Kristen Stewart looks like a new woman. Yes, it’s an odd thing to say about a 24-year-old, but the steely-eyed Angeleno isn’t your typical twenty-something. At age 11, she tackled a pivotal seizure sequence for David Fincher in Panic Room with such ferocity that she burst several blood vessels in her eyes. “She reminded me of a young Jodie Foster,” said Fincher. She’s been forged in the crucible of Hollywood, enduring a polarizing film franchise (Twilight), tabloid controversy, and incessant scrutiny—and emerged all the wiser. 

These days, she’s decidedly more Joan Jett than Bella Swan.

Stewart’s just emerged from her slumber and met me at the lobby lounge of the Greenwich Hotel, a hipper-than-thou hotel in Downtown New York, looking effortlessly striking in a baggy white T—exposing a right forearm tattoo of the illuminated eye in Picasso’s Guernica—black jeans, and short, dark hair. She got the bit of body art after wrapping Clouds of Sils Maria, a Swiss-set surrealist flick helmed by French master Olivier Assayas and also starring Juliette Binoche. It’s one of three indie films that’s earned Stewart heavy acclaim on the festival circuit, along with her gripping turn as a daughter struggling to cope with her mother’s  (Julianne Moore) deterioration from Alzheimer’s in Still Alice, for which she’ll receive a “major Oscar push” from distributor Sony Pictures Classics, and last but not least, as PFC Amy Cole, a green guard at Guantánamo in Camp X-Ray, in theaters Oct. 17. 

In Camp X-Ray, her guard is initially happy to serve her country in the wake of 9/11, but after observing the treatment of the prisoners there, and striking up an unlikely friendship with one of the detainees (Peyman Maadi, A Separation), she begins to have a change of heart.

After ordering coffee, we discuss her resurgence.

Camp X-Ray was shot on a shoestring budget of $1 million, but it looks much bigger than that.

It’s weird to say that the scope of it is pretty small considering what you see, but if you think about it, we had essentially three locations and shot it in 20 days. The key to the budget is it was so fast and we just gunned it.

It had been two years since you shot your last film, Snow White and the Huntsman. Were you being extra picky in the wake of Twilightbecause you knew you were under the microscope?

I’m never really that precious about choosing projects that don’t have every sure element that is a guaranteed good experience and/or success. There’s a lot of risk involved in this job, and it doesn’t bother me. This could’ve been a terrible movie! It could’ve been awful. It’s with a first-time director. But I still would’ve gotten what I got out of it had the movie not turned out as well as it did.