Oscar buzz is in the air
Emma Stone has one Oscar nomination to her name and seems poised for another with her wondrous turn in Damien Chazelle’s new song-and-dance film La La Land.
Yet, like her La La Land character, there was a time when she was rejected or completely ignored during auditions in Los Angeles and had her heart set on parts that didn’t come through.
“The one in the movie that I probably related to the most was the callback scene where she goes in there and it starts — and then it’s cut off and then they say, ‘That’s enough,’ ” Stone said in an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival, where La La Land won the People’s Choice Award.
London, Ont.-native Ryan Gosling, her co-star in La La Land and 2011’s Crazy, Stupid, Love, also felt the same rejection.
“The (scene) at the beginning was actually Ryan’s story that he had told Damien,” said Stone. “He was in an audition and had to cry and in the middle of his crying scene the casting director answered the phone.
“And then she was like, ‘Keep going,’ once she got off the phone and he was like, ‘Oh, OK.’ ”
La La Land stars Stone as a fledgling Hollywood actress who falls for a jazz pianist, played by Gosling. While his career takes off, she finds herself still struggling to get parts, going from audition to audition in her car that serves as a makeshift makeup/script prep room.
Chazelle, who got an Oscar nomination for penning Whiplash, wrote and directed the ode to old Hollywood, which has already earned a slew of awards nominations. Among them are seven Golden Globe nods, including one for Stone and one for Gosling.
Gosling learned to play piano and dance in more classical styles than those of his days on The Mickey Mouse Club.
They wanted the audience to feel as if the characters in the musical numbers “were the same people that you’d just been watching in the scene beforehand,” Gosling said, “and that maybe that these things could add a different dimension to those characters but that they felt like the same people.”