We previously posted about Kristen’s Q&A appearance in Santa Barbara, CA to promote ‘On the Road’ with Garrett Hedlund here, but here is the full transcript!  See what Kristen has to say about her character, Marylou, and the Beatnik generation – she has some really adorable quotes!

“On The Road”

Roger Durling with Actors Garrett Hedlund and Kristen Stewart

Durling: And Kristen, you’ve also been involved with this project for a very long time, since, Into The Wild with Sean Penn?

Kristen Stewart: It was a little after that. I think it was in 2007, I was seventeen.

Durling: What was it that attracted you to this role?

Stewart: On The Road was my first favorite book. I read it as a freshman in high school. And then when I heard Walter was directing it I would have done anything to be involved. I would have been his assistant on it. I would have done craft service. The reason you love something, it’s so clear. I don’t even really remember the details of the initial conversation; I think I just drove away shaking. I mean I was fairly certain. Not necessarily that I would get the part, because it could have been decades and we still would have had to wait fifty years for it to begin, but that I wanted to commit to something like that. Which is obviously, at least the way I remember, so irresponsible of me. I wasn’t ready for that part yet, at all. I got involved when Garrett did, and if fifty years had gone by and we’d missed out then it would have been a really painful experience.

Durling: Kristen, in the book the women, especially Mary Lou, are shall I say, underwritten. Were you involved in the process of expanding the character of Mary Lou?

Stewart: Yeah, she’s definitely on the periphery of the story. I think some of the people behind the characters thought it would be easier to not change the story necessarily and never add anything really. It was always just sort of felt. I think a really common idea in the book is that the women are treated as sort of playthings like they’re ambience or sexy wild things

Durling: Which seems like misogyny to some people.

Stewart: Yeah, which is interesting to me because I always hear men say that like, “So hey, don’t you think there’s a chauvinist feeling to the use of women in the story?” and I think that’s a kind of simplistic way of looking at it. They’re not on the forefront of the story so you don’t know where their hearts or where their minds are. But at the same time, getting to know Luanne especially, I don’t think anyone could have taken from her. She was so generous and giving and what she was getting in return was not leaving her empty. The same goes for Dean. She was an incredibly formidable partner and talk about a girl who doesn’t know fear. She was just a teenager and it’s not a very typical quality for a teenager to have. That like, really hungry and unselfconscious and self-aware thing. It’s not common. As soon as I met her daughter, she went into great detail; she’s got a killer memory as well, and everything just made sense. I think we were able to feel them instead of having to have to illustrate it. It sort of just came across as we got to know them and how we loved the people.

Hedlund: She’s wise beyond her years, this character. I mean, she’s the one who left me in New York at the beginning. I just thought Dean and MaryLou were so parallel because she was wise beyond her years, he was as well, and they were kind of just great travelling companions. She was kind of the mirror image of him in a way, because just like that she left him to go back to Denver when she reveals that she has a husband to return to.

Stewart: They kind of helped to raise each other.

Durling: You talked about the research you did for the roles. I read somewhere that Walter did a “Beat Camp” for you guys. Can you describe it? Was that sort of rehearsals or improvisation before?

Hedlund: All of the above. On this film, it went kind of fast. We only had six weeks of pre-production before going on the road for six months to shoot. And four of those weeks we spent in Montreal. We started in the middle of the summer and kind of camped out in this apartment where Sam Riley, Kristen, Walter, and I would all go to and we would have the family members come. John Cassady, Anne-Marie Santos (LouAnne’s daughter), and Gerald Nicosia who wrote Memory Babe, a Jack Kerouac biography, who also shared with us hundreds of hours of audiotape of MaryLou speaking of Jack and Neal, which was incredibly powerful. We watched old films that Walter would share with us, Shadows, John Cassavettes, and a film that just saw the light of day, The Exiles, which had been in archival footage for up until maybe five years ago, and it was shot in the fifties. All of the walls surrounding were filled with photos of the characters, the locations of the houses, the locations where we were gonna go, what it looked like then, what it’s going to look like now. Jazz was constantly playing. Dexter Gordon, Slim, Jack McQueen, Miles – playing all day along. And all the reading that we had to do. There was hundreds and hundreds of letters that all of these characters wrote to each other. More particularly, Neal Cassady wrote to Jack. They’re very personal and uncensored, and from then we got to sort of realize the thought processes and what made everyone tick.

