Whether Emma Stone and Andrew Garfield have gotten back together is unclear. What is clear, though, is that Garfield knows how to Stone over.
For Interview's May 2015 issue, on newsstands this week, Diane Keaton read Stone a quote from Garfield that appeared in the July 2012 issue of Vogue. "Andrew Garfield said, 'Working with Emma was like diving into a thrilling, twisting river and never holding on to the sides. From the start. To the end. Spontaneous. In the moment. Present. Terrifying. Vital. The only way acting with someone should be.' My God," she said. "I mean, what did you feel when you heard such a dream-come-true observation?"
"He is such a poet," the Aloha actress, 26, said with a laugh. "But that's the way he writes in general. So I hear it and of course my heart swells up. And I also know that he writes things like that on a daily basis."
Keaton couldn't believe it, saying, "No way."
"Yes, he does," Stone assured her. "He's so poetic."
"What a guy," Keaton marveled. "But that's beautiful."
"What a guy. He is a real Wordsworth," Stone said, making herself and Keaton laugh.
"Good for you," Keaton told her. "Good for him."
"Good for him," Stone echoed.
In her 2012 Interview cover story, Stone said her first memory of pure happiness was sitting on the screened-in back porch with her dad during monsoon season in Arizona, eating circus peanuts and watching a storm. "To me this memory is something that's universal, mysterious yet simple," Keaton said. Stone agreed it "absolutely" is that kind of memory "The greatest thing about that memory—and I can only hope that other people have that same experience—is that it is of love before love ever got complicated. It is just the purest form of love that doesn't need to be explained," she said. "And if you're lucky enough to have had that with a parent, or with both of your parents, that's a life-changing feeling."
Stone likes revisiting that time. "With all the things that have happened in my family or with friends or in love relationships over the years, to be able to go back to a memory where I'm just watching a monsoon and eating these circus peanuts, it's a touchstone kind of memory to have in your life," she told Keaton.
As for her future, Stone said she feels "more ready than I ever have to do something incredibly different and challenging and scary." The realization came after she played Sally Bowles in the Broadway revival of Cabaret. "There's something about having to go up and do it every night, no matter how you're feeling, having to tell the whole arc of a story and not just scene by scene the way that you do on film," she said. "I feel more like I understand acting in a different way. It's totally different when you're shooting something. But only in the past six months to a year have I felt like I can really try these different things. I think I was really scared of that for a long time. And if something was really challenging, I thought that I was just going to fall on my face and embarrass myself. I'm just less scared of that now, of failing."