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For Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun, the A.I. indie romance “Love Me” is almost indescribable — and that’s partly what makes the film resonate the most.
“Love Me,” which marks married directors Andy and Sam Zuchero‘s feature debut, premiered at Sundance 2024 and is now in select theaters. Stewart and Yeun play a disembodied couple over the course of a billion years: Stewart is a buoy named Me who then adopts the physicality of since-deceased Instagram influencer Deja in a post-apocalyptic world. Yeun is satellite Iam, who takes on the role of Deja’s husband Leo as the duo re-enact a series of YouTube videos.
Yet even the two lead stars couldn’t classify exactly what kind of film “Love Me” is.
“I think the movie itself is just, in a very cool way, really hard to pin down,” Stewart said, citing the various transformations of her character. “I think that’s the point. It’s very hard to define. It’s hard to do interviews about it. It was hard to talk about on set. We were always wondering if we were having the same conversation, like existential spiral stuff, and that’s, like, totally why we make movies. I just thought it was kind of a breath of fresh air.”
Stewart called the Zucheros’ script a “beautiful diving board” to portray how “desperate” people are to connect. And the best way of showing people struggling with that was to have the two leads be, well, not people.
“I wanted to be in a movie that starts off as just a lonely voice, and then finally sort of breaks away into some silly cartoon — which being a human often feels like — and then you go a little further, and you have weird makeup on,” Stewart said of why she joined the project. “You’re sort of doing an odd, human impression, and by the end, we’re shooting in 35mm, and we’re touching each other for real. I thought that was just such an interesting kind of experience to have. […] It just really prods at what it is to connect and how desperate we are to do so, with all of the shape-shifting we do in order to get close to each other and our own sense of self. It felt so daring to me, acknowledging that the truth is so transient instead of trying to make some groundbreaking statement.”
Production came with a few surprises for Steven Yeun once he realized just how abstract the film would be. An actual buoy and satellite were built by Laird FX for the film, with both Stewart and Yeun also having scenes in motion-capture suits for the animated portions. “Sims” and “Where the Wild Things Are” were among the inspirations for how the animation was later created.
As co-director Sam Zuchero told IndieWire in 2023, both actors were filmed for a month on a soundstage, which Yeun now recalled having some trepidation about.
‘Love Me’Bleecker Street“I remember getting into setting up my character, and I didn’t consider this until I got there, but there was already a set of limitations that existed for my particular character and as the actor,” Yeun said. “I was like, ‘Wait, how come I’m limited to these particular wardrobe choices and these particular constraints?’ Then I was like, ‘Oh, because so is Iam, and so is Leo.’ He’s limited to these constraints because he’s a part of this tandem in which there’s a dynamic happening. There was just this meta that kind of spilled out in this beautiful way. This is an exploration that keeps going. It doesn’t pin itself down, and I feel like it’s just this eternal mirror that hopefully just keeps resonating, but in the meantime, I’m still trying to figure out what it all means.”
Both Yeun and Stewart, though, assure that “Love Me” does not mean to make a statement about the politics of artificial intelligence.
“I don’t want to get too much into the weeds of some sort of like statement. I don’t think we’re planning on making that,” Yeun said. “If anything for me, I’ll just say personally, as a reflection of going through a project like this and just kind of seeing the world change, I don’t know if you can co-sign AI. I think if anything, AI feels like something that’s revealing to me what we embody. We embody AI most of the time. I think that’s what it’s revealing to me, and what was so fascinating and fun and scary about exploring the topic that we were in this movie is that what is ultimately human will spill forward. I really just think it just becomes this mirror.”
Stewart, however, admitted she is afraid of the lengths AI could go to.
“Artificial intelligence is smarter than us. I don’t know that we have the capacity to contemplate it enough. I certainly don’t have a grasp on its potential,” Stewart said. “I know it scares me. I feel like it’s listening now. I don’t even want to mention it.”
She continued, “I feel like it’s so egotistical also to sort of deem what is alive. We’re just growing out of the earth. We are like fucking organic material, and I don’t really know where the line is between what is natural and unnatural. It’s really not something I think the movie actually touches on in a literal sense. I feel it’s so much more emotional and human than that. I think the movie is totally a metaphor. It’s a kind of elaborate hypothetical that gets us onto an interesting thought process that is self-reflective. And, in terms of the AI thing, the movie actually brought me more into my body and less into the idea that we are becoming computers or that we might be melding or how we integrate. Blah blah blah blah blah.”
‘Love Me’Courtesy Everett CollectionStewart did know, though, that there were bound to be memes made out of “Love Me.”
“My friend, after they watched the movie the other day, said that we definitely won’t escape a certain [scene]. They predicted that a meme would be created for ‘I’m not even a buoy anymore!’ It’s so, so serious and earnest at the end and super emotional. Like, ‘Oh my God, what the fuck is this movie?'”
And that viral influencer dupe actually brings Stewart “great, great joy” to watch.
“The two of us [with Yeun] looking like that, it’s such an uncanny valley experience,” Stewart said. “It’s not wrong. I don’t know, it looks like AI. It looks like someone did that to us. And I’m like, ‘Oh, what a glimpse into an alternate reality. How weird. It could have been.'”
Yeun added that he’s actually been steering clear of the internet’s reactions to the film.
“I actually haven’t seen any of that,” he said. “I’ve been trying to be off [social media] for a while. Luckily, my kids are too young to send it to me because they’re not on it, but I am cringing at the thought of this, but also, kind of, maybe it’ll be cool. I have no idea.”
After “Love Me,” Stewart is focusing on getting her feature directorial debut, “The Chronology of Water,” which shot in summer 2024, into a festival. Stewart adapted the film from writer Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir about her transformative experiences as a swimmer; Imogen Poots leads the indie, with Scott Free Productions among the backers. “The Chronology of Water” has been in the works since 2018.
Yeun has another long-awaited film finally out as well: Bong Joon Ho’s “Mickey 17,” led by Stewart’s fellow “Twilight” alum Robert Pattinson.
“I love director Bong,” Yeun said. “I’m just excited for people to see his giant dive into the deepest depths of creative consciousness, you know, the things that he pulls out, the things that he lets go of, the way that he surfs … where he’s able to like put his touch and then also just completely leave his hands up … It’s truly admirable. I’m excited for the world to get to see this.”
Yeun also stayed mum about a possible return to “Beef” or a cameo for the upcoming Season 2, which he’s executive-producing.
“Season 2, I’m more hush-hush about that,” Yeun said, adding that he would love to work with creator Lee Sung “Sunny” Jin again. And Stewart.
“I say that now like because you’re on the call and also because I really feel that way, Kristen, like that’d be so fun to do another one [together],” he said.
Stewart agreed, saying, “I’m not being performative, but … I have a shortlist. I’m coming for you, like, we’re gonna fucking work together. We have work to do.”
“Love Me” is now in select theaters from Bleecker Street.
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