Emma Stone aced her audition for Crazy, Stupid, Love.
The makers of the 2011 romcom film auditioned various actresses for the role of the movie's female lead - but Emma wowed directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa within minutes of meeting them.
Glenn told People: "We had this whole thing with Emma where it was really difficult to get an audition from her. And she was living in New York at the time, and I don’t know if she was busy or whatever. But we finally got her to read and she was fantastic.
"So we put her together with Ryan [Gosling]. We did this whole day of actresses reading with Ryan, and a lot of them were really good. But then, once Ryan stepped into the room, they sort of were a little shaken."
Glenn explained that Ryan "wasn’t trying to do anything. He was just being himself."
The director added: "Then Emma came in and Ryan said a line and he flubbed the line. He was reading with her offscreen, flubbed the line, and Emma just, without missing a beat, was like, ‘Oh, you’re killing this. You’re doing great'.
"She just flipped him the s*** right then and there, and we were all just like, ‘Okay, that’s it. That’s the person.’ And we wanted to work with her desperately. Even in the small stuff she was doing, she’s so brilliant."
Emma and Ryan, 45, struck up an instant chemistry, and the directors were happy to allow them to improvise during certain scenes.
Glenn explained: "I would say that Ryan and Emma and falling in love, montage in bed, which was a really improvised thing that I think only me and John really understood what we were doing there. And just sat there with the cameras rolling for hours and letting them just run."
John thinks the improvised elements of the film worked really well.
He said: "Many of those lines in that scene are stuff they were doing around the set. They were just watching YouTube and seeing things, and then Emma would do an impersonation. And we just kept saying, ‘Do that thing you were doing when we were standing over in video village the other day. Do that thing.’ And the crew and the actors thought we had lost our minds.
"Everybody was just like, ‘I don’t know what you guys are doing,’ but we were just trying to get them to be Ryan and Emma and not their characters and just relax a little bit.
"When we went into the editing room to see the first cut of that scene, and it’s basically what’s in the movie. We didn’t really have to change it."
