Just days before Poor Things director Yorgos Lanthimos was set to talk to Little Gold Men, the actors strike ended, meaning that Lanthimos could be joined by his star, Emma Stone, for the interview. Both seemed overjoyed to be reunited, especially after Lanthimos had spent the past few months doing the fall festival tour without her or any of the other stars of his wild dark comedy.

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“It was horrible,” he said of his experience promoting the film without his cast. “It took so long to make it and they were an integral part, and to not be able to celebrate together and bring the film out into the world with them, it was quite sad.”

Stone, who plays Bella Baxter, a woman brought back to life by a mad surgeon (Willem Dafoe), had mixed feelings about the experience. “It was very emotional, the whole thing, in a positive and difficult way,” she said.

Poor Things debuted at the Venice Film Festival and has since charmed audiences at various festivals around the world. The film, released in theaters on December 8, centers on a towering performance by Stone as Bella, a young woman who leaves her sheltered London home and embarks on a journey of discovery. Lanthimos, who previously worked with Stone on his Oscar-nominated film The Favourite, brings his singular vision to Poor Things, creating a colorful, surreal, sex-positive world for Stone to play in. At this point, the two have worked on at least four projects together, including the short film Bleat and another upcoming feature titled Kind of Kindness, though there may be a secret fifth project that has yet to be officially announced. They discuss what makes their collaboration work so well (yes, they fight!), their inspirations for Bella, and what makes her so different from every other character.

Vanity Fair: It’s quite a demanding role. What did you think of it when you read the script for Poor Things?

Emma Stone: Before I even got the chance to read the script, I felt like I understood her journey or her arc, from brand new to full adulthood. She’s my favorite character ever—anyone would be lucky to get to play Bella. It was such a long process. Prepping for it it was probably four years from the beginning of talking about it to the time we actually got to film it. So I felt like I kind of lived with her for a long time. Yorgos and I still talk about how we miss her now.

How do you prepare to play a character like Bella? Where did the two of you pull inspiration from?

Yorgos Lanthimos: She’s unlike any other character that I’ve ever seen, so it wasn’t easy to find a reference. I think the only one of the few references, in terms of a film, that I came up with was, uh, [Werner] Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. But again, it’s not necessarily directly related, but it was an inspirational performance. But it was hard to find anything that’s been done like that. So it was just about finding what the challenges would be and understanding what we would do and then rehearsing and having certain conversations about her physical evolution, her vocal evolution, the way her language develops. And making a map of how that evolves across the script and separating the script in the stages of her development.

How did you play Bella in those early days of her life, when mentally she’s essentially a toddler?

Stone: Any character that you play, like any person, has a history to them and has things that have happened in their lives that shape who they are, and because she didn’t have any of that, it was really freeing to just play around and experiment with someone of that young mental age that she is in the very beginning. We never ascribed an actual age—there were never any numbers associated with where her brain was at any given time—but it was really freeing to just come up with what would happen if you had that brain inside of an adult body. We had about five stages that we would work through and that we would use as reference points when we were working on her walk or the way her language develops.

So the very beginning was really freeing but also the scariest part for me, or the hardest part for me, because the jumping-off point describes how the rest of this is going to go as she develops. And we shot that first. So, after many years of thinking about things or trying things out to actually be doing, the first couple of days were really, really challenging.

Her sexual awakening and journey is such a big part of her journey that she goes on. How did the two of you discuss capturing those scenes?

Stone: Because she’s so free, because she lacks that shame about anything—eating, drinking, the way she’s taking in the world, her relationships to other people, her environment, sexuality—for me it was a really freeing experience.

As a woman in the world as we know it, and as an American woman also, it was a really freeing thing to think if I didn’t have judgment around my body or around my sexuality. That’s one of the reasons why I love the way that this is shot and that the story is told, because the camera’s also not saying, Oh, well, now we should look away because we know in our society that this is something that shouldn't be seen. None of this would be embarrassing to her or something that she would think was shameful in any way.

The two of you must have a pretty easy shorthand after having worked together so many times. But what’s it like when you disagree?

Lanthimos: Of course we have little fights. And then we make up and it’s all good to go.

Stone: It’s the best, though, because…how you know you really love and trust and respect someone is that we can absolutely fight, which I think is so important because when you’re kind of tiptoeing around a person or feel like you’re on eggshells or like you can’t say what you need—I mean, I think we have, like, a very kind of jokey banter and we like to have fun, but we’re also able to stand strong on what our opinions are on things and meet either in the middle or persuade each other to the other one’s side. And that’s why we’ve made four things together and hopefully more.

What did the two of you learn from each other working on this one?

Lanthimos: I learned to trust in experienced people. We actually—after each day of filming, I took pictures on set and we developed together the film that we shot.

Stone: After work every day, we had a lab.

Lanthimos: Emma had never done that before, and I trusted her with it. The negative can be destroyed if something goes wrong. The same way I trust her about every other thing, I trusted her with this. It was a fulfilling experience.

Stone: That’s when I knew he really trusted me, because his photography is precious. Like when you do trust falls with people—that was our trust fall.