Durling: Kristen, the Hudson is another character in the movie and you obviously spent a lot of time inside this car. What was that experience like, it seemed awfully claustrophobic.

Stewart: Really?

Hedlund: Remember Argentina?

Stewart: Yeah, that got old.

Hedlund: After Montreal we needed snow in August. So we went all the way down to Patagonia in Chile and shot for three days. I remember there was a banana on the backseat floor and that’s how you could tell how long the day was by the current state of the banana. Obviously the banana was getting squished on the backseat floor, and whoever was in the backseat would be you know…

Stewart: Making disgusting jokes about the state of the banana that don’t need to be repeated here.

Hedlund: They only made the Hudson for about six years; I think the last Hudson was made in ‘54. It’s a wonderful, wonderful car. I bought a ‘53 Hudson before we started shooting and this was a ‘49 Hudson but I just wanted to get used to the three on the tree and driving it. All these shots where everybody’s in the car, you had to know how to handle this thing. Like when we were shooting the blizzard scenes with my head out the window I was actually driving the car. The camera’s just out there, nobody’s around so we just did the scene driving down a blizzard road. Walter would be walking and say, “There’s a snowplow coming! Do you see the snowplow?” It was like, “I can’t fucking see anything just tell him to watch out for me.”

Durling: You know, you mentioned Argentina. A lot of these landscapes have disappeared in the United States because of the commercial sprawl and so you had to travel to other parts of the world. Can you tell us about that?

Hedlund: Yeah, after we started in Montreal for about three weeks, went down to Argentina. Flew over to Chile; shot there for three days. Flew up to New Orleans; shot for two weeks. Flew over to Arizona; shot for two weeks. Down to Mexico City, for another three weeks, and after we finished that they said, “We’re halfway!” Then there was Calgary for three weeks, Montreal for another month, and then we finished in San Francisco for the last four days of shooting, which were mostly either the interiors with Dean and Camille or driving through Russian Hill. Then, Walter and I went on a three week journey with a five man crew where we took the Hudson from New York to Los Angeles, because with the principal photography we couldn’t possibly get all the lands of America throughout the schedule we had. So Walter and I shot the Harlem rooftop scenes there then went out to the Adirondacks to get more snow shots, broke down in Utica, drove through a blizzard to Erie, Pennsylvania, with my head out the window. We didn’t have a speedometer or windshield wipers, and our gas can was in the trunk of the car so obviously there was some gasoline high going on as well. We drove with no brakes from Cincinnati to Lexington, Kentucky, then over to Nashville where we tried to find brakes on a Sunday in the Bible belt. We were driving only on back roads too, so it took us eight hours to get to Memphis where it would have taken two hours by freeway. Broke down in Texarkana, Arkansas. Broke down in Lubbock, Texas. Broke down in Las Vegas, New Mexico for three days. Then up through Arizona, down to Phoenix and then where it would have taken five hours by freeway, it took us eighteen hours to get from Phoenix to Los Angeles and that’s where we found that railroad that you see in the end credits between California and Arizona. We just stopped to take a photograph and we saw this wonderful railroad track over there. And if anybody knows Neal Cassady or his life, he had died, or was found dead walking from Temple Town, New Mexico on the railroad tracks. And was found between towns where he had gone to revisit the ties that him and Kerouac had had in the city when he was down there for a wedding. So, it was very special that we at least got to have that footage. I didn’t even know it had made the cut.

Durling: Kristen, you mentioned MaryLou’s daughter…Has the family seen the film? And what was their reaction?

