I think a lot of times movies are too, we’re too narrative focused in a weird way when
it comes to movies. And I think in film, there should be, films should operate as music in
that sense, that there should be stuff where film just becomes film, and hopefully the
story supports that apparatus. But to me narrative is a means to an end, it’s a means to give
you those sorts of cathartic moments where it just becomes about image and sound, and
it’s just so fun to kind of put together, it’s so fun to sort of you know, just imagine
how different shots could work placed against each other. It’s a whole part of my brain
I love using.
It was important from that whole kind of thinking that from the very first image of the movie
the very first scene of the movie that it just be very much what it was that there’d
be no beating around the bush, and then the rest of the movie could basically just vary,
you know riff on that theme. But I like the idea of basically having an entire movie within
the opening scene of a movie, and kind of giving the audience the close line that then
you can sort of elaborate on as it goes on.
If there’s one theme that binds Damien Chazelle’s stories together, it is to be found in the
realm of dreams. His characters, both fictional and real, are modern-day heroes driven by
a vision or a personal goal that they have to achieve in order to find a sense of fulfillment
in their lives. And yet what we as the audience witness, is not a glamourized story of success,
but rather something more intimate, grounding the dream back into reality.
I think it certainly started in Whiplash and it was that idea of how does the world feel
like to a jazz musician, and I was jazz drummer myself and so there was something about that
kind of, where it’s all about rhythm, just the sort of kinethesism of that. I love that
you can create, literally create a sense of music just through editing, even if there’s
no music on screen. That was an idea that I loved, and it was an idea that was really
important to this movie, that even if there was no music on screen, it needed to still
feel musical at every moment.
I wanted the whole feel of the film to reflect what again it must have felt like to be going
on these missions. So when we’re inside the spacecraft we try to really make you feel
the claustrophobia, use sounds, use what you see but also what you don’t see, restrict
the POV, again really put the viewer into a totally immersive sort of experience, so
they feel like they’re launching into the air, they feel like they’re hovering in
space.
It was important to me that the audience feel the pain, the physical pain. There’s always
this arts versus sports kind of contest that’s sort of played out in American culture to
a large degree. And what’s interesting about instrumental music, what’s interesting especially
about the drums is the physical side of it is the fact that your muscles tense up, that
your, that at least my hands bleed. So, I wanted to make sure that this movie really
kind of made you live in the muck of that kind of pain.
But also how Ryan would often talk about, you know you have to create a character where
after he’s done kind of plunging through the atmosphere, comes back down to earth,
barely, you know he has to take out the trash, he has to clean the pool, he has to figure
out what to make his kids for breakfast, you know. There was a normalcy and a quotidian
reality at the heart of all of this.
In some ways that was what interested me the most and that was trying to you know take
an event that’s so famous it’s almost mythological, the Apollo 11 landing on the
moon, and then try to peel back mythology and look at what actually happened at a practical
level, at a human level what went into that event.
This was a man who I think was forged through failure and through loss. He was not sort
of, this kind of born icon, he was not necessarily this sort of all-American hero from the outset.
He was a human being, he was vulnerable, he made mistakes, he had flaws. And yet at the
same time there was obviously something special about Neil, there was something about his
drive and about his vision, something you could see in his eyes I think.
But if Chazelle uses this sense of normalcy to ground his stories into reality, he also
utilizes it to depict the dichotomy that emerges as his characters strive to fulfill their
dreams…
With La La Land I wanted to explore how you balance life and art, and how you balance
dreams and reality. It was this idea of choices that you make
for the dream, versus choices that you make for the relationship, choices that you make
for art, versus that you make for love or for life. And you know we all kind of wish
we lived in a world in which those things are always compatible, but sometimes they’re
not and sometimes these choices can be messy, and one affects the other in ways we didn’t
expect. And sometimes even the choice itself is murky.
You know it’s one thing to have these kinds of perfect idealized dreams in your head,
of what kind of artist you’re going to be, or what kind of life you’re going to lead,
or what love is going to look like for you. But reality has its own agenda, and sometimes
dreams don’t find into reality and you have to find that balance. And that’s something
the characters have to find in the movie and it’s something that musicals themselves
are really adept at expressing.
So it interests me, I think personally I’m in a better place than I was back when I,
you know, was younger and first moving to LA I guess, in terms of finding that balance.
But it’s a balance you’re always trying to seek, you know. Because art, or any profession
can be very, solitary. So how do you commit yourself to that and share yourself with,
either another human being or just with the people around you? That’s a question that
I think is very hard to solve.
