Kristen Stewart

Great.

How are you?

It was the way that she told it.

It was the fact of the telling.

There is an invitation in that text to kind of excavate your own memories.

And also it's about the things that you just mentioned, but for me, it's much less about the things that happened to Lydia and much more about how she reorients those things and writes them down.

The idea of selfhood, just the idea of diaristic writing by women feeling and being criticized for being like selfish and narcissistic.

It's like, oh, sorry, I was being selfish.

I wanted a self.

It's like anytime you start talking about yourself, it becomes kind of this tired, pathetic, messy thing.

And I wanted to make something tired, pathetic and messy that felt exuberant and achieved and, you know, encouraging.

As soon as you start making those things specific, you fully and completely dilute the point.

In the beginning of the movie, we show a series of images of a woman bleeding at various times in her life.

There's a way that that blood sticks to the grout before it runs down the drain that indicates that that did not come from a laceration or a cut.

It came from an orifice.

That is a very, very specific experience, but it is also general enough for everyone to kind of insert their lives

into the movie if you are a woman or if you might have ever loved a woman or heard her speak about what it feels like to bleed from the place that hurts the most but that creates life.

The movie is called Tough because when you reduce it to these specific plot points,

it provides an arena for men to feel a lot of shame.

And you don't have, it's honestly quite like, it's very self-revealing because sometimes I talk to people like, is the thing that you took away from this not that it's an exuberant, bloodletting, telling, secret, bearing, sort of like joyous celebration of a woman finding herself in her own volition and freedom?