Damien Chazelle makes things personal. He began our interview by setting his phone down on the table and saying, “I’m recording, for my records.” He said it like he was kidding, but the recorder rolled on, capturing our conversation.
Maybe it’s part of his process. The 31-year-old writer/director’s 2014 film “Whiplash” was based on his high school experience in a competitive jazz band, and in his upcoming movie musical “La La Land,” Ryan Gosling stars as a jazz musician who can’t stand to see the art dying. Perhaps every interaction is a potential source of inspiration for Chazelle.
Or maybe he’s paranoid. I didn’t ask.
But it certainly seems as though Chazelle lives in his art. There is a scene early in “La La Land” when Gosling’s character, Sebastian, tries to sell Mia (Emma Stone) on jazz. You can’t just hear it, you have to see it, he says. In some ways, it felt like the pitch was coming directly from Chazelle.
“Looking at the movie now, it seems to be very much like me trying to convince people to like musicals,” he said. “Give them a chance! I guess it comes down to any art form that, for whatever reason, gets painted by society with a certain brush as being irrelevant or cheesy or old-fashioned or whatever. I think whether it’s jazz or musicals, I wanted this movie to do a little bit of selling in that way. So I guess Sebastian kind of takes up the mantle at that point.”
As Chazelle discussed his film, Rosemarie DeWitt sat on the other side of the couch, listening intently. DeWitt, who plays Sebastian’s sister, Laura, watched Chazelle as he spoke, weighing his answer before following up with her own question.
“Was this your hope?” she interjected. “That the audience would find some love for jazz and musicals?”
“Yeah!” Chazelle said. “First off, I think movies—especially the experience of going to a movie in a theater—can be very good. There’s good music movies, it almost doesn’t matter what they’re about. You can literally think you hate all classical music but you go to see ‘Amadeus’ and suddenly you want to listen to nothing but Mozart. You can think you hate James Brown, you go see ‘Get on Up,’ you want to listen to James Brown. You can—”
“You can’t hate James Brown!” DeWitt interrupted. “Who hates James Brown?”
“In my mind, who hates jazz?” he countered.
Their back-and-forth is reminiscent of “La La Land” itself, which is full of crackling dialogue and hinges on the concept of timing.
“Ryan [Gosling], the thing he kept talking about when we were rehearsing and prepping was this idea of timing,” Chazelle said. “In a way, the whole movie is about bad or good timing. When the timing lines up, you get a musical number. You get the literalization of being in sync. But for most of the movie, they’re just missing each other.”
Set in Los Angeles, “La La Land” portrays an aspiring actress and a struggling jazz musician trying to navigate both their dreams and a love story. As a musical, it serves as an homage to a long-ago era in Hollywood, when Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire tap danced across the screen in takes long enough to show off their impressive chops.
But though it takes inspiration from the Technicolor heyday of movie musicals and employs breathtaking visuals of its own, “La La Land” feels like something else. Despite its grandiosity, it manages to feel very small and personal, appealing to the shred of humanity you might have forgotten still exists inside you.
“That, to me, was what I didn’t understand while we were shooting,” DeWitt said. “We’re just being these people and loving each other and wrestling with each other, and that’s going to work? Then they’re just going to bust out into song? That to me is what’s a revelation about ‘La La Land,’ is the singing, when they do break out into song, it’s not corny. It doesn’t feel like, ‘Oh, here’s a number.'”
Chazelle gives all the credit to his actors for the humanity expressed by the film. Musicals are so choreographed that another director might have been tempted to completely predetermine everything before anyone got on set, but Chazelle said he didn’t want to think of the actors as pieces on a chess board.
“We knew this thing would have nice matte paintings and nice sunsets and stuff, but we didn’t want it to just be that,” Chazelle said. “I feel like the burden, in that sense, was really on the actors. Because it was probably easy in certain scenes to walk onto the set and feel like the whole thing could float off into the air, so I feel like you guys had to do a lot of the legwork of actually grounding it.”
Movies, by nature, are collaborative efforts, requiring a lot to come together for the whole thing to work. This truth is taken to extraordinary heights in “La La Land,” where one misstep could have sent the whole thing crashing down (visually or emotionally). But collaboration also requires compromise, and if too many concessions are made, is the original vision lost?
Chazelle has said that he didn’t have to sacrifice his concept of “La La Land” in the process of creating it, making him luckier than most. But as Mia and Sebastian pursue their dreams, the question of compromise vs. selling out is very present in the film. It’s a fine line, but I asked Chazelle and DeWitt if their own careers have taught them where it is.
“You’re too young to answer this question,” DeWitt told him, kidding. He answered anyway.
“As a filmmaker, one of the hardest things I’ve found, when you’re in the thick of the process, is to identify which changes are compromises and which are improvements,” Chazelle said. “It’s trying to find the balance between sticking to your guns and your vision so that the thing always remains the thing you want to make, but allowing it to get better. Allowing people who come in, who have their own experiences and their own expertise, whether it’s actors or a cinematographer or a musician or a dancer, whoever, to actually make you better and make the movie better.”
When our interview wrapped up and the two transitioned to their photo shoot, DeWitt took it upon herself to make Chazelle look his best in front of the camera. As a veteran of dozens of press tours and getting her picture taken, DeWitt moved with ease in front of the camera and began to pose Chazelle herself.
“This is your moment to be an actor!” she said.
She positioned him in front of her, placing her arms around his shoulders and joking that it would make him seem “hyper-masculine.”
“Shouldn’t the actor be front and center?” he protested, rather uncomfortably.
And even though his phone was no longer recording, perhaps Chazelle filed the moment away—another personal experience to find its way into a story.
@lchval | laurenchval@redeyechicago.com
