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Stewart spoke with ML during the Toronto International Film Festival where the film had its North American premiere. She shared thoughts on her character's "hard love," how she grew herself being a part of the film and how this was the "biggest experience" she's felt on a set.

So what was your road to On the Road? 

I was 14 or 15 when I first met Walter Salles. I spoke to him when I was 17, I think I may have shot the first Twilight, I'm not sure - possibly I was about to go do it. At first I was talking about playing another part, so it's been a long time coming. I don't know how I was able to get around that kind of energy, but to convey that I loved this thing in the way [Walter Salles] does and as soon as you get around that energy it passes between you, nothing really needs to be said. I got the job on the spot, and I drove away just vibrating. I was like, 'Are you kidding me?' Plus I was very young, I wasn't quite old enough for the part yet.

When I read the book many years ago, I found it sprawling and didn't seem to have elements that would make it translatable to the screen - at least I remember thinking that at the time. What did you think of the book when you first read it? 

I was reading it for school, so I had to read it. I did independent study when I was in high school. I remember, I took so long to read the book. All I had to do was read it and write a report, it wasn't like I had to do an intensive study of the book, and it took me months and months - I was late. But, I think my teacher was OK with it because I think ultimately the paper was good.

But, people say it's different when you read it at different ages - but for me at the time, it was fun! At that age you start realizing you have a choice in who you surround yourself with. Up until that point, you're just around circumstantially who you're with - your family or whatever - but at that point you can start choose your family - and I've got a great family by the way - but I mean just the people you decide to surround yourself with. I don't want to sound cliché, but people should pull something out of you that would otherwise remain unseen.

Before Twilight and even before Kristen Stewart was first approached to be in On The Road by Brazilian-born director Walter Salles, the young actress read the Jack Kerouac novel for school. She told Movieline that she picked up the book because it was an assignment given, but her experience with the now American classic evolved. "I found the book fun," she said. But after reading and studying it more, it became much more compelling and taught her personal life lessons about growing up, making choices and dealing with inhibitions. She also emphasized that while she played the comparatively wild Marylou, she does not judge her uninhibited character.

"I learned through the book that you really have a choice about who you surround yourself with. [As a young adult] you realize you can choose who you're surrounding yourself with," Stewart told ML in Toronto where On The Road debuted over the weekend. "Up until that point you're really circumstantially with your family or whatever but at some point you can 'choose' your family. "I have a great family by the way, but you need to find people who can pull something out from you that might be otherwise unseen. And when I read the book, I thought, 'Gosh I need to find people like that.' I'm definitely not the Marylou type. But as I continued reading it as I got older, the weight of it started to mean something more." In the film version of the book, Stewart plays Marylou who was first married to, then divorced from, and ultimately a lifelong companion/lover/fellow free spirit to Dean Moriarty. The story centers on Dean (based in real life on Neal Cassady) who meets up with close friend Sal (writer Jack Kerouac's own stand-in) as the two travel across the U.S. as well as into Canada and Mexico. Like Dean, Marylou is anything but monogamous and she dabbles in pleasures that are alien to the wholesome fun of the prevailing culture of the conservative 1950s.

Kristen Stewart fans may have been disappointed that the Twilight superstar did not make an appearance at last week's MTV Video Music Awards, but crowds here in Toronto had the chance to see the actress on the red carpet for the North American premiere of Walter Salles' On The Road along with fellow cast members Garrett Hedlund, Kirsten Dunst, Amy Adams and Sam Riley. Stewart spoke with ML about the part she had actually landed before she filmed her first Twilight installment. Stewart shared her thoughts on the steamy relationship between her character Marylou and Hedlund's Dean Moriarty - a life-long relationship that was rife with affairs, drugs and a wild ride on the road.

"They really are 'simpatico.' It was a tumultuous relationship. And it's hard to love like that, but they were so in love with each other and you don't know this from reading the book, but they stayed lovers until the end of his life," Stewart said during a conversation with ML at a Toronto hotel over the weekend.

