Joan Talks About KStew

Q: How involved were you with the casting? What was your reaction when you found out that Kristen Stewart was cast as you?

Joan: All I said to the casting people was, "It'd be really good if you could get teenagers because I think that makes a difference in the energy. Even though those few years changes things." Once I heard Kristen was cast, and that was a few months after Twilight came out, I had actually seen her in Panic Room and one other thing that I can't remember, and I was not colored by the fact that she was the one in Twilight. I didn't have a preconceived notion of her, so I was just really into it. I thought it was great. And, once I met her, I felt very relieved because I could really tell she wasn't just taking it for a gig, to just get through it. She was committed and really wanted to be authentic.

Q: How did you help these actresses get to be who you guys were, two decades ago?

Joan: I think a lot of the credit has to go to the actual actors because they did their own level of research. They watched any You Tube videos they were able to find of all of us, Kim [Fowley] included. For me, I met Kristen [Stewart] last New Year's Eve. She came up to see a gig, right before she started filming New Moon. We had one day together just to talk, and I dumped on her for a few hours about The Runaways, what it meant to me and how important it was, and just all sorts of little details I might not tell anybody else.

I asked her if she was going to cut her hair and she said, "Yes," and right away that gave me a sense of commitment because that's a lot of hair. It's a very intense hair-cut that. It's not just a regular hair-cut. I knew she was going to take shit for it, but I thought that it showed a level of commitment.

I burned her all The Runaways CDs, along with several bootlegs from live shows, in Cleveland in ‘76, The Whiskey and The Starwood, which was a club here, that's gone now, so she could hear the on-stage banter and the audience yelling. I gave her some tapes of me talking, as a 14-year-old, because I had a very Maryland/Pennsylvania drawl. Whether or not she got a chance to utilize that wasn't important. It was about just having that for her own self, so she could listen and see who I was. But, she also listened to those records and studied on her own because, when we finally did get together about three weeks before filming started, we didn't have any time. We went to the studio and she had studied everything.

Q: What sort of moves did you teach Kristen?

Joan: It was everything: the way I stand, how low the guitar is, the bar chords that I played, as opposed to the other kind of chords. That's a specific look. And, depending on the song, there might have been some choreography. I would tell her, "I'd go up towards the audience here and move forward and back, as opposed to standing back by the amp." It would be my nature to go towards the audience. Little things like that.

And then, we had a little bit of time to read the script. I'd read all the parts and all the action, just so she could hear me talk and move, and see how I reacted. I could feel her watching me and my mannerisms. We're a lot alike. in our regular energy, so that was very helpful. When you'd see the two of us in the trailer, we'd both be doing the same thing without even planning on it. It was really weird and surreal, but in a good way. It was a very pleasant experience.

Q: Why did it mean so much to you that Kristen was willing to cut her hair for the role?

Joan: It did, just because it showed commitment. I think it's a lot easier to embody it and feel it when you're in the hair. If you're going to the set every day and having the hair put on, you'll feel like it, but when you live in it and you're waking up in the morning and that's your hair, it's one tiny element that helps. I don't know if it helped her or not, but it showed me a level of commitment. It shows me what I would have done had I been an actor. I would have wanted to do something like that to embody it.

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