Emma Stone names the scene that is her “favourite movie ending of all time”
After coming through in the mid-late 2000s with appearances in the likes of Superbad and Easy A, the latter of which saw her perform in the first leading role, Emma Stone set about carving out a path for herself. She has reinforced her status as one of the most admired actors of her generation, a consideration that only grows as she continues to deliver impressive performances.
With the likes of Birdman and The Favourite to her name, both for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for ‘Best Supporting Actress’, and La La Land, for which she went on to win the Oscar for ‘Best Actress’, it’s fair to say that Stone knows a thing or two about quality movies. With that, the actor once named the film that contains her “favourite movie ending of all time”.
“My favourite ending of all time is in City Lights, the Charlie Chaplin movie,” Stone once told Interview. “I just watch the ending of that movie alone on YouTube and cry. I think any even mediocre movie can be saved by a great ending. And vice versa. A great movie with the wrong ending can just tank the whole thing.”
Going on to explain City Lights in detail, Stone continued, “So in City Lights, Chaplin is the Tramp. He’s in love with this blind flower girl who sells flowers on the street. And one day, he buys a flower from her, and she hears a door slam. She thinks that he’s left and that he’s left her with all of this change. She begins to believe that he’s this rich man, and he kind of, you know, keeps this alive. She thinks he’s a millionaire. But he’s the Tramp and has no money.”
City Lights, released in 1931, is a silent romantic comedy-drama from the genius mind of Charlie Chaplin. Even though movies with sound were coming into the fore towards the end of the 1920s when Chaplin began working on the script, he still decided to make the film silent. He was definitely right since it’s regarded as one of the greatest silent movies of all time and one of Chaplin’s finest achievements.
Eventually, Chaplin’s Tramp finds a doctor doing eye surgery for $5,000 and enters a boxing competition to win the money for the blind girl. The Tramp leaves the money for the girl to get the surgery, but she still doesn’t know his true identity.
Stone explained the ending of the movie, noting, “And so in the end, in the last five minutes, he’s walking down the street, and he hasn’t seen her for months. A bunch of kids are spitting spitballs at him and making fun of him. And she comes out. He sees her in a window. She owns a flower shop now. And she comes out of the store, and she pins a little flower on his lapel, and she feels his hand.”
She signed off, “And she knows his hand because she was blind before. And she’s just feeling his hand and looking at him because he looks so different than I’m sure she thought he would look. And he is staring at her in this way that you’ve just never seen—someone with so much love in their eyes. And she says, ‘You?’ And he nods. And he says, ‘You can see now?’ And she says, ‘Yes, I can see now.’ And he smiles, and then it just fades out. It’s the most beautiful thing.”
