第221期：艾玛·斯通：跟自己死磕的追梦女孩

想成为我们的主播，欢迎加微信 xdfbook 投稿。 一段美文，一首英文歌，或是一点生活感想，全由你做主。 《艾玛·斯通：跟自己死磕的追梦女孩》 How Emma Stone Got Her Hollywood Ending Emma Stone’s favorite place for sushi in Los Angeles is a no-frills1) spot in a Sunset Boulevard2) strip mall3). It’s here, having barely taken a seat that she starts telling me about her hiatal hernia4). “I can’t have spicy foods,” Stone says. “I was born with it,” Stone notes cheerfully. She snaps apart her chopsticks. “I was like a little old man as a young lady.” I first met Stone approximately 11 minutes ago, but it feels like I’m hanging with an old buddy. She huddles over the table mock-conspiratorially; drops5) callbacks to small talk we only just made like she’s citing long-cherished in-jokes. That Stone is preposterously6) affable should come as no surprise to anyone who’s seen her act. She’s a resolutely human-scale movie star—the type that somehow tricks you, onscreen, into forgetting that she’s a movie star at all. Stone is often likened to her hero Diane Keaton7), and the comparison tracks in a few ways: Both are beautiful, funny, repeat Woody Allen muses. But in Stone’s combination of gameness8), wry wit and ability to make an overriding aura of good-heartedness come off as magnetic rather than dull, she’s got a lot in common with another hero of hers—Tom Hanks. She auditioned to act alongside him in Larry Crowne, back in 2011, not because of the script so much as the fact that she adores Hanks. She didn’t get the part, but that same year, Stone got top billing9) in The Help and stole scenes in Friends With Benefits and Crazy, Stupid, Love. Watching those movies and the others that Stone has elevated over the years—Superbad, Easy A, Zombieland, and The Amazing Spider-Man reboots, among them—you routinely get the impression that she’s operating an amused half-beat ahead of everyone else; that she’s having a blast on her own terms, unconcerned with whether anyone is even watching. Stone lives in New York. She’s in Los Angeles right now because she has an excellent new movie coming out, called La La Land. It’s a musical, captivating in its sweetness, about two broke-and-scrappy Hollywood dreamers who fall in love while dancing and singing their way in spectator shoes across L.A. Like Stone herself—who sometimes seems like a screwball10) comedienne beamed into the present—the movie bridges classic and contemporary eras. “I needed someone who’d make the traditional musical feel relevant and accessible to people who think they don’t like musicals,” says La La Land writer and director Damien Chazelle11). “Emma’s very modern, but there’s a timelessness to her, too.” La La Land features Stone’s most bravado performance yet, and she’s emerged as an early Best Actress Oscar contender herself. When I mention this, she says, “I’m trying not to think about that”—her default mode being self-deprecation12), not self-promotion; jokes, not bluster. “I just focus on what I’ve got to do at any one moment, and don’t necessarily think about where it’s all leading.” Emma Stone recently turned 28, but she gave her first performance at age six, in a Thanksgiving-themed school musical called No Turkey for Perky. She grew up in Scottsdale, Arizona, the daughter of a homemaker mom and a contractor dad, with a younger brother. The Stones were supportive, permissive parents—“reins out,” as she puts it, when it came to discipline. “Like, ‘If you’re gonna drink at a party, call us and we’ll pick you up.’” She kept doing plays and improv, and started training with a local acting coach who tapped13) some old Hollywood connections to set Stone up with an agent. So it was not outright delusion when Stone, at age 14, notified her parents that she wanted to drop out of high school, move to L.A. and try her best to go pro. She made her pitch in the form of a PowerPoint presentation, which she entitled “Project Hollywood.” Other parents may have been taken aback, but hers had come to know this hyperlogical side of Emma: When she was 12, she’d made a different PowerPoint presentation, successfully campaigning for them to homeschool her. They decided to let her give acting a shot, too, and in January 2004, Stone moved with her mother into a unit at the Park LaBrea apartment complex, just south of Hollywood. Stone