La La Land (film)



La La Land is a 2016 American romantic musical comedy-drama film written and directed by Damien Chazelle and starring Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, John Legend and Rosemarie DeWitt. The plot follows a musician and an aspiring actress who meet and fall in love in Los Angeles.

The film's title is a reference both to a nickname for the city of Los Angeles and to the idiom for being out of touch with reality. La La Land had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on August 31, 2016, and was released in the United States on December 9, 2016, by Summit Entertainment. The film received widespread acclaim from critics and has grossed $64 million worldwide. It was chosen by the American Film Institute as one of the top ten films of 2016, and won the Critics' Choice Movie Award for Best Picture. The film has also been nominated for numerous awards, including Golden Globe nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor for Gosling, Best Actress for Stone, Best Screenplay, Best Original Score and Best Original Song.

Plot
On a crowded Los Angeles highway during winter ("Another Day of Sun"), Mia (Emma Stone), an on-studio barista and aspiring actress, is distracted by her preparation for an upcoming audition, which leads to a moment of road rage between her and Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), a jazz pianist. Her audition is spoiled, possibly because her outfit is stained by a coffee spill from a customer at work. At the same time, Sebastian is having problems paying his bills, leading to an argument with his sister, Laura (Rosemarie DeWitt) before going to his next gig at a restaurant. That night, Mia's three roommates, in an attempt to cheer her up, invite her to a lavish party in the Hollywood Hills ("Someone in the Crowd"). When Mia's car is towed, she is forced to walk back to her apartment.

Sebastian is instructed by the restaurant's owner, Bill (J. K. Simmons), not to play any jazz. While playing simple variations of Christmas songs, he slips into a passionate improvisation, which Mia overhears as she walks past the restaurant ("Mia & Sebastian's Theme"). Moved by his talent, she enters to watch him play, but Sebastian is promptly fired for his disobedience. As he walks out, Mia attempts to compliment his playing, but he coldly passes her, bumping her shoulder in his frustration.

Months later, Mia is at another party and notices Sebastian again, now playing as the keyboardist for a 1980s pop cover band. She playfully irks him by requesting the band to play "I Ran (So Far Away)" by A Flock of Seagulls. After the gig, the two walk together to find their cars. They lament being in each other's company, despite the clear chemistry between them ("A Lovely Night").

Sebastian takes her to a jazz club, explaining his intense love for jazz and his aspirations of running his own club, as well as reinforcing her passion as an actress. They warm up to each other ("City of Stars"). Sebastian asks her to a screening of Rebel Without a Cause at a theater. While getting ready for her date with Sebastian, Greg (Finn Wittrock), a man she has been seeing, shows up for a scheduled date. Mia reluctantly goes on the double date with Greg and his brother. She feels out of place on the date and abruptly leaves to rush to the theater, managing to find Sebastian just as the film starts. They begin to move in for a kiss but are interrupted when the film fails to play. Mia and Sebastian finish their date at the Griffith Observatory and dance ("Planetarium").

Mia, after several more failed auditions, decides to write a personal single-actress play, So Long, Boulder City, at Sebastian's suggestion, hoping it will propel her to stardom. Sebastian becomes a regular performer at the jazz bar, and after several dates, they move in together. Sebastian is reunited with a high school classmate, Keith (John Legend), who offers him a chance to be the keyboardist in his jazz band The Messengers, which offers a steady source of income. Sebastian accepts but is dismayed when he discovers the band's more pop-oriented sound. Keith chides him for being a traditionalist when jazz is "about the future". Mia attends one of their concerts but is left unsettled, knowing Sebastian would never enjoy playing that type of music ("Start a Fire"). During the band's first tour, Mia confronts Sebastian about this. He admits that he thought it was what she wanted of him. He then criticizes her for potentially liking him only when he was unsuccessful to feel better about herself. Insulted, Mia leaves.

