Outside of a certain franchise, confident Kristen Stewart continues to work outside the box, whether she’s an underage hooker in “Welcome to the Rileys” or her ferocious portrayal of Joan Jett in “The Runaways”, both of which premiered at Sundance.

Paul Fischer caught up with the actress in a Park City hotel room where they discussed “The Runaways”, bloggers and a certain eclipse of the sun.

Question: Kristen what did you see in Joan Jett that made you want to do “The Runaways” and do you see parallels between the pair of you?

Stewart: Yeah, I guess there would be. We have been professional at a young age, which is hard, but her in such a different way. For me the biggest adversity I face is like bloggers, while she had people throwing bottles in her face and saying like “Sit down, you ugly loud mouth”. To see how assured she is now and to know that she wasn’t always like that, actually took a lot.

What she has now is actually a really, really, really thick developed armor and you see that happen in the movie hopefully, or at least that’s how I felt. That’s what I wanted to do. It’s like – hardened but it’s like she’s not very in tune with herself. I think she’s really cool. She’s really honest and it’s a self-preservation sort of a thing, she’s a survivor. At the same time, she demands to live her life the way she’d like to. She’s just a very smart inspiring person.

Question: Talk about working with the guitar in this, because there are specific moves that Joan has, and a way of working with her instrument.

Stewart: We all had two weeks that we had band practice, where all the girls came in and they played the song that we recorded. I think that there were five or six songs that we did, that we had to have down. They played them over a speaker, but then we were actually trying to play as a band to it.

Question: Was it hard?

Stewart: Yeah. It’s exhausting, especially with the guitar, but it was fun. I mean there’s an okay amount of footage that you can see them and their performances, but there’s not an abundance and they’re all sort of fuzzy.

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In the midst of an interview about her new film Welcome to the Rileys, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this past weekend, Kristen Stewart’s cellphone, buried under a pile of puffy, winter garb, begins going off.

Stewart, who is dressed in all-black (sweatshirt, leggings, boots), is sitting on an immense leather sofa between director Jake Scott (son of Ridley) and co-star Melissa Leo (Frozen River), burrowing deeper in the confined space she always seems to create around her. Her head—hair dyed black in a jagged cut—is down, like a shy child. Her leg is tapping nervously.

Suddenly, she bolts upward and leaps in the direction of the buzzing contraption.

“Oh, shut up! I’m busy—Shut the fuck up!” she cries to no one in particular.

After silencing the phone, she returns to the sofa. “Sorry, Jake,” she says softly, and returns to what seems like her most comfortable stance: self-protected coil.

It is this nervous, very wired, “twitchy”—as she puts it—energy that has come to define Stewart. She is best known as the female lead in Twilight, the blockbuster vampire franchise, which has made her an unlikely star of both movies and tabloids. But with the Sundance debuts of two new films—Rileys and The Runaways, in which Stewart plays iconic rocker Joan Jett—Stewart is becoming known as something else: Indie “It” Girl.

Read the rest…

Photos from Saturday’s Joan Jett concert have been added to the gallery and you can read the accompanying article below as well.

Gallery Link: 01.23.10: Joan Jett Concert/Interluxe Lounge

Rock pioneer Joan Jett played a special Saturday night set at the Sundance Film Festival in celebration of “The Runaways,” the upcoming film about her ’70s L.A. all-girl rock band of the same name that had its festival premiere Sunday night. Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning, the film’s stars, joined Jett on stage.

A private reception sponsored by SPIN, Blackheart Records, Apparition, and FLO TV was held at the Interluxe Lounge just before the show.

It was fitting that Jett ignited her set at Park City’s Harry O’s with “Bad Reputation,” one of the biggest hits of her solo career. She followed with her No. 1 charting anthem “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll” and her ode to self-loathing, “I Hate Myself for Loving You.”

The standing-room-only audience joined Jett with boisterous screams and shouts of “Oh! Yeah!” during the sassy “Do You Wanna Touch” and gave the stuttering “ch-ch-ch’s” during Jett’s kiss-off version of “Cherry Bomb.”

