, played by Jamey Sheridan and Fiona Shaw. More crushingly, some of the development surrounding Lizzie and Bridget’s affair was left on the cutting-room floor. As we see it, their flirtations are sensual but clipped.
“It was very hard,” Sevigny said about learning those moments weren’t included in the film. “I was like, ‘If you have another scene with Kristen Stewart and you don’t put it in your movie, you’re stupid. What’s your problem?’ But almost every movie goes through that. Almost everything that was on the page was filmed, and a lot of it didn’t make it in the movie. And more stuff with me and Fiona Shaw. There was more to the relationships that made them more complicated, and also then informed why Lizzie [commits the murders]. Now it’s a little more vague than what Bryce and I intended originally to do.”
Asked whether she could elaborate on how the film’s tone and content changed, Sevigny said, “Without getting in trouble, probably not,” laughing and looking around to see if her publicist was in the room.
“I think Craig is very restrained,” she continued. “Craig has a lot of vision. I think he’s a great filmmaker. But I think maybe the movie could so easily go camp because she is also a camp figure. I think he was very frightened of pushing emotion in that direction, where it might turn into that. So he was really pulling the reins on a lot, performance-wise. […] What was so much harder with this film was I was a producer and this was my baby. I developed it from the get-go, and I had to relinquish control and power over to the other producers and the director. That was my first experience in that. Of course I’ve been in countless other movies where scenes all of a sudden disappear. You’re like, all right, well, that happens. But because I was so close to the material, it became harder for me to let go of stuff.”
“But we hired him,” she added, “and this was his vision and this was his interpretation of what we gave him.”
As it exists, “Lizzie” remains rather external ― it’s not as “inside her head” as Sevigny hoped. As much a romance as it is a psychodrama, the movie features more than a few shots of Lizzie’s backside as she glides through her yard and home. When asked whether she was surprised there weren’t more closeups of her face, which might better telegraph Lizzie’s internal emotions, Sevigny chuckled.
“You’re really pushing this,” she said. “I mean, have you been on my email chain? Uh-oh, I’m getting dirty looks [from my publicist]. Yes.”
It seems the film’s evolution surprised Macneill, too. He told Filmmaker magazine that the budget prevented “Lizzie” from shooting in New England, where Borden lived from 1860 until her death in 1927. “As a result, we were forced to mostly suggest the outside world rather than showing it,” he said. “Consequently, most of the film takes place inside the Borden home. As it turned out, finding a suitable interior was nearly as complicated as finding exterior locations, and each day without a locked location put an enormous strain on every department.”
For what it’s worth, the movie springs to life during the culminating murder sequence, in which Lizzie, fully nude so as to avoid incriminating bloodstains, slowly climbs the stairs, wielding the ax she’ll use to bludgeon her patronizing father and unloving stepmother. Exactly how much of Sevigny’s body would be exposed ― read: a lot of it ― was contractually negotiated via her agents and the movie’s producers. She also approved the footage after it was shot.
“I still feel really vulnerable, like I put myself out there,” she said. “I’m hoping it’s worth it.”
Indeed, the execution is dripping with carnal moxie. It’s the payoff we desire for someone trapped by her parents’ command, a woman who wasn’t even permitted to go into town unaccompanied.
“I love the whole murder sequence,” she said. “And even the stiller shots, just seeing the ax in the bin. I think there’s some real beautiful work that [Craig] did, and dare I say elegant? […] You almost want her to have this cathartic moment. It’s sexual.”
Q&A: Sevigny, Stewart on Lizzie Borden, directing and taste
A fateful trip to the house in Fall River, Massachusetts, convinced her to look at Borden’s life through a different, more empathetic lens, pulling back the curtain on the suffocating circumstances surrounding the infamous 1892 ax murders of her father and stepmother and what might have driven her to do it. Borden was tried and acquitted of the killings, but continues to be a source of intrigue today.
After years of false starts, “Lizzie,” a tense and beautifully rendered psychological thriller co-starring Kristen Stewart as Bridget Sullivan, the maid and a pivotal figure in Borden’s life, is finally making it to select theaters Friday.