On opening night on Mia's play, Sebastian fails to show up due to a previously scheduled photo shoot with the band that he forgot about. Only a handful of people attend the show. Devastated and hurt, Mia leaves Los Angeles to move back in with her parents in Boulder City, Nevada. Sebastian receives a call from a casting director who attended Mia's play. The casting director extends an invite for Mia to attend a film audition the following morning. Sebastian drives to Boulder City and manages to persuade Mia to return to Hollywood for the audition. Unlike previous "cattle call" tryouts Mia experienced, she is simply asked to tell a story for her audition. She begins to talk, and then sing, about her vivacious aunt who lived in Paris, where the film is being set, and who inspired her to pursue acting ("Audition [The Fools Who Dream]"). She and Sebastian go to Griffith Observatory where, confident that the audition was a success, he says she must devote herself wholeheartedly to the opportunity. Acknowledging the incompatibility of their dreams, the two promise they will love each other forever. Mia gets the role and leaves for Paris.

Five years later, Mia is a famous actress but married to another man (Tom Everett Scott), with whom she has had a daughter. One night, her husband notices a jazz bar after they go out for dinner. They enter, and Mia, noticing the "Seb's" logo she had designed, realizes it is the club Sebastian had always dreamed of opening. Sebastian, having left The Messengers, recognizes Mia in the crowd. He begins to play "Mia & Sebastian's Theme" and as he plays, Mia imagines a completely different life that she could have led with Sebastian following their encounter at Bill's restaurant ("Epilogue"), including Sebastian declining Keith's offer of joining The Messengers, moving to Paris with Mia, and starting a family of their own. The song ends and Mia leaves with her husband. Just before walking out, Mia and Sebastian share one last knowing look and smile, happy for the dreams they have achieved.

Cast

 * Ryan Gosling as Sebastian Wilder
 * Emma Stone as Mia Dolan
 * John Legend as Keith
 * Rosemarie DeWitt as Laura Wilder
 * J. K. Simmons as Bill
 * Finn Wittrock as Greg Earnest
 * Tom Everett Scott as David
 * Meagen Fay as Mia's Mom
 * Damon Gupton as Harry
 * Jason Fuchs as Carlo
 * Jessica Rothe as Alexis
 * Sonoya Mizuno as Caitlin
 * Callie Hernandez as Tracy
 * Josh Pence as Josh
 * Anna Chazelle as Sarah

Pre-production
As a drummer himself, Damien Chazelle has a strong predilection for musical films. He wrote the screenplay for La La Land in 2010, during a period in his life when the movie industry seemed out of reach for him. His idea of the film was "to take the old musical but ground it in real life where things don't always exactly work out," and to pay homage and salute people with an unrealistic state of mind, who move to Los Angeles to chase their dreams. He conceived the idea for the film when he was a student at Harvard University, along with his classmate, Justin Hurwitz. The two explored the concept in their senior thesis through a low-budget musical about a Boston jazz musician titled Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench. Chazelle was moved by the tradition of 1920s city symphony films, like Manhatta (1921) or Man With a Movie Camera (1929), that paid tribute to other metropolises. After graduating, both moved to Los Angeles in 2010 and continued writing the script, but made a few modifications, such as altering the location to L.A. instead of Boston.

"L.A., even more so than any other American city, obscures, sometimes neglects, its own history. But that can also be its own magical thing, because it's a city that reveals itself bit by bit, like an onion, if you take the time to explore it."

Rather than trying to match L.A. to the charms of Paris or San Francisco, he focused on the qualities and elements that make the city distinctive: the traffic, the sprawl, and the skies. The style and tone of the film were inspired by Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort, especially the latter, which was far more dance and jazz-oriented. The film is also filled with visual allusions to Hollywood classics like Broadway Melody of 1940, Singin’ in the Rain, and The Band Wagon. It shares a certain resemblance with his previous musical work, Whiplash, in terms of character development and themes, with Chazelle noting that "they're both about the struggle of being an artist and reconciling your dreams with the need to be human. La La Land is just much less angry about it." He also stated that both films reflect his own experiences as a filmmaker working his way up the Hollywood ladder. La La Land in particular is a story about his own experience, moving from the East Coast with preconceived notions of what L.A. would be like, "that it was all just strip malls and freeways."

