I shut down LA traffic for a 48-hour danceathon
It was like fighting a war’ is how Bafta-winning music producer and composer Marius de Vries describes filming the opening scene of La La Land, an eye-poppingly impressive single-take number that sees drivers gridlocked on a motorway flyover springing out of their cars to stage a Fame-style dance routine.
The minutes-long scene took a full gruelling weekend to shoot. Punishing 3am starts were coupled with temperatures pushing 40°C. An LA freeway had to be blocked off too, prompting panic to finish in time for the Monday morning rush hour. Exuberant and endearing, it sets the tone for the film. Remarkably, the scene almost didn’t make the final cut – it was ditched to speed up the story before eventually being reinstated.
The freeway frolic was by no means the only challenging sequence to capture. Even now, on his 20th viewing, the London-born, LA-based musical director breaks out in a nervous sweat while watching the showstopper song Audition delivered by Emma Stone. The vocals were performed live on set with no cuts. Cue an endless series of what de Vries calls ‘one intensely stressful moment with a million dollars at stake if a mistake happens and you have to roll another reel of film’.
Watching Stone and Gosling together is ‘like electricity’, says de Vries. ‘They feed off each other. They’ll ad lib between takes or try to make each other laugh when it’s time for one of them to sing.’ The duo even renamed one of the film’s songs, City Of Stars, as ‘Sh **** Old Bars’, insisting it was about a downtown pub crawl. Director Damien Chazelle, has called them ‘the closest thing that we have right now to an old Hollywood couple’, comparing them to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. De Vries describes the film as ‘a beacon of integrity, joy and real emotion at a time when those things are in short supply’.