In many ways what Chazelle explores within this dichotomy, is what happens when the desire
to achieve a dream intensifies to the point that the tunnel vision becomes so narrow that
all one can think of is that one seemingly unattainable goal…
There’s this movie I loved, this Sidney Lumet movie, it’s ‘Before the Devil Knows
You’re Dead’, which he made a few years ago. It’s the kind of movie that’s structured
kind of like a domino effect so that you’ve started in a state of normalcy, and then things
go wrong, and then they go more wrong, and then you think okay they can’t possibly
go more wrong, and they go more wrong, and then more wrong, and then you think, well
now it’s getting ridiculous, and then they go more wrong. It’s kind of like what people
say about something like Casablanca, that the clichés start talking to each other,
and they create something beautiful, that a movie like ‘Before the Devil Knows You’re
Dead’ actually to me works past the ridiculousness into something really incredible…
You’re in the realm of logic and you have to actually work through this area where you’re
not actually in logic, and that you wind up in something that’s truer than logic is.
What’s funny about the moon landing is, you know for such a famous event it’s there’s
so much that’s unknown about it and I think particularly just what exactly went into making
it a reality. And it cost a tremendous amount, it cost lives, it cost money, it tore families
apart. There was this tremendous sacrifice and loss that came with the success story
that we all know.
That ultimately was the biggest question for me you know that I wanted to grapple with
in the movie, you know. To what extent do the ends justify the means, to what extent
are we willing to kind of put up with monstrous behavior in the name of something we believe
in. Whether it’s art or you know, something else, some kind of achievement that we can
all kind of tip our hat to and say, that was good. At what point does that outweigh the
cost, you know?
I grapple with those kinds of issues myself. In terms of what is the price of success worth?
How do you even define what success is? Is success leading a happy healthy life and being
a good person, or is success kind of leaving something behind for people that never knew
you to appreciate? And that, certainly I don’t think that the extremes that are depicted
in the movie are necessary for success, or to make great art or great anything. But there’s
certain cases in any artform where you see that kind of cause and effect, you see a work
of art that was produced by either people being cruel to one another, people subjugating
someone else, or people being cruel to themselves. And, so it’s in those cases that you have
to ask whether you think that’s okay…
At the end of the day there is, I agree that there is a way in which this can be seen as
a musical, in the sense that it was all about building up the drama in a certain traditional
way and then exploding it into music. Music can just take over from words in such an elegant
way that just buys you a lot. And, it’s more interesting to me to kind of find ways
to resolve storytelling beats without words and through other forms, whether it’s just
images, or just music.
To me it’s you know the heart and soul is that, is when you get to do “pure cinema”.
That to me is like, every movie should try to be an excuse to do that, you know you try
to tell a story that allows you to do that.
In a way the entire movie had to lead up to those last moments at the end. It had to all
be kind of a prelude to that. And it had to be a very kind of blunt sort of, totally unflinching
look at the costs of what, of what that moment at the end was.
As the characters finally reach the end of their journey’s, a last question arises.
What is it that drives us to struggle for some hard to attain dream, if the costs are
so high? This is the main philosophical question that has slowly developed throughout Chazelle’s
work, culminating in his examination of Neil Armstrong in First Man.
I think what was so fascinating about him, I think in some ways, he himself, couldn’t
even articulate, why the moon, or why, why… There was something deeper to Neil that was
not so much about ambition and more just about constantly wanting to see just beyond. Just
that very kind of primal desire of human kind to just peak behind the curtain, and how that
got sort of sublimated into one individual in this case and one pursuit. I think that
sort of, it became more interesting to me I guess and more profound than, you know,
someone who wants to be a great drummer or something. That’s a very concrete goal,
but this felt like it had something that was harder to put into words and therefore we
were really kind of motivated to try to film it.
Although explored most succinctly in First Man, in a sense all of Chazelle’s characters
align with this primal pursuit, embodying the archetypal warriors and the explorers
of old, insatiable in their desire to conquer, to tread on undiscovered ground, always seeking
to expand the edges of their existence, driven by a passion that gives meaning to their lives.
The movie is about passion and it’s about passion for art and passion for love, and
ultimately the passion with which we wanted to approach the movie with which we wrote
it, with which we composed to music for, with which we presented it to people and with which
we intended to put it on screen. I’d like to think that kind of wound up infecting people.
I guess I’ll always be no matter what the genre is trying to find that kind of deep-seated
connection where at the end of the day I’m writing or filming about my own emotions,
my own experiences, whether literally or not.
But I always am trying to, it’s another balance I guess I would always like to try
to find, which is, try to have stuff that feels like it’s very thought through and
very cinematic for lack of a better word you know, but that still has spontaneous life
in it, that still has some real humanity, that stuff that
you can’t quite, that stuff that you can’t storyboard or write you know.