Stewart: Yeah, I think Anne Marie saw it a few weeks ago, we were in San Francisco and she attended a screening with her husband and daughter. I think she’s really happy with it. The thing that Luanne always did with her daughter, and probably with many other aspects of her life as well, was that she really kept things separate. Which is why I got a really interesting perspective through her daughter. Her values, and desires, and ideals were pretty varying. And yet she was able to provide herself with the life she wanted to live. I mean afterwards, she was just smiling a lot. Her mother had just passed away right before we were about to get this thing going. Out of a lot of characters in the book, she would have been one of the ones that would have been really enthusiastic and into it and would have loved to talk to us, and it’s too bad that it was timed badly. But yeah, I think she’s happy with it. She said that she’s always really shocked and surprised by that aspect of her mom’s life because she came right after. She would tell us stories about people coming back to the house and her mom would never explain to her who they were, so one day she was sitting there, she was sixteen years old and she answered the door to Neal Cassady. He looked at her and–he could always never accept the fact that she wasn’t his daughter. So he was always like, “Oh look! She’s got my eyes!” when she was a little baby, and Luanne would be like, “Uh, no, she doesn’t.” Which is crazy, it’s always insane to me that they never had a child together after all that. But anyway, Neal looked at her and said, “Oh, you’re not as pretty as Jack said you were. Where’s your mom?” and she was like, “Who are you?” Then she found out years later who he was, and he had shown up on the bus actually.

Hedlund: Oh yeah, the bus from the Electric Kool-Aid Acid test days. But it’s also special, Anne Marie the other night had given each of us a vinyl from her mom’s personal collection. Her mom, appreciated her vinyl so much that all of these had her initials on the back in the top right corner so…

Stewart: Yeah, there’s a little “Lu” and it’s really cute.

Durling: So the jazz, I wanted to ask Walter about the music but one of my favorite moments in the movie is your dance sequence. Was that choreographed, or could you explain how that scene was shot?

Hedlund: Yeah, it was maybe choreographed in the way of memorizing your lines and knowing what to say but having the freedom to improvise. Because at that point, and I know that later we found out that Luanne’s favorite dance was the jitterbug but that would have been a little too cliché for this moment, and at that period we couldn’t find any reference of dance because they were coming out of swing and moving into be-bop. So we just interpreted that and learned a few interesting steps and what to do, and it was much more on the seductive side. Really we just learned a few steps and Walter would film ten minutes without calling cut. So of course we had to use a song that was cut to ten minutes so those were some of the most exhausting days of the shoot. We were just being maniacal on the dance floor and a big sort of bash was going on but after ten minutes, cut. Then we’d run outside to catch our breath.

Stewart: There was no air in the room either. It was totally like a vacuum. It was hot.

Source: Santa Barbara International Film Festival / Via @gossipgyal

Source: Facebook / On The Road – the movie

It’s been a long, strange trip from ‘Twilight’ to the tabloids to the film of Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road.’

NEW YORK — Kristen Stewart has a solid, vigorous handshake.

When she arrives at the darkened restaurant at the Tribeca Grand hotel, precisely seven minutes late, she’s guardedly apologetic about her tardiness. A table of men gawks at Stewart as she keeps her head down, her hair loose around her face, clad in jeans and a T-shirt and sneakers, and quickly crosses the room to a more secluded table in the corner.

Stewart, barely out of her teens, has tasted the flip side of fame, and it isn’t much to her liking. She’s cautious and watchful and ill at ease, until she’s not. The thing is, give Stewart a little bit of time, a glass of pinot grigio, and some thoughtful conversation, and she warms up.

Being gaped at, she says, brings out her inner dork.

“I feel like I’m in the sixth grade, and everyone in the room is laughing at me. Some people can come into a room and say hello to everyone, and it’s fine. I’m not that person. I don’t think I’m very approachable,” says the actress, 22.

She’s no pushover. If there’s one thing you need to note about her, it’s this: When she suddenly was anointed the tabloid scarlet woman, after photos surfaced of her getting cozy with married director Rupert Sanders — while ostensibly dating her Twilight co-star Robert Pattinson — Stewart didn’t hunker down and hide under the covers. She went to Toronto in September to promote her labor of love, On the Road, the adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s classic 1957 novel about the Beat Generation. She talked to press. She posed for photos. She attended the premiere of the film.

