Imogen Poots on Her Shattering Turn in The Chronology of Water

“It’s strange we didn’t know each other before the film,” says Imogen Poots of Kristen Stewart. “We keep saying to each other that it’s kind of an odd, kismet occurrence.” British-born Poots is the mesmerising lead – and lodestar – in Stewart’s critically acclaimed directorial debut, The Chronology of Water, an adaptation of author Lidia Yuknavitch’s unflinching, impressionistic rendering of an early life shaped by competitive swimming and abuse. Stewart’s take is a gorgeous collage of spoken word and sensorial memory, grounded by Poots’ monumental performance as a young, damaged woman coming of age. Aside from announcing Stewart’s bold directorial vision, and marking a new high in Poots’ superior filmography, The Chronology of Water shows clear signs of becoming this generation’s Girl, Interrupted.    

Playing a character who is often “too much”, Poots in person is just right, charming, wry and passionate about what is obviously a labour of love. Wearing a black lace dress, mermaid-blonde hair loose, the actor is visibly delighted to be talking about the film, as well as her director and – it is fair to say – kindred spirit. “Kristen is known for being a very singular individual, and whatever she was going to make was going to be really exciting,” she remembers, after politely chucking away her gum. “I just wanted to be a part of it so much.” Known for their ferocious, fully embodied acting, as well as a shared love of film and literature, Poots and Stewart seem like an ideal pairing. “It’s really, really special, because I’ve worked with a lot of wonderful people, and there’s room in this town – whatever this town is! – for lots of successful women. It just means a great deal to me that she saw me in the way that she did.”

In her memoir, Yuknavitch writes about love, pregnancy, addiction and the hard road to becoming an author. If the rudiments of the plot sound tough, Stewart and Poots deftly manage pain and artistry in a virtuosic tightrope act, honouring Yuknavitch’s fluid, recursive style over a hypnotic 128 minutes. Poots was similarly struck by the poetic nature of the source material. “I was a real Beat-head in my twenties. It’s kind of a rite of passage, isn’t it?” she says, listing the usual suspects: Kerouac, Burroughs, Ferlinghetti. “But there weren’t many women Beatnik writers, and so I understood what Lidia was trying to get at.” Like the book on which it’s based, the film is a powerful meditation on memory, trauma and release, and a vivid portrayal of what it’s like to occupy – and be occupied by – one’s body.       

Poots is in virtually every scene of the film, supported by a cast of actors including Thora Birch as Yuknavitch’s sister and Jim Belushi as legendary author and early mentor, Ken Kesey. There’s even a cameo from Kim Gordon. “That was amazing, because these are like icons for Kristen and me,” says Poots. Of her co-stars, she says, “Thora’s seen it all. Jim’s seen it all. Kim’s seen it all. And they all wanted in on what Kristen was going to do.” Gordon attended the film’s screening alongside Poots, Stewart and Birch in Cannes last year, making for a powerful quartet on the Croisette. It would be an ask for anyone not to have a fangirl moment. “On the red carpet at Cannes, I had this huge Rodarte gown,” Poots says, of the black dress she wore to the film’s premiere. “I was standing on the carpet, and I was like, ’Oh God, I’ve got to adjust the train,’ and I looked around and Kim Gordon was adjusting the train of my dress. I was like – yeah. That’s it for me.”

With two decades in “this town” now under her belt – her first big role was in the second of the immortal 28 Days Later films, 2007’s 28 Weeks Later – Poots can equally claim to have seen and done it all, too. Peter Bogdanovich, Terrence Malick and Cameron Crowe are just some of the giants she has worked for. Recent projects include the streaming series Outer Range, alongside her dear friend and mentor Lili Taylor, last year’s sweeping speculative romance All of You, and Nia DaCosta’s sumptuous adaptation of Hedda Gabler, in which she plays Tessa Thompson’s rival. An A24 project from Jeremy Saulnier, who directed Poots and her late friend Anton Yelchin in 2015’s Green Room, was announced last year. Twenty years after she started out, her heart is still in independent films, though she acknowledges that it’s not like it once was. “If I look at the career of Michelle Williams after Dawson’s Creek, she worked with Kelly Reichardt, Tom McCarthy and Derek Cianfrance. I do think that’s starting to happen again, which is really cool, but there was a period of time where it was very much dominated by just studio pictures,” she says. “I think that independent cinemas and original ideas are resurfacing again in a really exciting way.”

The pride she feels in The Chronology of Water is equal to the work that went into its intensive six-week shoot. “The stakes were really high, and I didn’t want to let my girl down,” she says. The team evolved into something like a family (Poots’ Instagram is peppered with comments from Gordon, Belushi and Esmé Creed-Miles – daughter of Samantha Morton – who has a small but heart-rending role in the film). “We all became very, very close. And so there was kind of a grief period after we shot the film. Even though it was very, very hard to make, it was quite a transcendent experience in terms of what this job is.” It was a hard role to come down from, though Poots is no stranger to challenging roles and complex shoots (she’s filmed in the West Bank, after all, for Farah Nabulsi’s 2023 film, The Teacher). “Your body is different, and you’ve rewired your brain, essentially, by the end of a job like that,” she says, of this particular experience. For an actor devoted to their craft, though, the rewards are heroic. “It’s just such an exposing part that you want to calibrate it correctly. But then, in a world full of rules and trying to get things right, it was actually amazing to have this chance to just be a mess, because that’s what it is to live a life, I think.”

The Chronology of Water is out in UK cinemas now.