Kristen & Julianne Moore Talk Alzheimer’s Disease & Working Together

Kristen, if you were in this situation, do you think you’d react like your character does?
STEWART: Well, I think that it is easier for a person who lives and indulges in the ambiguity of life, considering Lydia is this artistically inclined person that is not entirely comfortable having the answers. She does not profess to be able to tell you exactly what she wants. What she’s telling you is, “I don’t know what I want, and that is okay. I am traversing that.” I think it’s easier for a child looking at a mother with something that is so undefinable. It’s easier for a child to appreciate and live in the moments. Just because you can’t have a final answer, in terms of how it’s all going to work out, or you can’t call it by a name, it’s still worth living in that potentially wonderful moment. Whereas somebody who wants to map it all out, if they can’t solve it like an equation, then they can’t have it in their lives. I can relate to my character, in that I definitely don’t have the answers, and that’s not even what I’m looking for. I’m not the type of person that just needs to feel concrete and like nothing’s going to change. I revel in the change. It’s not that she’s more apt or has the tools to be emotionally stronger. It’s not strength. It’s just the way people are. Within this story, and within anyone’s reality that might be similar, I hope to god they have someone who doesn’t need the answer and who is just willing to sit there and forget every other sentence, and still enjoy the afternoon.

Have either of you have any personal experience with Alzheimer’s?
MOORE: I have had no personal experience with Alzheimer’s. I’ve been lucky on that score.
STEWART: I’ve never had any personal experience with Alzheimer’s, with a family member or a loved one. I have one story from when I was a kid, at a family friend’s house for dinner. I walked into a room and there was an older lady there, and I had this strange experience. We started speaking, and I very quickly found that there was something wrong. I was little, so I didn’t know what it was, but I was very aware that she was what you say about somebody who might have Alzheimer’s in their older age. I had this exchange with her that just slammed both of us into our bodies and into that moment with such force that you could feel that we were emotionally connecting, and I could see in her eyes that this was precious and that it was going. And then, she asked me where her sister was and I was like, “I don’t know. Bye.” We had dinner, and she was absent from the dinner. She was sitting at the table, but was completely and utterly ignored. I felt like there was no way that the soul of this person, as much as her body and her mind was limiting her, wasn’t singing. She was just not being heard. I remembered that, for a long time. It was the first thing I shared with Wash [Westmoreland] and Rich [Glatzer], when we talked about the script. I don’t judge the family that was ignoring her, at all. I was a kid who was there for 30 seconds. That’s probably not the case. They probably have these connections where they fuel each other and give each other a lot. But what really stuck still-alice-kristen-stewart-julianne-moore-2with me is that people are forgotten, but they’re not lost. Everyone could be so much happier and have so much more to hold. That made me so emotionally invested in this, in a way that I wouldn’t have been, had I not seen that.

Kristen, what was it like to work with Julianne Moore?
STEWART: We’ve known each other for a few years, and I knew that I could play her daughter and have this relationship with her. I’ve probably only spent, cumulatively before this movie, very little time with her.
MOORE: It was time at events, and stuff.
STEWART: But what I found, other than what I expected, that she transcends the technical aspect of what she does, yet she masters it, and actually is able to live and breathe in it. I’m a kid, so it sounds silly for me to speak to this, but I have watched a lot of people do this. I was really fueled by the fact that she really likes to straddle the emotional and spontaneous and scary side with the controlled and prepared side. Once she’s there, she lets herself be there. I love her, and it’s weird to talk about her in a room like this, but I’m candidly and embarrassingly saying, straight up, that if you called her a jerk, we would have serious problems.
I learned a lot. I learn a lot with actors that I don’t think are good. Every experience shapes you. I’ve had experiences with actresses – and I say actresses because there’s just a woman thing – that have achieved what she’s achieved, by means that I can’t understand. When I met Julianne and actually started going through this process with her and was able to observe this monumental task that she has completed, I could fully relate to the way she approaches everything. It made me feel so good. I want to know where we’re being seen from, I want to know every angle, I want to talk to the D.P., and I want to annoy the director, all day, about what the shot list is ‘cause I want to be able to utilize every single half-second that we have to tell the story that we have to tell. That’s fun. I don’t think that that takes anything away from being completely entrenched, involved and lost in a situation. She’s a soulful technician. I’d never seen it, and it makes me feel better about not being the type of person that’s like, “Oh, I don’t even know where the camera is, I just am so in it.” No, she knows. That’s why she’s better than you.

Julianne, how did you feel about working with Kristen Stewart? 
MOORE: Either you like a person or you don’t like a person. I don’t have to love somebody to work with them. I’m a professional person. But when you get the bonus of really liking someone and really connecting with them and really enjoying them, it’s a fantastic thing. And I think we felt that as people, as actors and as partners. It’s very freeing. It made it all very, very easy for us.

Kristen, what do you look for, in a character, when signing on for a movie?
STEWART: Most of the work that I’ve done, I’ve been so personally drawn to that I felt that was the most honest way to do it, not only for the good of the project, but for the reason that I am an actor. I have very rarely stepped outside of myself to play a character that I couldn’t fully understand. I don’t know if I’ll ever do that. Maybe one day. I don’t know. There isn’t a specific through-line for the characters that I gravitate towards. I think that you see me in them because I can’t hide that and I’m not trying to. I’ve played a few characters that have been based on real people, and those have been the times that I feel stretched the furthest. But even then, I think the reason I was drawn to those characters was because I felt an unbelievable amount of myself in them, and undiscovered aspects of myself in them, which is more important. I’m not fully interested in just playing things that I know. Of course, I’m comfortable running my hand through my hair in a moment that I get insecure, and that might be caught on film, so you can assign me that affectation for life, and that’s fine. But the reason that that’s happening is because I want to be there and I want to do it. I want to learn why I’m worked up about a project. I want to know why I get this feeling when I read a script, or I get on the phone with a director. I need to live it, so that I can get on the other side of it. Hindsight is 20/20 and I learn something, but in the moment, I am fully there. That’s what I like to do.

 

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