Kristen Stewart has signed up for another biopic. The former Twilight star who portrayed '60s actress Jean Seberg in 2019's Seberg and Princess Diana in 2021's Spencer, is now going to portray influential author Susan Sontag.
First reported by Screen Daily, the project is being helmed by Kirsten Johnson based on the book Sontag: Her Life by Ben Moser. Johnson and Lisa Kron will write the script with filming scheduled to begin at the Berlin Film Festival where Stewart is the jury president.
Australia-based Brouhaha Entertainment will back the film.
This is Johnson's first feature film. She's best known as the documentary filmmaker behind 2016's Cameraperson and 2020's Dick Johnson is Dead, the critically acclaimed project about her octogenarian father's impending mortality. She won a special jury award at Sundance and earned an Emmy for directing the film.
Johnson's documentary experience will be highlighted in the Sontag biopic.
"We're using Berlin as a moment to kick off the project and do documentary footage of Kristen as the head of the jury and talking to her about how she's going to become Sontag," Brouhaha Entertainment founder Gabrielle Tana told Screen Daily. "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."
Sontag was a noted essayist who identified as Jewish and queer and had relationships with both men and women in her lifetime. The author of 17 books, she wrote fiction and non-fiction but was well known for her essays on controversial topics like the Vietnam War, social justice, and the AIDS epidemic long before writing about those issues was commonplace.
Sontag and the photographer Annie Leibovitz had a lengthy relationship, though neither ever explicitly confirmed whether it was romantic or professional.
Sontag died of cancer at age 71 in 2004.