Kristen Stewart Slams Studio System Before Full Phil Cannes Premiere
Kristen Stewart is heading into Cannes with Quentin Dupieux’s Full Phil and a blunt message for the U.S. studio system. In an interview from an airport lounge in the Canary Islands, she said she is “so sick” of the system while preparing for the film’s Midnight Screenings debut on Saturday night.
That matters because Stewart is not speaking from the sidelines. She is already in week one of shooting Panos Cosmatos’ Flesh of the Gods in the Canary Islands, and she is moving straight from that set to a Cannes premiere that puts an unusual, one-hour-and-20-minute film in front of one of the festival’s most visible late-night audiences.
Dupieux and a quick shoot
Stewart said she was ready to sign on to Full Phil before she even read the script. She described Dupieux as a French filmmaker whose absurd, surreal style makes his films feel unlike anyone else’s, and said she wants to follow directors like that because “those are the types of directors that actors are so lucky to be able to follow.”
She also pointed to the pace of his work. “That’s the Quentin Dupieux special because he shoves a lot into that short period of time,” Stewart said, adding that he shoots quickly on a microbudget and knows how he will cut the film by the end of the day. That operating style is part of the appeal here: an actor choosing speed and control over the slower machinery she clearly has little patience for.
Woody Harrelson in Paris
Full Phil follows an American father-daughter duo played by Woody Harrelson and Stewart as they travel to Paris trying to reconnect. Their plans get derailed by protests, a nosy hotel employee, an obsession with a 1950s horror movie and French cuisine, which gives the film a compact comic frame rather than a sprawling one.
Stewart said she had been trying to work with Harrelson for years, and that they first hung out when she was a teenager. She remembered him taking her to a vegan spot in the valley, and said they became friends when she was “kind of a kiddo.” That history gives the casting a built-in familiarity the film can use without needing any big setup.
Cannes Midnight Screenings
Full Phil runs for one hour and 20 minutes and is set to debut in the Midnight Screenings section on Saturday night. Stewart said, “I just wanted to work in Paris and I wanted to meet that director,” and described the film as “a sweet story about a father and daughter trying to reconnect.”
The sharper edge came when she turned to the industry around it: “There needs to be less making billionaires more f—ing billionaires.” That is the line that will travel beyond Cannes, because it turns a festival appearance into a public rebuke of the studio model at the exact moment she has a film built outside it. Stewart sounds done asking permission, and Full Phil looks like the kind of small, fast, director-driven project she wants more of.