Sevigny, 43, and Stewart, 28, it girls of different generations, spoke to The Associated Press about the shoot, why the nudity in it is “punk” and directing short films before features.
The following remarks have been edited for clarity and brevity.
AP: How did you decide to go after Kristen?
Sevigny: Bryce (Kass), the writer, said Kristen and I was like ‘Oh yeah. No one else.’ So then we went about trying to seduce her.
Stewart: I’m really easy. It was not difficult.
AP: Visiting the house helped you figure out the story?
Sevigny: It bore out our decision to tell the story this way. Not only were we interested in the love story, a tragic love story at that, and them both searching for freedom and finding each other, but also just the practicality that she (Bridget) was outside the house. There was no way she couldn’t have known what was going on.
AP: Kristen what did you find compelling about Bridget?
Stewart: I felt protective over her. She’s got truly no voice. I really liked the kind of lens that she provided us of Lizzie. The way she saw her was really sweet and kind of innocent but also pure.
AP: It shows women at that time of different classes.
Sevigny: They’re all Andrew (Borden’s) prisoners. Me and Abby and Emma and Bridget. We’re all prisoners in this household together with no options.
AP: Tell me about the decision to be fully exposed in this film.
Sevigny: The movie deserved it. That’s what the movie needed. I think it was even my decision. I wanted the movie to have that. And I think it’s kind of punk as a 43-year-old to be naked. I feel like we’re bombarded with these beauty ideals and I am trying to in my small way (with my Instagram) to say look at this woman, look at Anna Magnani, she’s a great beauty, and have girls see that and see more diversity and shapes and sizes and looks and know that these people are also appreciated for whatever they bring, not only their looks, but their talent.
AP: I saw on your Instagram that you two hung out at this bar, Original Pinkie Masters, during the shoot in Georgia.
Sevigny: That was I think the first gay bar in Savannah. And there’s an art school there so a lot of the art students and professors would be there. It was a nice generation gap. They had a great jukebox with all this amazing obscure music and it was just our local.
Stewart: It’s just a great bar.
Sevigny: Cool crowd. Nobody bothered her. They bothered me more than her.
Stewart: Which means it’s a REALLY cool bar.
Sevigny: It just means they’re older.
AP: Why did you both start out directing shorts before features?
Sevigny: I was frustrated as an actress, always giving myself over to someone else’s vision. Not that I didn’t always agree with their vision or wanted to be part of it or thought they were great filmmakers, but still you’re not in the editing room, it’s somebody else’s thing. I wanted to have my own thing and express my own ideas and visions and loves.
Stewart: Yeah same, I started so young, I’ve never felt more seen or expressed or like allowed to really be as when you’ve really told a story well, one that got inside you. I don’t draw a huge distinction between acting and directing. I think as an actor I love the indulgence, but I don’t want to say lack of control because I’m very controlling, I’m always in the director’s back pocket like, “How is this being seen?” I want to be able to fit into your frame perfectly. I want to know what it looks like.
Sevigny: I don’t. I become too self-aware.
Stewart: But I wanted to do a short before a feature because I had never done it before. Straight-up. And I love what shorts do for people’s willingness to do weird things. You’re not trying to entertain people, not that that’s something that I’m not into, I’m into that too, but it’s fun to do truly a free-verse poem.
Sevigny: More of an expression.
Stewart: It doesn’t have to be an hour and-a-half, it doesn’t have to be digestible. It just has to have a taste.
Sevigny: People are like why are you doing another short, why aren’t you doing a feature? And I have such reverence for feature filmmakers, I’m not prepared yet. I still am experimenting and learning.
AP: And as actors you both are often rebelling against the big business of Hollywood, consistently choosing interesting projects and directors to work with.
Sevigny: It’s called taste.
Stewart: And she strikes again! Dude! Honestly if I said that I would sound like such a tit, but because it’s her, because you genuinely actually have the pull, you can actually lift up that statement and (expletive) hurl it.