The audience included Jett’s former Runaways bandmate Cherie Currie, whose book “Neon Angels: the Cherie Currie Story” was the basis for the film. Jett asked Currie to take a bow and also invited Fanning and Stewart, who portray Currie and herself, respectively, to join the band onstage.

“I think they did a great job,” Jett said, while striking the opening chords to The Runaways’ “You Drive Me Wild.”

Read the rest @ Spin.com

Reviews for “The Runaways” and Kristen’s performance have begun to flow in. Check out a few excerpts below — so good to see her get good reviews across the board!

Breaking free from the shackles of Bella, Kristen Stewart finally breaks loose delivering a stunning performance that covers a wide range of the acting spectrum yet achieved in a way that is far from self-conscious. Her Jett is ferociously angry, anti-establishment, fragile, sexual and exquisitely vulnerable as a girl desperately running away from a life that is conservative at a time when America was undergoing such pivotal change and not necessarily for the better. Stewart is phenomenal, a powerhouse proving how incredibly talented and multi faceted she is. Read the rest…

Stewart as Joan Jett physically embodies the role and curses and growls as the part demands. Read the rest…

Stewart’s no-frills, casually likable performance begins with Jett’s distinctive tough-girl saunter — which is to say, the actress knows just how to walk like a skinny dude. Read the rest…

…at times you’ll feel like you’re watching documentary footage from the era as Stewart and Fanning are really playing and singing in the film, and they both deliver inspired performances. Read the rest…

Though sometimes her usual neurotic tics distract, “Twilight’s” Stewart is a good fit for the tough but good-natured Jett, who carried on as frontwoman after Currie left, then launched a far more successful solo career. Read the rest…

Keep checking the gallery for the latest adds!

Here’s a fantastic interview from Hitfix for you today in which Kristen discusses the importance of portraying Joan Jett.

When it comes down to playing a beloved real life character versus a beloved fictional one, Kristen Stewart declares herself Team Joan over Team Bella. Stewart, who plays Joan Jett in the new biopic “The Runaways,” says she felt a tremendous personal responsibility to capture Jett’s essence.

“Bella’s effect on the world wasn’t necessarily as great as Joan’s, obviously, and I never got to meet Bella,” Stewart said. “It’s completely different. All these people who have an investments in these women, that’s awesome…but when it becomes personal and it’s my responsibility to not destroy, like, what people are going to take from the most important part of my friend’s life… Joan has become really, a really big part. She’s awesome and I really love her. If we hadn’t told the story right, people don’t know the Runaways in our generation. Because they’re going to see them through us, it’s a much different experience than making an original fictional story.”
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I thought I’d post these before the new stuff from another busy day for Kristen at Sundance begins. Kristen’s performance in Welcome To The Rileys and the movie itself have received many great reviews. Find links to read them below. Also, another picture from inside the premiere of the movie has been added to the gallery. Enjoy!

Gallery Link: 01.23.10: “Welcome to the Rileys” Sundance Premiere

WTTR Reviews:
Hollywood & Fine
Variety
The Hollywood Reporter
Risky Business
MTV

LA Times Blog have posted a great review on Welcome To The Rileys and Kristen’s performance.

By some strange cosmic fluke, Kristen Stewart portrays a 16-year-old runaway in both of the movies in which she appears at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

In the drama “Welcome to the Rileys,” which premiered Saturday afternoon at an industry-heavy screening at the Racquet Club Theater, the “New Moon Saga” superstar portrays someone quite unlike “Twilight’s” long-suffering vampire-lover Bella Swan. That would be Mallory, a stripper-hooker with a penchant for wearing X-shaped pasties and G-strings (and sometimes no undies at all) with fishnet stockings who makes repeated references to the state of her “private parts” and sexual acts in language not suitable for publication in a family (or even PG-13-rated) blog.

Although her “Rileys” character initially claims to be 22, it is eventually revealed that Mallory ran away at an age when most teens are first getting a drivers license to live in semi-squalor in New Orleans, where she works in a French Quarter strip club in which she charges a little extra for more personal contact.

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