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

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 deeply connects with. It’s appropriate, too, that the film again brought Stewart to Cannes, a prime platform for Stewart’s own transformations for the last decade.

“There is a certain commitment to what feels like radical art here that is so unabashed and audacious and so sort of arrogant in a beautiful way,” Stewart says on a rooftop terrace overlooking Cannes’ Croisette. “Nobody has to defer and say, ‘Well, I guess