Chloë Sevigny: ‘I didn’t want to name names. I think they’re commonly known as assholes anyway’
Chloë Sevigny walks into the bar of a hotel in downtown New York like a discreet but still conquering hero: leather jacket, red lipstick, round John Lennon-style sunglasses and a laugh that draws the eyes of the room. She recently moved back to Manhattan from a far-flung neighbourhood of Brooklyn, where she had gone in search of a quieter life. For decades, the actor enjoyed the buzz of being a well-known figure, until suddenly, in her early 40s, she didn’t. “But it didn’t work out,” she says, drily. Brooklyn was too quiet, too far; not Sevigny’s style at all and now she is back – greeting people she knows every few paces – a somewhat reluctant queen of the scene.
It is more than 20 years since Sevigny was anointed “the coolest girl in the world” by Jay McInerney in his New Yorker profile, a piece that now reads like the slightly doddery engagement of a middle-aged man with youth culture, and for whose purposes any modish 19-year-old woman may have served. Sevigny has never been “cool” in the traditional sense, being neither detached nor aloof.
Her style these days errs on the side of men’s braces/baggy shirts, landing somewhere between A Clockwork Orange and Amish country. She is also forthright, intelligent, chatty, unguarded – she got into trouble recently for bad mouthing one of her own screen projects – and, above all, opinionated: over the course of our interview, Sevigny will get stuck into Trump, movie stars who hog all the best TV roles, and why she turned down an offer to chip into #MeToo. “I hope they’re not going to read this,” she says, of her family.
Oh, and conscientious. Sevigny decides which roles to accept largely based on whether she approves of the people offering them. In the case of Andrew Haigh, the British director best known for the HBO series Looking, who has just directed Sevigny in the movie Lean on Pete, it was a no-brainer. “I wanted to be part of the calibre of movie Andrew puts out,” she says. “Knowing how he likes to sit with characters and that he has a sensitivity and a beauty to his films.” Although, she adds, smiling, “even with the greatest director in the world you never know – it’s always a risk.”
Lean on Pete, which is based on the novel of the same name by Willy Vlautin, tells the story of Charley, a 15-year-old boy who falls through the cracks after his father’s death, takes up with a bunch of small-stakes horse racers and flees across the country after stealing a horse. Sevigny plays Bonnie, one of the jockeys – a tough, weather-beaten figure full of hidden damage and pragmatic charm. It’s reminiscent of her role in Boys Don’t Cry, the 1999 movie for which Sevigny was nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar: measured, deep, finely balanced between knowing and subtly evasive.
The film was shot in Oregon and, says Sevigny, she has to think harder these days about committing to months of filming away. “I was doing a show on Netflix in southern Florida called Blood Line – that commute wasn’t as bad; same time zone. But as my mother is getting older and my brother has just had another child, so I have two nephews, and my life and my friends are here, it is harder. If it’s an isolated thing it’s easier to accept, but signing on to a series for five or six seasons somewhere far from home, I think I would be more reticent.”
Sevigny lives alone in New York and her family are an hour away in the Connecticut town where she grew up. One of the advantages of getting older, she says, is understanding that the best way to ensure good work for herself is to take on a greater role in curating it. She is starting to direct short films: the first, Kitty, from 2016, based on a short story about a girl who turns into a cat, and more recently Carmen, about a fortysomething standup comedian. “Creating opportunities helps ease anxiety and focus yourself on keeping busy with other things – to get some control, to be a pure expression of your own.”
With Lean on Pete, I was shocked to discover Sevigny had first been considered for the role of Charley’s aunt, who is in the film for about three minutes, and only won the larger role after lobbying hard. It says something regrettable about the film business that Sevigny isn’t currently a bigger star, although she is at pains to point out she is doing fine: she has a movie about Lizzy Borden coming up later in the year, in which she co-stars with Kristen Stewart, and more projects lined up beyond that. “I’m not allowed to talk about my finances,” she says, smiling ruefully, “because I am very privileged.”