“I’ve been working on this thing for five years. When it makes sense, when there’s a platform for it, it makes so much sense for me to be there. I can stand tall. I can stand proud,” Stewart says. “I’ve never been the type of person who can stand in the forefront of nothing. That occasionally makes public appearances awkward. It feels a lot different when you’re going to unleash something that feels worth it.”

A conversation with the actress isn’t linear. It ebbs and flows and touches on everything from her love of cooking to her appreciation of Kerouac to her recent fascination with the reality show Duck Dynasty, courtesy of her best friend Dakota Fanning.

“She is 100% herself 100% of the time, which is admirable and difficult to do,” Fanning says. “She’s very unapologetic of herself. She does everything to the fullest. She’s really honest.”

Silver Linings Playbook and The Hunger Games star Jennifer Lawrence calls Stewart “one of the coolest people I’ve ever met. She’s just really laid-back. She’s one of those people who owns her own energy. She’s down to earth and funny and nice and just cool.”

And for someone who has never been at ease in the spotlight, Stewart isn’t about to start spilling her guts now. She’s not telling whether she and Pattinson are back together, or not, or something in between. And she doesn’t really care what anyone thinks, either way.

“People think they knew a lot about me before. They know even less now,” she says. “People will project whatever. It’s a huge form of entertainment. As soon as you step outside your own life and look at it like that and think that you can shape something — you need to live your life. I’m just going to live my life, actually.”

Stewart’s career is also at a crossroads of sorts. She just wrapped up the Twilight film series, based on the insanely popular books and starring Stewart as Bella Swan, the love of vampire Edward Cullen (Pattinson). The films made her famous beyond belief, rich beyond comprehension, and even more leery of being a superstar who can’t go out to dinner without being mobbed. Stewart is grateful to have been part of the Twilight behemoth, and to have played a character who was so pivotal in many teens’ lives.

“I never felt stuck in that. Not at all,” she says. “I had so many opportunities in the midst of that to do a million things. If it kept me from doing other things, I still wouldn’t resent it. You start a project to finish it. I was eager to get back and finish the story.”

A different kind of role

As for On the Road, which shows a far more adult side of Stewart, “this wasn’t me stepping out to do a different thing to liberate myself,” she says.

Playing Marylou, the free-spirited, uninhibited girlfriend of Dean Moriarty (Garrett Hedlund) is a departure for Stewart, who is an observer by nature.

“I had to jump into somebody who wasn’t watching, who wasn’t thinking about being watched,” she says. “She’s the least vain person who completely lets her face hang out. Those people are few and far between. I was sort of nervous I would be playing the crazy girl, the girl who was wild. She offers the exuberance in the story, as well. I’m so not that person, so it was hard.”

Director Walter Salles met Stewart when she was 16, after seeing her in Sean Penn’s Into the Wild, and he approached her about playing Marylou.

“She thought the role was very different from who she was but she was tempted to do it. She’s been part of this ever since. It speaks a lot to how much she reads, how sharp she is, and how attracted she is by challenging material,” Salles says. “She’s very different from Marylou and yet — she truly understands that it is important to constantly redefine her sense of the future, which is what Marylou does.”

And Stewart felt liberated by playing Marylou, a woman who is free just being herself.

“It’s easier to not throw up so many barriers,” she says. “Do you have butterflies in your stomach? Great. Don’t try and get rid of them. I’m oddly incredibly measured. I take things too seriously sometimes. I take myself too seriously sometimes.”

Stewart is loath to sound like a complainer. She’s not going to whine about being famous, or her inability to walk through an airport without paparazzi intrusion.

“Rob is (noticed) way more than I am, especially if we’re out together. He’s so recognizable, and I’m not. I put a hood on, and I’m a girl with long hair. I can go out,” she shrugs.

And even though, at the height of her scandal she issued a statement apologizing to Pattinson, she’s not going to address what’s written about her in endless stories that speculate about her romantic status.

