Who knew actor Ryan Gosling could sing, dance and play jazz piano? Or that an actual Los Angeles freeway could be the scene for an unforgettable song and dance number involving multitudes of cars and people stuck in a traffic jam? “La La Land,” whose title refers to both Los Angeles and a certain mental state, stars Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, along with John Legend. The modern, contemporary take on the old Hollywood musicals, about the romance between an aspiring actress and a musician, has just gotten seven Golden Globe nominations.
In a packed house with an audience of over 200 last Wednesday, Dec. 7, the Malibu Film Society did a special sneak preview of “La La Land” followed by an interview by Ben Mankiewicz, on-air television host for Turner Classic Movies (TCM), with writer/director Damien Chazelle and producer Jordan Horowitz.
Chazelle, a 31-year-old Harvard grad, moved to LA from the East Coast fewer than 10 years ago with the dream of making films. He first broke into movies in a big way in 2014 as writer/director of “Whiplash,” which was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture. As a jazz drummer himself, he naturally gravitates to films with musical themes.
“I think of music and filmmaking as both having rhythm and tempo, and a lot of similarities,” he said.
Mankiewicz asked Chazelle and Horowitz about their personal relationship to LA, since the city is featured so prominently in “La La Land.”
“We both had an uneasy relationship with this city as East Coasters,” Chazelle said. “First off, I was dazzled. And then it can make you feel lonely and isolated, and then that your big dreams are out of reach. It’s a story about our experiences.”
“Whereas New York reaches out to you,” Chazelle continued, “LA is a little more work. You have to find your own version of it … People come from all over to find their dreams in LA.”
Although Chazelle first had the idea for “La La Land” in 2010, he said people “would just kind of roll their eyes” when he said he wanted to do a musical. It wasn’t until the huge success of “Whiplash” that they started listening.
“Literally, the day after ‘Whiplash’ won at Sundance, people went from saying ‘I hate the script’ to ‘I love the script’ or ‘I never actually read the script,’” Chazelle said. “A lot of people got in line, but there was pressure for us to compromise on the cost.”
Once the movie was in production, Chazelle said one of the biggest challenges was logistical — shooting a musical in real locations, including “100 people dancing on the freeway,” and places where real sunsets and the real City of LA could serve as a backdrop. “The City of LA can be as magical as a painted backdrop,” he said. “There was no CG trickery at all.”
It was also a filmmaking challenge to make sure the music fit the movie and vice-versa at every step of the way. “I wanted to do an original musical so that everything was together at one time,” Chazelle said. He described “a two-handed process where editing would hand off a finished portion of the film to composer Justin Hurwitz, and it would go back and forth … It was like recording an album and making a movie at the same time.”
“The movie had to be able to stand on its own with characters and storytelling even if you took all the music out,” Chazelle said.
He chose his two main actors, Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, because they were “not completely divorced from musical performance [Gosling had been a Disney Mouseketeer and Stone had been on Broadway in “Cabaret”], but didn’t seem like people who would be ready to snap into song.” They spent three to four months rehearsing.
“I like when you can see a little bit of nervousness or vulnerability, especially in movie stars of that ilk — they have the movie star charisma we remember from old Hollywood, but a hesitancy that I find personally moving — making it feel modern and fragile and a little bit tender,” Chazelle explained. “I like taking people outside of their comfort zones.”
The Wednesday event was the first collaboration between MFS and TCM after Mike Thomas, a Malibu resident and one of the five executives who put TCM on the air 22 years ago, joined the MFS board.