Why Won’t Yorgos Lanthimos Hang Out With Emma Stone—Even After Multiple Movies Together?

Ever wonder how many Oscar-nominated arthouse movies you have to make with someone before they’ll agree to grab sushi with you—just you, not Mark Ruffalo tagging along like a golden retriever with a juicer? Try asking Yorgos Lanthimos, who’s apparently turned cultivating actual friendship with Emma Stone into a new kind of surrealist endurance sport (not to mention a potential new cinematic genre) . The poor guy’s already counted the dramedies and surrealist nightmares separating him from patio drinks and unscripted giggles . Is this what showbiz camaraderie looks like—meticulously brokered through scripts, period costumes, and awkward parking lot waves? Maybe you’ve been there, stuck chatting the best pistachios at the craft service table, wishing the ice would just break already . Grab your popcorn, folks—emotional vulnerability never looked so delightfully awkward . LEARN MORE

ATHENS, GREECE—Longing for the day they might cross the threshold from work friends to real friends, director Yorgos Lanthimos reportedly calculated Tuesday that he was only three films away from getting to hang out with Emma Stone outside of work. “I can feel it, I’m just one twisted period dramedy and two surrealist nightmares away from her agreeing to drinks on my patio,” said Lanthimos, who admitted that he had hoped casting Stone in Bugonia, the pair’s fourth and latest feature-film collaboration, would have given the two artists more conversational fodder beyond common shop talk. “When I first asked her to get coffee with me when we were working on The Favourite, she blew me off, but on the set of Poor Things, she waved at me in the parking lot. Then, when we were making Kinds Of Kindness, we had a solid interaction about the best kind of nuts at the craft service table. So things are headed in the right direction, but we’re not there yet. Once I find the right project, we’ll be gabbing over sushi in no time. Maybe something set at a 19th-century diving academy.” Lanthimos added that it would just be nice to hang out with someone other than Mark Ruffalo for once.