“They don’t write about my personal life. You know what I mean? The same exact thing about being able to choose your path and your career — you don’t step outside your life and look at it like you’re someone else. It’s the most disjointed, uninformed, and completely unsatisfying and completely depressing (stuff),” she says. “I have the same friends I’ve had for years and years. I make new friends. I’m a really good judge of character. I know who I like, and I know who I don’t like, almost to a fault.”

Fanning says: “People don’t know her as a person. What she says is what she believes. She’s never fake. She does what she cares about and lives her life and has to deal with a lot and does it the best way she knows how.”

This kitchen whiz shoots pool

It’s hard to dislike Stewart after spending any amount of time with her. She seems solid and smart, an observant, attentive person to whom quotes and sound bites don’t come easily.

“She’s a good listener,” Salles says. “When you cut for lunch, you can bet the best music will come from her trailer. She can be extremely funny and loose, and she’s great company to have around. She’s a fierce pool player. There’s a lot to Kristen that is very revealing of a personality that is curious and open to the world and certainly very accessible.”

And she’s a whiz in the kitchen. Stewart eagerly shares her foolproof way of roasting vegetables to ensure that they’re fully cooked yet also crisp (heat the oven as high as it will go). Her hobbies are simple: music, books, friends.

“We’re homebodies,” Fanning says. “She cooks for me. She loves to cook. I go to her house. Certainly there are times it’s crazy, but we’re also just friends. We go to Target to get wrapping paper. She has to do things like everyone else.”

At the top of Stewart’s to-do list: getting a script in her hands. She has spent this year doing non-stop press, first for Twilight and then for On the Road. And she’s ready to be back on set in the grifter comedy Focus.

“I really want to work,” she says. “I’m working in April, but that’s too long. I haven’t worked in a year. I’ve been promoting (stuff). I should go and chill somewhere. But at the same time, I haven’t done what I do in so long. I need to get back there.”

Source: USA Today
HQs via: KStewartFans

Kristen Stewart’s latest movie is based on a book with a much longer shelf life than Twilight, but you may not have heard of it recently. On the Road was written by Jack Kerouac and published in 1957. Based on Kerouac’s own experiences traveling with Neal Cassady, the book renames Kerouac Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty becomes the pseudonym for Cassady.

In the movie version, Stewart plays Marylou, based on one of Cassady’s girlfriends LuAnne Henderson. He would have others. Living Dean/Neal’s wanderlust lifestyle full of free love and drugs is a harrowing journey for Marylou. If the things Stewart has to say about her latest role intrigue you, add On the Road to your Fanhattan watchlist.

Kristen Stewart on her connection to Marylou in On the Road
“I really had to dig pretty deep to find it in me to actually play a person like that. It took a long time. Initially, I couldn’t say no. I would have done anything on the movie. I would have followed in a caravan had I not had a job on it. But I was 16 or 17 when I spoke to [director] Walter [Salles] for the first time and 14 or 15 when I read the book for the first time. It was easy to connect dots after having gotten to know the person behind the character, what you would need to pull off a lifestyle like that. That didn’t happen until deep into the rehearsal process. At first I was just attracted to the spirit of it. I’m the type of person that really needs to be pushed really hard to be able to really let it all hang. I think Marylou is the type of person that you can’t help but be yourself around because she’s so unabashedly there, present all the time, like this bottomless pit of really generous empathy and it’s a really rare quality to have. It makes you capable of living a really full, really rich life without it taking something from you. You couldn’t take from her. I don’t know she was always getting something back. So she was amazing.”

“I don’t get to have very many involved conversations with Twilight fans. It’s really rare.”

Kristen Stewart on the real LuAnne Henderson – “I think Luanne would have been ahead of her time now. Generally peoples’ expectations for their lives in a personal way are not a whole lot different. It’s a really fundamental thing to want to be a part of a group. We are pack animals. In a way she had very conventional ideals as well. She had this capacity to live many lives that didn’t necessarily mess with the other. She was not above emotion. She was above jealousy but not above feeling hurt, but not slighted. Maybe if this movie was made back in the day as opposed to now, people would be so shocked and awed by the sex and the drugs that they would actually miss what the movie’s about. Whereas now we’ve just seen a little bit more of it so it’s not so shocking to stomach. It’s easier to take. Sure, times have changed but people don’t change. That’s why the book’s never been irrelevant. There will always be people that want to push a little bit harder and there are repercussions. It’s evident in the story as well. Even in that little glimpse, that moment in time. Knowing what happens to all the characters afterwards is interesting. She knew Neal to the end of his life, and they always shared what they had. It never left their hearts even though their lives changed monumentally.”