Chazelle was unable to produce the film for years since no studio was willing to finance an original contemporary musical with no familiar songs to build off a pre-existing fan base. It was also a jazz musical, which The Hollywood Reporter called an "extinct genre". He believed that since the team behind the project – he and Hurwitz – were unknown at that time, it might have made financiers dubious about the project's potential. Chazelle managed to find producers through his friends who introduced him to Fred Berger and Jordan Horowitz. With the two producers on board, the script then landed at Focus Features at a budget of around $1 million. The studio demanded numerous alterations to things that Chazelle felt were distinctive and pivotal to the storyline: the male lead was asked to be changed from a jazz pianist to a rock musician, the complicated opening number had to be altered, and the story's bittersweet ending needed to be dropped. Chazelle, unwilling to make such huge sacrifices, scrapped the project and moved on.

Chazelle later wrote Whiplash, which was an easier concept to sell and a less risky investment. After the film was acclaimed by critics upon its premiere at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival in January, Chazelle continued his efforts to bring La La Land to the big screen. He was still pitching his musical to distributors. A year later, when Whiplash earned five Oscar nominations at the 87th Academy Awards including Best Picture, and grossed nearly $50 million worldwide off a $3.3 million production budget, Chazelle and his project began to attract attention from studios. Five years after writing the script, Summit Entertainment and Black Label Media agreed to invest in the film and distribute it, along with producer Marc Platt, after studio executives were impressed by the critical and commercial success of Whiplash. Liongate's Patrict Wachsberger, who had previously worked on the Step Up franchise, pushed Chazelle to increase the film's budget since he felt high-quality musicals could not be made cheaply.

The film underwent various "permutations" over the years, according to Chazelle. Initially, Miles Teller and Emma Watson were both set to star in the leads. Watson dropped out over a commitment to the 2017 adaptation of Beauty and the Beast, while Teller's departure involved long contract negotiations. Chazelle also aged up his main characters, who were originally younger newcomers just arriving in Los Angeles.

Casting


Emma Stone stars as Mia, an aspiring/struggling actress working as a barista at a coffee shop on the Warner Bros. lot in Los Angeles, who serves lattes in between auditions. Stone loved musicals since she was young and went to see Les Misérables when she was 8 years old, saying that "bursting into song has always been a real dream of mine", and that her favorite film is the 1931 Charlie Chaplin romantic comedy City Lights. She studied pom dancing as a child, with a year of ballet. She moved to Hollywood with her mother at the age of 15 to pursue a career, and struggled constantly to even get an audition during that year, and when she did, she was often turned down after singing or saying one line. Stone borrowed many real life experiences for her character, some of which were later added into the film.

She met Chazelle in 2014 while she was making her Broadway debut in Cabaret. Chazelle and Hurwitz went to New York City to watch her performance on the night the actress had a cold. The two met at Brooklyn Diner in New York City, where the director outlined his vision for the forthcoming film. It was only during her successful Cabaret run that Stone began talking seriously with Chazelle about La La Land, and seemingly gained confidence from the show. In preparation for her role, Stone watched some of the movies that provided inspiration for the film, including The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers collaborations. Stone accepted the offer because Chazelle was so passionate about the project.

Ryan Gosling plays Sebastian, a jazz pianist who makes a living by playing cocktail party gigs in dingy bars, and has dreams of opening his own club. Like Stone, Gosling also brought his own real-life audition experiences as an artist, including one incident Stone's character endures that happened to Gosling, when he was performing a crying scene and the casting director took a phone call in the middle of his audition, talking about her lunch plans all the way through. Chazelle met with Gosling at a bar near the latter's home in Hollywood Hills, when Gosling was about to begin filming for The Big Short. Chazelle cast the two immediately after Summit bought the film. He said the two "feel like the closest thing that we have right now to an old Hollywood couple", akin to Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and Myrna Loy and William Powell. The film marked the third collaboration between Gosling and Stone, following Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011) and Gangster Squad (2013). Chazelle asked the two about their audition disasters when they were both trying to make it. Both learned how to sing and dance for the film's six original tunes. Their characters have different ways of looking at art — Sebastian believes if it is great, it does not matter if anyone likes it, while Mia believes art needs an audience.