says, “I auditioned for three months pretty steadily, got absolutely nothing, and then they stopped sending me out.” Not ready to give up, she got hired making treats at a bakery for dogs—a ridiculous gig14) that she clung to “because I was, like, ‘Now I’m working, see? I’m not getting auditions, but I gotta stay here.’”She booked just enough work to keep hope alive. “I did an episode of Malcolm in the Middle,” she says. “And an episode of Medium.” Stone got crucial encouragement from casting director Allison Jones15), a veteran comedy talent-spotter who helped launch the careers of James Franco16). “I auditioned for Allison for three years,” Stone recalls. “She would bring me in for things and they’d never work, but then one Friday evening she called me and said, ‘Hey, my office isn’t even open tomorrow, but I want to put you on tape for something.’ It was Superbad.” Stone got the part, playing Jonah Hill17)’s high school crush Jules. Ever since, Stone has steadily broadened her range, pushing into serious dramas. The unifying trait across her portrayals is a core decency—on display from The Help, where she played a privileged white woman in the Sixties-era South, to the Best Picture winner Birdman, where she got a Best Supporting Actress nomination playing Michael Keaton18)’s daughter, fresh out of rehab. This part is one of the very few times that Stone has portrayed a fuck-up. She describes herself as having an eager-to-please side, and she concedes that it’s hard to imagine her getting cast as a villain anytime soon. “If part of what you’ve craved in your life is to not upset anybody,” Stone says, “it’s easy to be drawn to characters that aren’t gonna upset anybody.” One night in 2013, though, while shooting Birdman, Stone lost her shit—and it felt fantastic. The film, which director Alejandro González Iñárritu19) wove together from a series of extremely long takes, demanded not just emotional rawness from Stone but technical exactitude. “I had to come in at the very end of this one scene, and it was so scary, because everything was timed out.” She botched20) a take. “Alejandro told me, ‘Emma, you have to go faster around the corner or it’s going to ruin the movie!’ And I was like, this is a horror, this is so hard, it’s actually insane. Later that night, Edward Norton21) and I were shooting on a rooftop at, like, 2 a.m. We’d done this scene 30 times, and Alejandro wasn’t getting what he wanted. He said, ‘Maybe it’s not going to work.’ I went to my dressing room, pacing, like, I can’t do it. I’m losing my fucking mind. This thing came over me. I’m usually a people-pleaser, but I felt like, fuck it. I don’t even care anymore. So when we went back to do the scene, I was crazy, spitting. And Alejandro goes, ‘Beautiful—there it is!’” Stone shakes her head at the memory. “I wasn’t trying to make it perfect anymore.” La La Land, like Birdman, depended not only on an emotionally authentic performance from Stone, who is onscreen for almost the entire movie, but precise choreography22), too, which she had to nail over a daunting series of uninterrupted takes. When she was first considering the role, Chazelle recalls, “She said, ‘How much prep time do you have, because I don’t wanna half-ass this—if I’m gonna tap-dance23), I wanna learn how to tap dance. I don’t want to cheat it with forgiving camera angles and misleading close-ups.’ That’s not normal for actors, or for people, period: wanting to make something harder for yourself.” When I ask if she’s considered writing a script herself, or directing one, Stone’s eyes widen. “Writing’s interesting, but I’ve never done it in any way,” she says. “And directing, God, that’s a hard job. It’s all the things you don’t think about as an actor. ‘We lost a location.’ ‘That costume is wrong.’ “Coming out of improv,” she continues, “where everything’s so reliant on the team, it’s still hard for me to be out front—even when it’s a big role. I like being a cog in the machine.” 艾玛·斯通在洛杉矶最喜欢的寿司店是位于日落大道一处购物中心内的一家朴实无华的小店。在这家店里，斯通刚一落座就和我说起了她所患的食管裂孔疝。“我不能吃辣的东西。”她说。“天生就这样，”斯通欢快地讲道，“啪”地一声将筷子分开，“我一个年轻女士倒像是小老头一样。” 我大约11分钟前才第一次见到斯通，但却感觉像是和一位老朋友在一起。她假装鬼鬼祟祟地蜷缩着趴在桌子上；随口一说，就回到我们刚才谈论的东西，就像她在讲一些长期受人喜爱的圈内笑话。斯通很随和，这看似反常，但看过她表演的人都不会对此感到意外。她绝对是一位接地气的电影明星——总会在银幕上迷惑你，让你完全忘记她是个电影明星。 ………… 文章摘自：《新东方英语》杂志2017年5月号