Director wanted to prove his critics wrong
La La Land, which charmed crowds at TIFF, brings back the song-and-dance genre
Filmmaker Damien Chazelle, 31, has achieved a few things with La La Land (opening Dec. 25) that seem nearly impossible to pull off.
First off, he had a ramp to a busy freeway in car-adoring Los Angeles shut down to film La La Land’s gloriously busy, five-minute singing-anddancing opening scene. It seems to be done in one thrilling, continuous sequence, although Chazelle said it was filmed over two days and there are two “hidden cuts” that make it appear seamless.
The bigger hurdle was getting La La Land made at all. It’s an original musical — not a Broadway-to-screen version with familiar tunes to pull in holiday crowds. But aren’t musicals the corny things your grandparents watch? Can one of those find an audience in already-crowded multiplexes amid action, drama, seasonal comedy, animation and sci-fi?
“For years and years, everyone was telling us this was a lost cause . . . and that we would never make this movie,” Chazelle said the day after La La Land screened at TIFF to a huge ovation, later going on to win the People’s Choice prize.
Even Chazelle didn’t believe it was finally going to happen when the movie he’d spent six years trying to get made was about to start.
“Until the day cameras started rolling, I was waiting for something to happen,” Chazelle said. “I was waiting for the studio to pull the plug to realize, what the hell are we doing? To wake up, someone wakes up, and goes: ‘holy s---, who greenlit a musical?’ ”
Chazelle, who shot to fame with the 2014 award-winning jazz drama Whiplash, starring Miles Teller and J.K. Simmons, speaks passionately about musicals: the “direct crosscurrent to the heart” of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and how he can’t watch Vincente Minnelli’s Meet Me in St. Louis without crying.
Now he sets out to prove a classic musical made in the tradition of “such joyous films. . . but they also just break your heart,” can also reflect modern life and relationships.
With La La Land, Chazelle pays homage to both the city where it is set and the golden age of musicals made there, with the story of struggling actress Mia (Emma Stone) and pianist Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), who dreams of opening his own club to showcase “pure jazz.”
The two dreamers meet where Los Angeles denizens seem to spend the most time: stuck in traffic on the freeway in the opening number “Another Day of Sun.” But there’s nothing old-school musical about what transpires. He leans on the horn when she holds up traffic. She flips him the bird.
Now showing up on film critic associations year-end best-of lists, La La Land dominated the Critics’ Choice Awards earlier this month, including Best Picture and Best Director for Chazelle. It netted seven Golden Globe nominations, including best director, screenplay and lead actor and actress.
Chazelle said making La La Land was a “very personal thing.”
The songs are by his best friend since college, composer Justin Hur- titz, and the film draws from their 2009 black-and-white musical, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench.
“I guess I’ve approached it (like) anything I’ve done, it’s just making a movie that I would want to see,” Chazelle explained.
“And it was like, OK, well, I haven’t seen a movie like this. I haven’t seen a full-fledged musical in this vein in a while but I also haven’t seen one that tries to still be contemporary enough today and realist in a way.”
Shooting the film in Los Angeles was “especially fun,” he said, because he was following in the footsteps of the great musicals made there.
“A lot of the people who made a lot of those movies are still (there), either you feel their ghosts in the air, or they’re still alive and well and you can talk to them and you can go to the places where they shot,” he said. “It’s a very living history. So it was fun to indulge in that.”
Earlier that day, Canadian-born Gosling, who sings and dances in La La Land with a style that echoes Gene Kelly, said Chazelle showed the cast and crew “a whole bunch” of classic musicals that influenced his thinking in preparation for making La La Land, including Singin’ in the Rain, An American in Paris and Top Hat.
Asked about the early accolades for the film, Gosling smiled. “It could be worse,” he said, then added, “I saw how hard everyone worked on this film and I saw when they made it look effortless, so it’s nice to see that work acknowledged.”