By Fred Topel | Image property of respective holders
The Cake Eaters
Now that she’s a major star from Twilight, distributors are eager to pick up all the little indie movies she made before. The Cake Eaters is one beneficiary of her blockbuster success. She plays Georgia, a 15-year-old suffering from a terminal muscular disorder, trying to lose her virginity before she succumbs to the disease.
Kristen Stewart on The Cake Eaters
“I was so intimidated by the character that I didn't start any physicality before literally the first day of shooting,” Stewart said. “I just couldn't stop thinking about it. [Director] Mary Stuart [Masterson] set me up with a lot of material and information, Sam and Alex, two girls that have the disease and were too generous. I mean, really an amazing family they have. They recorded a lot of video of themselves speaking and Mary Stuart interviewing them.”
Aside from the physical condition, the character was obvious on the page. “I have to say, the movie starts out and her objective is clear. She's definitely after something but I feel like she's smart enough to realize that if she didn't find in him what she finds, then she wouldn't have gone through with it. I don't think she's just finding a weak person to conquer. They fill each other up in a way that they just never had before. It's hard to define exactly why people click. They find solace in each other. That's the thing.”
Despite her inevitable fate, Stewart sees The Cake Eaters as a positive tale. “The one thing that the movie has is an unabashedly outward sense of hope. It's a very positive movie, which is commendable considering it's about a girl who's going to die before she reaches the age of normal consensual sex. Anyway, so that's commendable. That's a feat in itself. Hopefully they can take from it real characters that actually affected them. If they can put faith in characters for a good hour and a half, that says something.”
So seek out The Cake Eaters in its limited release. “It's a really quaint little movie but it is so madly triumphant in a way that there aren't big story points. It's not like a whole lot happens but somehow at the end of the movie, you feel like these people really accomplished something. Any time you feel like a responsibility for the characters, like you don't want to let th
Add to Heffee!
