Kristen Stewart on Her Favorite French Films at Deauville Masterclass

Kristen Stewart drew a packed house of festivalgoers, locals and fans at France’s Deauville Film Festival for her masterclass titled My French Cinema and organized with Chanel. For the occasion, Stewart curated a list of her all-time favorite French movies and candidly discussed why they inspired her as an actor and filmmaker.

Ranging across different eras and styles, the films she chose have in common a certain boldness, from Louis Malle’s “Elevator to the Gallows” (1958) to Alain Renais’ “Hiroshima Mon Amour” (1959), Catherine Breillat’s “A Real Young Girl” (1976), Leos Carax’s “The Lovers on the Bridge” (1991), Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “The Double Life of Veronique” (1991) and Michael Haneke’s “The Piano Lesson” (2001).

In her typical unfiltered, brainy and self-deprecating fashion, Stewart made the audience laugh as she admitted that she actually struggles to watch entire movies.

“It sounds fucking absurd coming from me,” Stewart said, “considering it’s what I want to do with the rest of my entire life. But I have to strap myself into a seat to stick with an entire movie. I drift in and out.”

And although she’s able to talk in granular detail about movies that have marked her, and has also served on the juries of Cannes (in 2018) and Berlin (2024), she “wouldn’t say that there’s one filmmaker that (she) can tell you everything about this person top to bottom.”

The first film she spoke about during the Deauville masterclass was “A Real Young Girl,” a film charting a 14-year-old girl’s sexual awakening, written and directed by Breillat, who is known as a subversive French filmmaker.

Stewart said she watched Breillat’s movie shortly before she started filming her directorial debut “The Chronology of Water,” an adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir of the same name starring Imogen Poots as a woman who emerges from an abusive childhood and…