But should teenage Twi-hards go see the R-rated On the Road?
“I think the actual law is if you are with a parent you can go and see an R-rated movie, if you’re over the age of 13. I guess it depends on who your parents are, who you are. I read On the Road when I was fourteen, so I don’t know. My parents never wanted to shelter me from the world that we live in, so I think I’m probably not the right person to ask. I think if you have a desire to see it, and your parents don’t want you to see it, take that bull by the horns.”

Getting intellectual about books
“I don’t get to have very many involved conversations with Twilight fans. It’s really rare. Sometimes, the girls that run the fan sites will come in and do an interview and I absolutely love doing that. I find that a lot of people I talk to, most journalists I sit down with, are huge On the Road fans. I feel that they’re even assigned to those stories because they have an interest in it. I’ve got to talk to a lot of passionate On the Road fans. The difference is there’s a lot to feel in Twilight, and that’s the experience usually of having individual exchanges with fans, without even saying anything you know, you just feel it, but obviously with On the Road there’s a lot to talk about.”

Source: Fanhattan

Kristen and Garrett coyly answer (what should be an easy question) a question about which one of them is most like their On The Road character:

Which of you is most like your character in On the Road?

“He’s got a lot of Dean in him,” Stewart finally says.

“He’s got a lot of teeth in him?” Hedlund replies, in mock-confusion.

“Dean!” she insists, as they both start laughing. It isn’t hard to coax a smile from Stewart and Hedlund, even if their screen personas would suggest otherwise.

Talking about how each acquired their roles in On The Road:

As for Stewart, “You wouldn’t be attracted to a project if you had to fake it,” she says. Though Marylou is more impetuous and sexually assertive than the other roles she’s played, Stewart claims, “I don’t feel like I’m stepping outside of myself when I’m playing parts. Even if it’s really different from the apparent version of who I am, I’m always somewhere deep in there.”

Kristen then comments about the difference between making a big blockbuster, green screen movie to making indie movies:

“I don’t mind making big movies, ‘cause you get to sort of bitch and complain with the other actors about what’s keeping you from being able to really feel it,” she says with a self-deprecating chuckle. “But then at the end of the day, you could be in a white room; the whole thing about being an actor is you have to have an imagination.”

And of course, the interviewer asks Kristen about filming those racy sex scenes in On The Road and if she must lose her inhibitions to film such a scene:

Stewart says yes and acknowledges that in general, she’s perceived to be a closed-off person, but that she’s working on it. “It’s funny: By putting up walls, you think you’re protecting yourself, but you get to live less,” says Stewart. “If you’re hiding behind a wall, then you can’t see over it. You’re depriving yourself of so much if you’re trying to be too aware of what you’re putting out there, you know?”

She adds, “If you feel someone breaking those walls down, let them. Those are the people that you need to find in life, rather than people that you’re just comfortable with.”

And lastly, Kristen talks about reading Patti Smith’s novel, Just Kids, and the possibility of staring in an adaptation of one of her novels:

“It had a very similar effect on me as reading On the Road did when I was 15,” says Stewart, who’s currently reading the novel for a second time. “I had a serious urge to create shit after I read it, to go out and find people, and travel.”

When I bring up the recent report that Smith is a fan of Stewart’s — suggesting that maybe one day, she could find herself starring in another adaptation of a bohemian coming-of-age book — Stewart demurs and meets eyes with Hedlund again. “I will never be the type of person like Patti Smith who has that compulsion to be constantly creating,” she laughs, confessing, “You feel diminished somehow [after reading it]! You’re like, ‘God! I gotta build myself back up again! I need to actually use every second! Why am I sitting around, ever?’”

Source: Vulture