Stewart first read On The Road as a high school freshman. A short time afterward, she was approached by director Walter Salles who had been told to consider Stewart for the part of Marylou after fellow filmmakers saw her in Sean Penn's Into The Wild and suggested that he consider the young actress. The project took a number of years before the actual shoot commenced and in the meantime, Stewart began doing the enormously popular Twilight series, propelling her fame into the stratosphere.

Kristen Stewart did what most actors in her situation wouldn't: in the midst of personal scandal, she stepped out to promote her small, intimate and very personal film, On the Road.

"Thanks, man. Thanks," says Stewart, when told it was good of her to put herself out there, given the scrutiny she's been under.

Granted, she did her interviews with costar Garrett Hedlund and director Walter Salles. But she put herself out there and for that, I respect her.The film is based on Jack Kerouac's seminal American novel. Hedlund plays Dean, who has what could be generously described a very unconventional relationship with his teen bride, Mary Lou (Stewart).

Plus,Twihards, she's just a cool chick who's smart and well-read, with On the Road being a favorite. "I was a freshman when I read it. I was projecting to the future a little bit. Is that what's on its way? It was about knowing that I wasn't there yet. I hadn't realized what my ambitions were. It made me less insecure and a little bit more hungry." She's not kidding. "I would have done anything on the movie. I would have been any crew member. I would have followed the crew in the car as a fan just to be around it," said Stewart. "Getting to know the woman behind the character -- she's not the main character and you do wonder what kind of person would live like that?" 

"Personality-wise, we're so different. I am just a little bit more locked up and with time, I think that's going to go," says Stewart. "I don't think it's possible to change who you are. "

Hedlund and Stewart's characters have loosely, effortlessly passionate love scenes in the film. "None of them were events. Professionally, from an actor's standpoint, you do what you have to do. I think it's about feeling safe with who you're with and that you're both there for the right reasons," says Stewart. "The only way to do Mary Lou justice was to feel free and natural doing it. It was always easy. It was done so quickly." 

For the actress, the film was a nice break from her blockbuster Twilight series. "I have been pretty lucky. I've gotten to switch things up. Five years of one thing ... it would asinine," says Stewart.And the most important question of the day: why is her finger in a splint? She broke it, shrugs Stewart.

Source | Scan | Via

[On The Road] became the defining document of the so-called Beat Generation of young hipsters in postwar America.

“As a sensitive girl of this time who is maybe a bit more conventional – ha ha – I kind of was curious about how you could have the strength to do the things she did,” Stewart said…. “And it’s not that at all. It takes a lot of strength to be super-vulnerable. She was so so so open to the world.”
….

“If you approach it as a completion of the process, there are things that would never occur to you if you weren’t asked the question,” Stewart said about the interviews. “Sit down and have 10-minute conversations with 15 different people; if you don’t take something from that, you’re a sociopath.”

Hedlund added, “At the end of the day we both know it’s the end of a long road we’ve been on.”
….

Marylou, Stewart’s character…. was really a teenager named Luanne Henderson, but Stewart said she left behind a long record of her thoughts about that era.

There’s no place she [Stewart] would rather be than at the Toronto International Film Festival alongside her colleagues for the adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s 1950s Beat Generation novel, “On the Road.”

Stewart said she never thought about skipping the festival, where the film played ahead of its U.S. theatrical release in December.

She said it was important to be there with director Walter Salles and co-stars that include Kirsten Dunst and Garrett Hedlund, who like Stewart had worked for years to get the film made.

“We have been waiting for this thing to be unleashed for so long. It was sort of one of those situations where you just have to put yourself in your body and go appreciate the moment,” Stewart said in an interview Saturday.

Recalling the film’s world premiere at May’s Cannes Film Festival, Stewart said, “I would have been happy standing at Cannes with the entire theater booing it as long as I was in that row with my cast and with Walter. We would have been fine. I feel so strong with these people, and it’s so appropriate. I belonged there.”

