All the right moves
Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash follow-up sees Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling dancing to a unique beat.
The movie musical has been in rude health in recent years, thanks to robust adaptations of stage hits like Les Misérables and Into The
Woods (not to mention Frozen’s ‘Let It Go’ ear-worming half the global population). Yet it’s been a long time since anybody did a full-blown, toe-tapping extravaganza of the type that dominated Golden Age Hollywood.
Damien Chazelle might be the man to reinvigorate the genre. On paper, his previous film – about a jazz drummer locked in a cymbolic duel with his teacher – didn’t sound much, but
Whiplash was the little film that could, becoming a triple Oscar-winner and instant classic.
In La La Land, Chazelle makes a return to the world of performance, this time charting the on-off affair between musician Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) and aspiring actress Mia (Emma Stone). That relationship is recounted through – in Chazelle’s words – “a full throttle song-anddance romantic musical.”
His reference points strike all the right chords: peak-period MGM classics like Singin’
In The Rain, the work of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and Jacques Demy’s colourful French fantasies such as The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg. Reuniting with Whiplash composer Justin Hurwitz, the two have fashioned an original score that Hurwitz promises contains “a bunch of songs and a couple of fantasy ballets… It’s all lush, romantic, 90-piece orchestra.”
Little is known about the story, except that Chazelle has long dreamt of bringing it to the screen. La La Land was planned as his second movie after 2009 debut Guy And Madeline On A
Park Bench; it was only after developing writer’s block that the writer/director channelled his anger into Whiplash, a project based on his experiences as a college drummer. “To put it simplistically,
Whiplash is about the pain of making music; this is much more about the joy of making music.”
Accordingly, he promises something more light-hearted this time around. “My experience as a jazz drummer was just constant dread, terror and anxiety… With La La Land, it’s about love, and big dreams, and trying to navigate that kind of tenuous correlation between dreams and reality and what you have to do to your dreams to fit them into reality.”
The title refers to Los Angeles, with Chazelle keen to “make a big love letter to the city and focus on that push and pull that all young artists experience… It’s a city that’s so filled with dreamers, most of whom won’t make it. I think there’s something poetic about that.”
Alongside all those Golden Age musicals, a more unusual inspiration comes from the doc
Los Angeles Plays Itself, which convinced Chazelle that “if treated the right way, LA can definitely hold its own as a romantic playground.”
Originally rumoured to star Whiplash’s Miles Teller with Emma Watson, La La Land has instead become the third outing for Gosling and Stone, who established their crackling chemistry in Crazy, Stupid, Love before reuniting to lesser effect on Gangster Squad. They’re joined by Chazelle’s Whiplash muse J.K. Simmons and the latter’s fellow 2015 Oscar winner John Legend (Best Original Song, for Selma’s theme track ‘Glory’), here playing one of Gosling’s fellow musicians.
Behind the camera, Chazelle confirms his standing as Hollywood’s new golden boy by calling on an ace crew: David O. Russell’s go-to guy Linus Sandgren as cinematographer, the Coens’ regular costumier Mary Zophres and David Wasco, the man behind Pulp Fiction’s Jack Rabbit Slims, doing the production design.
“Whiplash was very much about the kinetic editing and images colliding against each other,” Chazelle muses, “whereas this is about telling the story through camera and blocking. It’s a style which is more suited to the musical but I think also more romantic.” With Gosling and Stone on song, expect to swoon this summer.