Kristen Stewart believes she has been shown more respect as a director than an actress.
The Twilight actress has helmed her first feature film, The Chronology of Water, and has found that while promoting the project, people spoke to her "like somebody with a brain", but female screen stars are often just treated "like puppets."
In a conversation with The Sunday Times' Culture magazine, Kristen said, "Actresses get treated like s***, I’ve got to tell you.”
She continued, “People think anyone could be an actress, but the first time I sat down to talk about my movie as a director, I thought, wow, this is a different experience, they are talking to me like I’m somebody with a brain.”
“There’s this idea that directors have otherworldly abilities, which is not true. It’s an idea perpetuated by men. Not to sound like I’m complaining all the time, but it’s worse for female actors than male ones — they get treated like puppets, but they are not,” the Love Lies Bleeding star mentioned.
The Chronology of Water stars Imogen Poots as a competitive swimmer whose father sexually abused her and her elder sister and Kristen doesn't think a man would have made the film.
When asked if she thinks it would’ve been easier to get the funding for the film if she was a man, she said: “If I was a man I wouldn’t have made this movie.
“We have to deny our physicality every single day and there is so much — like birth — that is so painful and also quite beautiful, but we don’t share it because it is uncomfortable and icky,” the 35-year-old film star added.
“We’ve been pushed out of the canon in terms of expression. I wanted to speak to a world designed to silence women. We have to push people out of the way to get our experience seen and that p**** people off,” Kristen Stewart concluded.