The rest of the cast – J. K. Simmons, Sonoya Mizuno, Jessica Rothe, Callie Hernandez, Finn Wittrock, Rosemarie DeWitt, and John Legend – were announced between July and August 2015. Legend plays Keith, a successful mainstream jazz performer and the leader of the band "The Messengers", which Sebastian joins.

During the pre-production phase, Miles Teller and Emma Watson were both initially set to star as the leads. However, both stars dropped out, with the former pertaining to scheduling and pay, and the latter over a commitment to the 2017 adaptation of Beauty and the Beast. Teller was offered the lead role by Chazelle when the two were in the midst of filming Whiplash in 2013. He even passed up the chance to star in War Dogs, because the film would have conflicted with La La Land (although he later went on to star in the film). One day, Teller received a call from his agent saying that Chazelle had told Lionsgate that he no longer thought Teller was "creatively right for the project", and that the director was moving on without Teller's involvement. Teller responded by texting Chazelle "what the fuck, bro?" Chazelle responded by saying that "the casting of this movie during the six years it took to get made went through lots of permutations," and it was "part of the up and down of this movie: that we were about to make it, we were about to not make it, about to make it, about to not make it." The Hollywood Reporter reported that Teller's exit was due to his $4 million pay demand. However, Teller later rebuffed this claim, saying, "these publications print things so people read their article and then they say an 'unnamed source said this'. All that's bullshit."

The film was choreographed by Mandy Moore. Rehearsals took place at a production office in Atwater Village over the span of three to four months, beginning in May 2015. Gosling practiced piano in one room, Stone worked with Moore in another, and costume designer Mary Zophres had her own corner of the complex. Moore emphasised emotion rather than technique, which Stone said was key when they filmed the Prius scene. To help his cast and crew get their creative mode flowing, Chazelle held screenings on the soundstages every Friday night of classical films that provided inspiration for the film, including The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Singin' in the Rain, Top Hat and Boogie Nights.

Filming
Chazelle wanted Los Angeles to be the primary setting for his film, commenting that "there is something very poetic about the city I think, about a city that is built by people with these unrealistic dreams and people who kind of just put it all on the line for that." From the beginning, Chazelle wanted the film's musical numbers to be filmed "head to toe," using 50s style, wide-screen CinemaScope, and performed in a single take, like those of the works of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. Principal photography on the film officially began in the city on August 10, 2015, and filming took place in more than 60 L.A. locations, including the downtown trolley, houses in the Hollywood Hills, Angels Flight, Colorado Street Bridge, South Pasadena, Grand Central Market, and Watts Tower, with many scenes shot in one take. It took 42 days to complete shooting, finishing in mid-September 2015.

The opening pre-credits sequence was the first to be shot, and was filmed on a closed-off portion of the carpool ramp of the Los Angeles highway, connecting the 105 freeway to the 110, leading to Downtown Los Angeles. It was filmed in a span of two days, and required over 100 dancers. For this particular scene, Chazelle wanted to give a sense of how vast the city is. The scene was originally planned for a stretch of ground-level highway, until Chazelle decided to shoot it in the 105-110 interchange, which arcs 100 feet in the air. Production designer David Wasco said, "I thought somebody was going to fall off and get killed." Not every portion of the highway was blocked. Chazelle compared the scene to the yellow brick road leading to the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz (1939).



