Kristen Stewart will star as feminist writer Susan Sontag in Sontag, an upcoming biopic with a metafictional twist. Documentarian Kirsten Johnson will direct. Screen Daily reports that the film will actually begin filming at this month's Berlin International Film Festival, where Stewart heads this year's international jury, and will open with documentary footage of the actor discussing the role before moving on to chronicle the events of Sontag's life.
Says producer Gabrielle Tana, "It will be a drama, but with a documentary aspect to it. Kirsten has a wonderful approach to storytelling, and this is reflective of that, so she will use documentary in it." It will be Stewart's latest role as a prominent woman, having played Jean Seberg in Seberg and Princess Diana in Spencer in recent years; she received an Oscar nomination for the latter.
Sontag, who died in 2004, was a prolific essayist, novelist, and cultural critic; she opposed the Vietnam War, quantified the concept of camp in her essay Notes on "Camp", and broke down the barriers between criticism of so-called "high" and "low" culture. She courted controversy wherever she went, criticizing US foreign policy, highlighting government inaction on the AIDS crisis, and supporting Salman Rushdie after he was subjected to a fatwa; she was also open about her bisexuality at a time when that was uncommon.
After breaking out in the Twilight films (which Sontag would likely have considered prime examples of camp), Stewart has been associated with a number of daring and prestigious films, including Clouds of Sils Maria, Personal Shopper, and Still Alice. Last year, she starred in David Cronenberg's return to body horror, Crimes of the Future. She can next be seen in the A24 romantic thriller Love Lies Bleeding, and is also slated to make her feature directorial debut with The Chronology of Water.
Johnson began her career as a documentary cinematographer, shooting films like the Edward Snowden doc Citizenfour and the genocide chronicle Darfur Now. She has since directed two documentaries of her own; the autobiographical Cameraperson, and Dick Johnson is Dead, a blackly comic meditation on her father's decline and death. Sontag will be her first narrative feature. Sontag is based on Benjamin Moser's exhaustive 2019 biography, Sontag: Her Life and Work, and will be adapted for the screen by Johnson and Lisa Kron. Tana, of Brouhaha Entertainment, will produce.
Sontag will shoot this year in Berlin, California, Paris, New York, and Sarajevo. Stay tuned to Collider for future updates.