Kristen Stewart thinks she has been shown more respect as a director than an actress.

The Twilight actress has helmed her first feature film, The Chronology of Water, and has found that while promoting the project, people speak to her "like somebody with a brain", but female screen stars are often just treated "like puppets".

She told The Sunday Times' Culture magazine: "Actresses get treated like s***, I've got to tell you.

"People think anyone could be an actress, but the first time I sat down to talk about my movie as a director, I thought, wow, this is a different experience, they are talking to me like I'm somebody with a brain.

"There's this idea that directors have otherworldly abilities, which is not true. It's an idea perpetuated by men. Not to sound like I'm complaining all the time, but it's worse for female actors than male ones -- they get treated like puppets, but they are not."

The Chronology of Water stars Imogen Poots as a competitive swimmer whose father sexually abused her and her elder sister and Kristen doesn't think a man would have made the film.

Asked if she thought she'd have found it easier to get funding if she was male, she said: "If I was a man I wouldn't have made this movie.

"We have to deny our physicality every single day and there is so much -- like birth -- that is so painful and also quite beautiful, but we don't share it because it is uncomfortable and icky.

"We've been pushed out of the canon in terms of expression. I wanted to speak to a world designed to silence women. We have to push people out of the way to get our experience seen and that p**** people off."

The 35-year-old star believes no women adopt a Method acting approach to their work because they don't feel the need to make their profession seem harder than it is.

She said: "I was talking to a male actor I really love,. And I said there are no female Method actors because Method acting is an acrobatic performance to make acting seem like a feat that it is not. I think acting is just playing pretend; you don't have to do 50 press-ups before a take.

"As soon as I made the distinction between male and female actors, he became defensive and said he had never met an actress that wasn't crazy.

"A couple of years ago a comment like that would have made me turn red in the face, my ears would have started steaming and I would have seemed exactly like what he wanted me to seem like -- an angry woman.

"Instead I just continued and got to the end of my thought. Getting older is great because you can achieve a calm."