Kristen Stewart talks about her character in Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk movie. The interview is a script long consisting other actors/director part as well. Below are the extracted interview focused on Kristen’s part. If you would like to read more on, kindly click on the source at the bottom.
It seems like one of the main recurrences in both Fountain’s book and in the film is the way in which no two people seem to know what the concept of “supporting the troops” means or entails. How did you approach that?
Kristen Stewart: What I found most interesting about this was that you have [Kathryn, the titular character’s sister], who is essentially a pacifist, but who never expresses her liberalism in any way that isn’t humanitarian. She’s never provoking anyone, and she’s being made to acknowledge a gap that has grown between her and someone that she’s known her entire life but can now no longer hold as close as she has before, because they’re now completely different beings. That changes a person, when you can no longer keep someone close enough to love them and comfort them as much as you want to. You’re so deep inside of something that you’ve never been able to get an exterior perspective on, and is that fair? Can you be proud of that?
It’s very contentious now in modern storytelling: Who can represent whom? How do we responsibly tell the story of others?
KS: I have so much more distance than someone who has served does, yet I still have that same feeling. Can I own my feelings? Do I really understand the situation? I think Kathryn is coming from a place of, “Let’s understand what we’re fighting for.” It’s a personal response, but she’s genuinely worried for him. Because what’s going to happen when his training fades, when the conditioned responses fade and you have to be a human being again who doesn’t necessarily know how to contend with what happened? And further on from that, how do we contend with having put those people there, in that situation?
She’s a different kind of a character than we usually get in stories about military families.
KS: She’s the personification of Question, rather than Opinion.
Source: Nashville Scene
