Georgia's not willing to succumb to the disease before she has sex with a boy, and it doesn't matter if love is involved or not. Enter Beagle Kimbrough (played by Aaron Stanford). Georgia sets her sights on Beagle, and Georgia is nothing if not determined to have her way.
Stewart was immediately attracted to The Cake Eaters script which was written by Jayce Bartok (who appears in the film as Beagle's big brother). "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," explained Stewart. "Any time you feel like a responsibility for the characters, like you don't want to let them down, any time they're whole enough to want to give a month of your life to, then obviously it's something to do."
Playing a character with Friedrich's Ataxia meant Stewart had to figure out how to physically convey the disease's affects on her character. "I was so intimidated by the character that I didn't start any physicality before literally the first day of shooting," said Stewart at the film's LA press day. "I just couldn't stop thinking about it. Mary Stuart set me up with a lot of material and information. Sam and Alex Bode…they're 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."
"I don't know. I was just sort of obsessed with it for maybe three weeks prior and then delved into it very, like, impulsively. It was just something that I had to wrap my head around. I couldn't physically do it until the day we started shooting because it felt cheap. Like I just felt like I was faking something. Until it was actually real, in the moment, we were actually doing it and I was actually portraying this person and feel like I had to, then it felt right to do. But before that I just didn't feel right. It just felt strange."
It wasn't difficult to get into the mindset of a 15 year old girl with a devastating disease who wants to experience sex at least once before she dies, says Stewart. "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."
As for working with a first-time feature film director, albeit one who is an accomplished actress who's been acting in films since way before Stewart was born, Stewart had nothing but compliments for Masterson's handling of the production. "She's very, very, and this is going to sound way cold, facilitating. Like the most nurturing. She really creates an environment for you that you just feel like you're in the best position to give as much as you can possibly give. And she's a really good, it sounds kind of lame, but she's really one of the most amazing role models I've ever had. She's very ambitious and I should learn from that."
Asked what she hopes audiences will take away from The Cake Eaters, Stewart said, "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."
Looking Into the Future
In addition to the second film of the Twilight series, New Moon, Stewart's going to be acting in her mother's directorial debut at some point down the line. "I've worked on the script with her a little bit, so we have delved into it in that sense of just writing. But it's called K11. Hopefully, I mean, this year for me has gotten really insane and absolutely psychotic, but hopefully next year, maybe in January, that's when we hope to do the movie," said Stewart."It's about a dorm that isn't widely known called K11 that is located in LA County Jail. It's specifically for the sort of people that can't be put into general population. They need to be protected because they would be subject to a lot of danger in normal [cells]. They're an eclectic bunch of people. There are famous people, gay people, cross dressers, trannies, and it's a story about this guy who finds himself in that dorm and he integrates himself into this sort of hierarchy and then breaks out of it a couple weeks later. It's just that two weeks of his life in this world of really sort of damaged but functioning family of people."
And who would she be playing? "I play a young girl who's not a girl and her name is Butterfly and she's autistic and that's it, that's Butterfly. That's it," revealed Stewart.
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The Cake Eaters hits theaters on March 13, 2009.