Still, while the boom in TV promised to be a gold rush for good actors, it hasn’t really turned out that way. Sevigny is a veteran of the small screen after appearing in five seasons of the HBO show Big Love, since when the TV landscape has become much more crowded. “It feels like there’s been a big industry shift, especially in the film industry, so that now all the big movie stars are doing TV.”
Reese Witherspoon?
“Yeah.” She rolls her eyes. “It’s now more competitive than ever. Like Amy Adams is doing an HBO series; the big movie stars who would normally just stick to the big movies are now in TV. There is something to be said for doing a long-term thing that is interesting to explore a character. And I guess if you’re a movie star of that calibre, you’re used to being on sets for six months at a time. They’re not doing indies, which are 30 days and you’re out.”
The downside to committing to a multi-season TV show can be expressed with a single word, says Sevigny, one that strikes fear into the heart of most actors: “unavailable”. She says: “If you’re out of the film hustle, then you’re ‘unavailable’ and you might miss an opportunity there. Actors hate being unavailable. Being in a play is really hard because then you’re unavailable. It’s terrifying being unavailable, unless you’re on a great project.”
Doesn’t she find that getting older takes some of this anxiety away? “I feel more relaxed,” she says. “I feel confident in the fact that I’ll always be working, whether it’s getting the parts I necessarily want or,” she laughs apologetically, “feel that I deserve, although deserve is a strange word to use. I know something will come along and I’m also pursuing directing. I’m shooting another short film. I’m going to Cannes to be on the jury during critics’ week.”
In honour of which, she orders the fruit and yogurt: “Trying to keep it trim, girl. I have to fit into some sample-size dresses” she says, and delivers one of the hooting laughs that, however much she jokes about slimming down for Cannes, give a sense of Sevigny as someone who won’t diminish herself to meet industry demands.
How is she finding her 40s?
Sevigny stops laughing. “I don’t mind it. Some of the physical changes are a little frustrating.”
Like what?
Sevigny lifts a hand vaguely to her neck. “I feel like… texture. Like, certain areas. It’s the décolletage. Those sorts of things are disconcerting. We need more women like Frances McDormand, and Tilda Swinton. Just the way they present themselves and don’t bend. Frances with no make-up and hair just loose; why can’t more women do that? I love seeing Helen Mirren, too; I think Helen is such a natural beauty. And she still does the classical dress up, but she has her own hair and her face looks natural. Seeing her next to Jane Fonda at the Oscars and Jane had like… not natural hair.” She laughs. “But Jane can do whatever she wants. Jane is the ultimate. All women should do whatever they want, obviously.”
Last year, Ronan Farrow, who broke some of the Harvey Weinstein sexual assault allegations in the New Yorker, approached Sevigny and asked if she’d be interviewed by him about her experiences of Hollywood. She turned him down. “I didn’t really have anything to say to him,” she says. “I’ve had experiences that are kind of common, verbal experiences, or innuendos. But I didn’t feel they offended me to such a degree that I wanted to name the names. I think they’re commonly known as assholes anyway. Do you know what I mean? I felt it would draw attention to myself, in a way. Which I know is the wrong thing to say, because we have to be vocal for people who don’t have a voice… ” She trails off, then starts up again. “For someone to say ‘What are you doing after?’ during a casting session is not so unheard of. Yeah, it shouldn’t be done and lots of girls might feel vulnerable and not know what to do in that situation. For me it was like: really?” She laughs. “I do feel like what Harvey Weinstein did compared to Al Franken [the former senator of Minnesota] – there has to be some delineation. Instead they’re all grouped together.”
Was she just naturally buoyant enough to push back against casual pros?
“I think maybe growing up around some men in my life who were a little chauvinistic [helped]; I don’t know. I can’t even remember now who said it to me, but a female casting director said, in a room full of people: ‘You have to make the men want to fuck you and the women want to be you.’”
Ew.
“Yeah. I almost wish I could remember who she was. Not that I want to call her out, but I feel like that was almost more damaging in a way. To think to myself, that’s really what I have to be? And then trying to figure out how to be that. This was from a casting person who was like, this is how you’re going to get the jobs and then that permeating through how I thought about myself, and the commodity I was. That was more damaging than the guy asking me what are you doing after or saying you should take your clothes off more. Shocker.”
