Kristen Stewart has replaced Mia Wasikowska in Olivier Assayas’s next film, the English-language “Sils Maria,” which will be filmed in Switzerland and Germany this summer.
When Deadline reported yesterday on Stewart being cast in the movie as well as writer-director Peter Sattler’s Guantánamo Bay drama “Camp X-Ray,” its headline said Stewart has landed “leads” in both movies. By all accounts, however, Hollywood’s highest paid actress won’t be the star of “Sils Maria.”
The film is a portrait of a middle-aged actress, played by Juliette Binoche, for whom Assayas wrote it, reflecting on her past choices and where they have led her.
She becomes obsessed by a young actress (Chloë Grace Moretz) who is appearing in a controversial role that made the Binoche character famous 20 years before. Stewart will play Binoche’s assistant.
If it sounds a little like a continental “All About Eve,” Assayas possibly has something more existential in mind. Friedrich Nietzsche, regarded as one of the first existentialist philosophers, stayed in Sils-Maria, a section of Sils im Engadin/Segl, in the Maloja District of southeast Switzerland, in the summers of 1881 and 1883-88.
The Nietzsche-Haus is open to the public if the former Bella Swan fancies brushing up on the author of “Twilight of the Idols,” which he wrote in Sils-Maria between August 26 and September 3, 1888. Its title insists she must.
If Stewart’s character proves more pivotal than central in Assayas’s film, it should be creatively nourishing for an actress whose predominantly introspective style sometimes ill-suited her action sequences in the “Twilight” saga. Nor did she look comfortable in the awkward physical sequences of “On the Road.” Interiority, reticence, and reactivity have proved her strengths so far.
Assayas is a master at directing ensembles, as he showed in “Summer Hours” (which featured Binoche) and this year’s “Something in the Air.” Bringing together Binoche, Stewart, and Moretz in a film that seeks to analyze female ageing and careerism can scarcely fail to deliver psychological combustibility. “Sils Maria” should be ready for Cannes next year.
In “Canp X-Ray,” set for a late-summer start, Stewart will play a soldier from a small town who is posted to Guantánamo instead of being sent for a tour in Iraq. The Deadline article says she is abused by the Muslim detainees, “but forges an odd friendship with a young man” who’s been imprisoned there for eight years.