La La Land seems to be singing its way to Oscar glory, the latest offering from writer/director Damien Chazelle having won numerous accolades since its debut at the at the Venice Film Festival last August, with many acclaimed critics and critics’ associations naming it their Top Film of 2016.
Moreover, it walked off with a record seven Golden Globes on Sunday – Best Film: Musical or Comedy; Best Screenplay and Best Director for Chazelle; Best Actor and Actress for its stars Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone; and Best Score and Original Song (City of Stars).
Chazelle is no newcomer to awards recognition – Whiplash, the second movie in his directing career, helped him walk off with three Oscars two years ago, telling the story of a young jazz student and his abusive teacher to much acclaim.
“La La Land is a very different movie from Whiplash in many ways,” says Chazelle. “But they both deal with something that’s really personal to me: how you balance life and art, how you balance reality and dreams and also, specifically, how you balance your relationship to your art with your relationships with other people. With La La Land, I wanted to tell that story using music, song and dance. I think the musical as a genre is a great vehicle for expressing that balancing act between dreams and reality.”
The story at the heart of La La Land is a boy-meets-girl tale set in the so-called ‘city of stars’. It’s a love story between Sebastian, a jazz pianist (Gosling) and aspiring actress Mia (Stone) that is told via some astonishing song and dance routines. The film is described as “at once an ode to the glamour and emotion of cinema classics, a love letter to the Los Angeles of unabated dreams and a distinctly modern romance”.
Proves that toe-tapping musicals can be embraced by audiences and critics alike
Inspired by the films that entranced him when he was a child, Chazelle explains that La La Land began with a crazy dream. He wanted to see if he could make a film that channels the magic and energy of the most poignantly romantic French and American musicals of filmmaking’s Golden Age. “I wanted to explore how you use colour, sets, costumes and all these very expressionistic elements of Old School movie making to tell a story that takes place in our times.”
Chazelle became struck by the idea of fusing some of his favourite elements from musicals of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s – the continuous musical score, the eye-popping colours, the mood-driven energy – with his favourite city: Los Angeles, which becomes as much a romantic character in La La Land as the film’s two lovers.
Los Angeles has been many things on films – a searing noir backdrop, a lush bikini paradise, a city high on the fumes of ambition. But Chazelle set out to explore Los Angeles as muse, a constantly in-motion canvas of fateful encounters, endless traffic, but also endless striving as everyone chases their own private, unrealised dreams, at times futilely, sometimes transformationally.
“La La Land is about a city that is very epic and unto itself – it’s a wide-screen city,” observes Chazelle. “So I thought it would be great to shoot it in wide-screen, to make it as a big and spectacular to me as a classic Hollywood musical.” Chazelle’s friend and frequent collaborator Justin Hurwitz composed and orchestrated the film’s songs and score. The lyrics are by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul – except for Start a Fire, which was written by John Stephens, Hurwitz, Marius De Vries and Angelique Cinelu.
Chazelle has clearly struck a chord, his ambitious film coming as a breath of fresh air in a world that seems to becoming more cynical by the day, proving that toe-tapping musicals can be embraced by audiences and critics alike. And, if last Sunday’s awards haul is anything to go by, by the members of the august Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences come February 26.