It makes sense that Sevigny, while sensitive to all the nuances surrounding #MeToo, held back when approached by Farrow; to be in a room with her is to be reminded that Sevigny, while friendly and charming, is a non-conformist who makes up her own mind, thinking long and hard before she answers some questions and doubling back to qualify them once she has. She is politically at odds with her family, a situation she finds depressing, but is well used to by now. Sevigny grew up in Darien, Connecticut, the US equivalent of the conservative Home Counties, but after moving to New York at 19 and falling in with a fashionable art crowd, rapidly moved away from the opinions she’d grown up around. Her family watch Fox News, she says, “which I try to zone out whenever I go home. It’s a losing battle. They’re at an age when – now it’s just the sad undercurrent of tension, and me having to block it out or ignore.”
Are they the kind of Republicans with whom she can at least unite against Trump?
“Unfortunately not. I think they have fallen prey to his anti-establishment rhetoric and they feel radicalised in a way. I don’t know where all their Catholic values went.” Sevigny shrugs. “There’s something about him they find comfort in, because they were so anti-PC; so I think they’re like, ‘Oh, finally, someone’s being honest.’”
Sevigny sometimes wishes she could be more effective politically; she’s a big fan of Susan Sarandon and she admires Rosario Dawson, “who I know from the Kids days [Larry Clark’s 1995 film] and who’s very vocal. You see her in an interview and she’s throwing out numbers and references to this bill and that bill. If I had that artillery, I feel like I’d be more empowered. But I don’t know if my brain works that way.”
If her strengths lie elsewhere, they are perhaps rarer and more valuable for that. After the interview, Sevigny is running uptown to meet with the director of photography who worked on Beyoncé’s Lemonade, who she hopes to persuade to work on a new short film she is writing. What’s it about, I ask and she smiles. “A woman and the relationship to her power.”
Kristen Stewart on Her “Honest” Sex Scene With Chloë Sevigny in “Lizzie”
“It’s entertaining and it’s a tragic love story,” Stewart tells EW, adding, “so it’s kind of trippy to imagine: What did ‘gay’ look like then? What did it look like for young women to have really warm, transcendent feelings with pheromones flying between them, and support they’ve never even imagined from another person?”
“I wanted to be a part of this movie because you see these two girls who are entirely oppressed and unable to breathe and being strangled,” Stewart continues. “Even though it doesn’t end super successfully for either of them, just being able to watch two people who are not allowed to f—ing be and just feel okay or happy for just one second, just share a few moments and kind of breathe together as one is, to me, so triumphant.”
The interviewer points out that while the women undress for the murder scene, they remain fully clothed for their sex scene.
”We were never inserted into overly beautiful [scenarios],” Stewart says. “We were never like, ’Okay, then your corset bursts open!’ Of course it doesn’t burst open! It takes, like, 10 minutes to take off, so if we’re going to f—k, we’re going to do it with our clothes on! That intimacy level, that sort of hushed, quiet, whispered exchange they have, [fits]. It was present and honest.”
“Same with the murder scene: They couldn’t wear clothes because blood would get on them, so they had to take them off. [But] seeing Chloë naked with an ax… is so representative of what this movie is about. Conversely, us in our clothing while being intimate is trying to get under these binds, trying so hard to just get one inch of space closer… we realized what’s sexy is the immediacy of not taking our clothes off.”
The 28-year-old actress also discusses how she and Sevigny presented that same-sex intimacy without being exploitative.
“Naturally, from an insider’s perspective,” she explains. [It’s] a queer story line in a movie that doesn’t define the movie in its entirety—it’s f—ing cool to make movies that are nuanced, layered, and true to life rather than taking something that matters to me and making it cliché and broad. That gets under my skin; I hate seeing it presented that way. [For them] the word ‘gay’ doesn’t factor. It’s an instinct that doesn’t have a name.”