The movies that inspired Emma Stone for her breakout role
For some kids, the dream of being a Hollywood actor remains just that – a dream that their parents dissuade them from actually pursuing. The film industry is a tough one to crack, but Emma Stone knew she wasn’t going to stop until she was there, actually landing roles in movies and television shows. So, she assembled a PowerPoint for her parents that laid out her plans to become a star.
Believe it or not, it worked, and she relocated to Los Angeles as a teenager and began auditioning for roles. Stone struggled to find success at first, but she eventually landed her first film role in Superbad, a hit comedy starring Jonah Hill and Michael Cera.
Following her relatively small part in the movie, she appeared in various other films, like The House Bunny and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, although neither were particularly well-reviewed. While it might have seemed that Stone’s career was heading towards disaster, she landed a role in Zombieland in 2009, which would introduce her to a wider audience. The film became a success, cementing itself as one of the highest-grossing zombie movies of all time.
Since then, Stone has starred in many popular movies, like Birdman, The Favourite, La La Land, and Poor Things, winning Oscars for the latter two. She is one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, and thanks to her breakout performance in Zombieland, she was able to continue rising the ranks to become an icon.
However, to prepare for her role in Zombieland, Stone watched various movies that you wouldn’t initially link with a zombie comedy. She told Entertainment Weekly, “Ruben [Fleischer] gave us all little kits at the beginning: DVDs, iPods preloaded with music, and a little speaker. I think he gave me True Romance. Patricia Arquette as Alabama? Holy shit, she was unreal! I was playing Wichita, so it was a perfect location-based-name kinship.”
The movie features Christian Slater’s Clarence and Arquette’s Alabama as they hit the road after they get caught up with the Mafia, leading to lots of action and high-intensity drama. While there are no zombies in sight, you can see how the narrative inspired Zombieland, which sees the group travel as far as they can from zombies.
She also looked at Paper Moon by Peter Bogdanovich, which follows a man who must transport a little girl who may or may not be his daughter back to her relative’s house after her mother’s funeral. It is a charming yet tender film that influenced Stone’s approach to her character. She explained that it was her first time watching Paper Moon, “which has become one of my favourite movies.”
She added, “That relationship between Ryan O’Neal and Tatum was kind of a model for the relationship that Abigail [Breslin] and I had because we were basically a family on the run but not necessarily family.”
Stone concluded, “And, of course, they’re con artists,” in reference to the fact that in Paper Moon, the pair make a strangely good con artist duo as they traverse America.
When Stone wasn’t watching movies to prepare for the film, she played a lot of “Donkey Kong Country on Super Nintendo while we were filming,” she revealed, getting herself into the spirit of her Zombieland character, who also had to defeat enemies and perform tasks to achieve her goals. “Seriously. I played it constantly as a kid and I never actually beat it, but this time I had the skill set of an adult. I felt pretty good about that.”
