Q&A: Kristen Stewart on body horror, Cronenberg and Cannes

By JAKE COYLE
AP Film Writer

CANNES, France (AP) — In David Cronenberg’s “Crimes of the Future,” in which an artist played by Viggo Mortensen has organs and tumors plucked from his body in performance art excavations, Kristen Stewart plays a timid bureaucrat swiftly turned passionate devotee. In Cronenberg’s film, a Cannes Film Festival entry opening June 3 in theaters, Stewart’s character, breathlessly excited by what she’s witnessed, transforms into a fan and, maybe, an artist. It’s a literally gut-wrenching film thick with metaphorical meaning about art making that Stewart says she deeply connects with. Pain, she says, is “the most cathartic pleasure.”