It comes as a shock to see Kristen Stewart curled up in a chair in a Toronto hotel room, looking considerably thinner and less poised than she did at the Cannes Film Festival in May.

The same film is being discussed: On the Road, the Walter Salles adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s totemic 1957 Beat Generation novel, which is receiving its North American premiere at TIFF before a year-end release.

The tense body language of Stewart, 22, says all that needs to be said about how difficult the past four months have been for her.

It would be a mistake, though, to read too much into tabloid headlines. Stewart looked as glamorous on Friday’s Ryerson Theatre red carpet as she did on the scarlet walk outside the Palais des Festivals in Cannes.

And the intense experience of making On the Road, which took years of planning and included “boot camp” readings of Beat writings, couldn’t help but have a transforming effect on all involved. That’s certainly the case for Stewart, and also with co-star Garrett Hedlund, who joined her for an interview with the Star.

“To say that this movie opened me up in a way, sounds really obvious, but it f--king did!” says Stewart, who first read Kerouac’s classic at age 15.

“I’m not just saying this. The book has had such a major effect on who I wanted to be at age 15, which is a pretty important and formidable time.”

Kristen Stewart swears a lot. It’s great; it instantly makes her a human being rather than the tabloid icon she’s unwillingly become at age 22.

Stewart’s come to TIFF to launch On The Road, an adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s classic Beat novel in which she plays Marylou, the sexually adventurous child bride of the charismatic Dean Moriarty. (Yes, there are nude scenes. No, they aren’t explicit.) On the press day, Stewart is paired with Garrett Hedlund, who plays Moriarty. And the two of them were their most animated when they were discussing the freewheeling, improvisational style director Walter Salles encouraged on the shoot.

“There are probably, like, 600 movies within the film that we shot,” Stewart says. “I think the only way to have done this, and be really true to how the book feels, is to not be so connected to [memorizing] lines. I mean, certain things just find their way into your heart, and you’re like, ‘I need to say that. I love that fucking line.’ And that’s fine, as long as you’ve opened yourself up to letting it fall out, rather than trying to do something a certain way.”

The challenge for the actors was keeping themselves in that headspace, which Stewart says she had trouble with.

“I signed a copy of East of Eden last night,” says Kristen Stewart. “I was like, what the …”

You’d have to see her to know she doesn’t believe this herself. There’s the ironic emphasis on Eden. There’s her self-deprecating smile gone awry. There is, in every Stewart interview, a certain undisguised incredulity at the people who’ve made her famous.

In 10 minutes she tells you nothing about herself, but in the inflection of 10 words she says everything.

She isn’t lying about Steinbeck, who is, by the way, her “favourite favourite author.” From the other side of the handrail, I watched her graffiti a fan’s brand-new paperback. Her right stiletto trembled more than her left.

Today, tucked into the Intercontinental Hotel for a round of tape-recorded torture, Stewart is wearing flats. She sits cross-legged and impatient, like a kid on a too-short chair.

Kristen Stewart returned to the public stage this week at the Toronto International Film Festival to promote her work in On the Road. Metro scored one of the actress’ first interviews, and we even got her to answer a few questions from her fans on Twitter.

Q: Given how Dean (played by Garrett Hedlund) treats the women in his life, the story could seem a little unfair for its female characters. Did you ever get the sense that they maybe get short shrift?

That was not an impression that I got when I was younger. You feel for certain losses and certain strife that people have to go through in the book, but at the same time I never felt like there was an injustice because people — women as well — had put themselves in that position. They took just as much as they gave. Especially considering that they’re not the main characters — they’re semi on the periphery, and you’re not completely with them, you’re not inside their heads, you’re not feeling what they’re feeling.

But from an outsider’s perspective, I just think that that’s a fairly misogynistic way to look at it. It’s like a sweet thing — especially a lot of guys say like, “Oh, I just don’t think they’re treated well.” Yeah, but they could take it, and that’s why they were there.