Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos have nothing and everything in common

It's one thing to cry while performing. Emma Stone can do that. What she doesn't want to do, and what she found herself doing anyway, is to cry in the middle of an interview.

"I'm such an actor, what is wrong with me?" she said, her eyes welling up with tears.

It was mid-November in Los Angeles and we were out to lunch with Yorgos Lanthimos, the Greek director with whom Stone has made the cockeyed comedies "The Favourite" and now "Poor Things," which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in September and is tipped to be a major Oscar contender when it's released Dec. 8. Based on the novel by Alasdair Gray, "Poor Things" casts Stone as Bella Baxter, who may have the cinematic year's most outrageous origin story: Trapped in an unhappy marriage, she throws herself off a bridge and is resurrected by a mad scientist (Willem Dafoe) who swaps her brain for that of...