Emma Stone _ 'Trains, Planes, _ Automobiles', _Comedy Saved Me as a Kid_ _ Close Up With THR

Do you remember what made you decide to go into acting? My, well, just my teacher putting me in the first grade play and it was all fifth graders and I was the only first grader, which felt so cool because everyone was so much older than me. So I was like, oh, I'm cool up here. And then I, and then I felt like I had an outlet in a way and it was just so, so incredible. And then doing youth theatre, I was, I felt the same. When I wanted to do theatre, I thought, I thought that would be what I, what I would do. And then I wasn't, you know, the most excellent singer or dancer in the world. So I realized I couldn't do much Broadway. But it's funny to be here talking about a musical. Yeah, exactly. But I was like, I'm never going to be able to actually do this on stage. When you did La La Land, what was the toughest challenge of that role? I was really nervous about the tone of the film. I didn't really fully understand how we'd be sitting at a dinner table having an argument, you know, with a handheld camera and then move into cinemascope and fly into space. So I was like, you know, it was the measuring of if the performance was supposed to, you know, how do we move through this and make it all cohesive and not feel inconsistent and strange. And how do you go from something very small into song? She captured a feeling. Sky with no ceiling. The sunset inside a frame. Here's to the ones who dream. Foolish as they may seem. Ryan and I both developed the characters with Damien for a long time before we shot because they were originally written for people younger than us and we were sort of able to change what was driving these two people to stay in this town where their dreams had been crushed again and again and they were on the edge of giving up. Was the dancing and singing difficult? That was fun. Oh. Yeah, it was fun. And we also had the kind of relief of knowing that we didn't need to be perfect. It didn't need to be technically perfect. He wanted it to feel like two people who are, you know, messy and alive and we sang live for the most part and, you know, fell off our chair. Oh, you sang live? Yeah. That's great. Except for at the beginning of duet, except for the big dance number because that was all one shot. John Candy and Plains Chains and Automobiles. There is one scene in that movie that I think has just changed my life, which is the Chatty Cathy scene. It's just because comedy is, I mean, means everything to me. So his depth and his, he just breaks your heart and he makes you laugh and he does it all so beautifully. Would you say comedy means everything? Do you prefer acting than comedy? Not necessarily, but I think that comedy was, like, saved me as a kid because I was so in my head and so tense and anxious that comedy really changed everything for me. Watching comedy and, you know, seeing, like, Steve Martin in The Jerk or John Candy in Plains Chains and Automobiles, it was, that opened up the world to me. In many ways, I feel less pressure on stage than I do on screen because eventually it's forever. At some point, you're going to be done with the scene and you're going to have to go home and live with yourself with what you did that day. And every night in theater, you get the opportunity, you know, you could fail miserably and fall on your face and go, well, I've got to get up and do it again tomorrow, which I love and I think builds such an incredible resilience in you. I find the growing me, the adult, I guess, I've become through so much of that work, you know, the relationships I have with the people I'm working with and how to stand firm in what I believe and in my power and the mistakes that I've made, that I've seen, you know, how I should have interacted with people, how I should have stood up for parts of a character and not just the character, but how I should have stood up for myself as an actor or as a woman, or times I could have taken it more lightly and gotten closer to people but felt insecure. Like, those are the things that I find from job to job and it makes it more exciting to work, I think.