Chazelle scouted for "old L.A." locations that were in ruins, or were perhaps razed. One such example is filming in the Angels Flight. The funicular had been closed in 2013 after a derailment. Attempts were made to repair and re-open the railway, but to no avail. However, the production team was able to secure permission to use it for a day. Chazelle and his crew then arranged to have it run for shooting. Mia works at a coffee shop near studio lots, which Chazelle views as "monuments" of Hollywood. Production designer Wasco created numerous fake old film posters. Chazelle occasionally created names for them, deciding to use the title of his first feature, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench (2009), for one poster, which reimagines it as a 1930s musical.

The six minute long Prius scene had to be completed during the brief "magic hour" moment at sunset. It took eight takes and two days to shoot it. When Gosling and Stone finally nailed it, "everybody just exploded," Stone said. Since Gosling and Stone were not Broadway performers, the two made a number of mistakes, especially during long uninterrupted single-take musical numbers. However, Chazelle was very sympathetic towards them, understanding their lack of experience and not minding their errors. While shooting Sebastian and Mia's first dance together, Stone stumbled over the back of a bench, but picked right up and kept on going with the scene.

Chazelle spent nearly a year editing the film with editor Tom Cross. The two focused primarily on getting the tone just right, which was the main focus for everyone working on the film.

Music
The songs and score for La La Land were composed and orchestrated by Justin Hurwitz, Chazelle's Harvard University classmate, who also worked on his two prior films. The lyrics were written by Pasek and Paul, except for "Start a Fire", which was written by John Stephens, Hurwitz, Marius De Vries and Angelique Cinelu.

Release
La La Land had its world premiere as the Venice Film Festival's opening night film on August 31, 2016. The film also screened at the Telluride Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, beginning September 12, 2016, the BFI London Film Festival, the Middleburg Film Festival in late October 2016, the Virginia Film Festival, held at the University of Virginia on November 6, 2016, and the AFI Fest on November 15, 2016.

The film was initially set for a July 15, 2016, release, however, in March 2016, it was announced the film will be given a limited release starting December 2, 2016, before expanding on December 16. Chazelle stated that the change was because he felt that the release date was not right for the context of the film, and because he wanted to have a slow roll out beginning with the early fall film festivals. The film was later pushed back a week to December 9, with the wide release still being planned for December 16. Lionsgate opened the film in five locations on December 9, and expanded it to about 200 theaters on December 16, before going nationwide on December 25. The film is expected to go fully wide on January 6, 2017.

La La Land is due for release in the United Kingdom on January 13, 2017. The film was released in the Netherlands on December 22, and in Australia on December 26, with the rest of the territories planned for a release from mid-January 2017.

Box office
, La La Land has grossed $37 million in the United States and Canada and $27.8 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $64.8 million, against a production budget of $30 million.

La La Land began its theatrical release with a limited release in five theaters in Los Angeles and New York City on December 9. It made $881,104 in its opening weekend, giving the film a per-theater average of $176,221, the best average of the year. In its second week of limited release, the film expanded to 200 theaters and grossed $4.1 million, finishing 7th at the box office. It was an increase of 366% from the previous week and good for and a per-theater of $20,510. The following week, the film expanded to 734 theaters, grossing $5.7 million over the weekend, and finishing 8th at the box office.

Critical response


La La Land was met with widespread acclaim, with critics praising Chazelle's screenplay and direction, Gosling and Stone's performances, Hurwitz's musical score, and the film's musical numbers. The review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film an approval rating of 93%, based on 248 reviews, with an average rating of 8.7/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "La La Land breathes new life into a bygone genre with thrillingly assured direction, powerful performances, and an irresistible excess of heart." On Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating, the film has a score of 93 out of 100, based on 51 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".

Peter Travers of Rolling Stone named La La Land his favorite film of 2016. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian awarded the film five out of five stars, describing it as "a sun-drenched musical masterpiece." Tom Charity of Sight & Sound stated, "Chazelle has crafted that rare thing, a genuinely romantic comedy, and as well, a rhapsody in blue, red, yellow and green." Diana Dabrowska of Cinema Scope wrote, "La La Land may look like the world that we dream about, but it also understands the cruelty that can come out of (or undermine) those dreams; it's shot in CinemaScope, and yet it's still an intimate masterpiece."