For two years running, the film that opened the Venice film festival went on to major Oscars glory. First it was Gravity, which maintained momentum right through the five months until it bagged seven Academy awards. The following year, Birdman repeated the trick, taking just two gongs, but one of them best picture.
In 2015, a blip, as snowy flop Everest failed to make it a hat-trick, but this year, the choicest launch pad seems back in the good books. La La Land won the spot this year, and reception to Damien Chazelle’s follow-up to Whiplash has been nothing short of rapturous. Its world premiere drew raves (The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw declared it a “sun-drenched musical masterpiece “).
The same occurred at the Telluride film festival days later, where it received its North American debut.
Such buzz has landed La La Land atop awards pundits’ 2017 Oscar predictions, with many touting Chazelle as a front-runner for the best director Oscar (he was previously nominated for Whiplash).
But for the 31-year-old right now, the biggest thrill has been the praise of Tom Hanks. In the Colorado ski town to plug his performance in Clint Eastwood’s Sully, Hanks has taken it upon himself to act as La La Land’s unofficial mascot, professing his admiration for the picture when he’s supposed to be touting his own.
“When you see something that is brand new, that you can’t imagine, and you think, ‘Well, thank God this landed,’ because I think a movie like La La Land would be anathema to studios,” Hanks said during a Q&A for Sully.
“Number one, it is a musical and no one knows the songs.”
“I’m blushing even thinking about [what Hanks said],” says Chazelle, looking like a college student in T-shirt and jeans, sitting in a conference room at the Telluride hotel where he’s staying. “I want to kiss him. He’s so generous, it’s insane. I’ve worshipped him since forever.”
Chazelle is a self-professed fanboy, not just of Hanks, but of the industry that made the actor a household name. La La Land is a joyous testament to that — a colourful and heart-rending ode to Tinseltown, and the bygone era of musicals it gave birth to.
The story is deceptively simple: Emma Stone plays a struggling actor, whose relationship to her jazz pianist boyfriend (Ryan Gosling) becomes strained when his career begins to overtake hers. The execution is anything but.
For the opening pre-credits sequence alone, Chazelle filmed a fastidiously rehearsed song and dance set-piece on a closed-off portion of the Los Angeles highway over a weekend.
“For moments like that, I remember going, ‘Whoa, this is crazy,’” he recalls. “I love movies where you can sense that the director risked biting off more than they can chew.”
As Hanks rightly marvelled at, films like La La Land just aren’t made in today’s studio system that tends to favour franchise-building over fresh concepts. It’s little wonder it took Chazelle six years to see his bold vision take shape; he completed the screenplay in back 2010, spurred to make “a Hollywood movie — in the old sense of the term — that could still feel personal and different... That space where those two things can overlap has been feeling more and more endangered,” Chazelle muses.
“La La Land is about the city I live in, it’s about the music that I grew up playing, it’s about movies that I grew up watching,” says Chazelle. “Even the big spectacle of the movie feels private to me in that way.”
It also doesn’t mark his first stab at the hard-to-pull-off genre: before Whiplash earned him an Oscar nomination for best director, Chazelle helmed Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, a little-seen micro-budget jazz musical, originally planned as his thesis project for Harvard Film School (he briefly left Harvard to focus on finishing the film). And while Whiplash doesn’t feature a single show-tune, an incessant drum beat courses throughout the tale about a young drummer and his abusive coach.
“I love the idea of thinking of cinema as not that far from music,” says Chazelle, who played drums growing up. “A lot of my favourite movie makers, the way they move their cameras, or the way they cut just feel very musical — even if the movies have no music in them at all. That, on a taste level, is what I respond to a lot. That said, I definitely want to make a movie that’s not about music.”
Given its long journey to the screen, La La Land underwent various “permutations” over the years, according to Chazelle. Initially, the romance was rumoured to star Chazelle’s Whiplash breakout Miles Teller and Emma Watson. When Summit Entertainment — impressed by the success of Whiplash — agreed to invest in La La Land, Chazelle landed on the proven pairing of Gosling and Stone, who demonstrated great chemistry in Crazy, Stupid, Love and Gangster Squad.
“They’re short of timeless in the sense that you can buy them as a 1940s sort of old movie, old Hollywood pairing — like a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, or a Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy,” says Chazelle of his famous twosome. “Yet at the same time, they feel, at least to me, completely contemporary. They have a way of grounding everything that they do in a very believable way. Once we were able to cast them in the film, it’s like the whole thing sort of woke up.”
Like Teller’s character in Whiplash, the artists Gosling and Stone portray are big dreamers trying to make it in an industry where constant rejection is the norm. Chazelle admits that both films reflect his own experiences as a film-maker working his way up the Hollywood ladder.
“I guess you write what you know,” he says, laughing. “There something to be said for having even unrealistic dreams. Even if the dreams don’t come true — that to me is what’s beautiful about Los Angeles. It’s full of these people who have moved there to chase these dreams. A lot of those people are told by people around them that they’re crazy, or that they’re living in la la land. I wanted to make a movie that saluted them a little bit, and that kind of unrealistic state of mind.”
Don’t miss it
La La Land in currently showing in the UAE.
