La La Land - Trivia, Questions and Fun Facts

[discussimdb]

Fan of La La Land or just want to share your movie knowledge? This topic is dedicated to all trivia and questions related to La La Land

[scarlett]

Influences for this movie include the films of French New Wave director Jaques Demy. Demy broke the hyper-serious mold of 1960's movie making with candy colored musicals such as Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The Young Girls of Rochefort and A Room In Town. According to Chazelle, " Jaques Demy is probably the single biggest influence not just on this movie but on everything I've done or wanted to do. There is no more formative movie for me than The Umbrellas of Cherbourg."

[veronica]

Actor Finn Wittrock plays "Greg". He was nominated for a Gold Derby Award Ensemble Cast for La La Land as well as for his work in The Big Short the previous year.

[stephanie]

Stone's rendition of "City of Stars" was performed live on set in order to keep her completely present and in the moment. Stone says, 'it was challenging but it was also something I felt really strongly about." The actress says she had just done Caberet on Broadway and saw the way a live performance adds something. Even if your voice breaks or you're a bit out of tune, something irreplaceable is lent to the performance.

[ivan]

The film cast includes three Oscar winners: J.K. Simmons, John Legend, and Emma Stone; and one Oscar nominee: Ryan Gosling

[amber]

After one of the auditions Emma Stone attends, she mentions the film has a plot similar to Rebel Without a Cause (1955). One of the most iconic things from "Rebel" is James Dean's red jacket, Emma wears a similar jacket to both the audition and the call back.

[carla]

Chazelle's main influence is clearly The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), in both style and music, with additional production nods (i.e. a parapluie shop stationed across from the coffee shop on the movie lot, and a cast of non-singers in the leading roles). Another, more covert influence is MGM's Oscar-winning An American in Paris (1951), particularly in Chazelle's decision to cap his film with an extended, surrealistic ballet that encapsulates everything that has come before in impressionistic terms, moving in and out of multiple sets, and projecting a happy end in lieu of what has actually transpired between the characters. While the ballet from An American in Paris (1951) lasted an unprecedented seventeen minutes, Chazelle's lasts eight.

[phyllis]

Chazelle says that some of the challenges of filming the opening sequence included, the choreography which brought the dancers very close to the edge of the freeway ramp, the curved nature of the freeway was different from their opening sequence rehearsals in a flat parking lot and camera cranes almost colliding with dancers.

[michele]

The exterior used for Mia's parents Nevada house is actually located in Santa Clarita, California 34 miles from Los Angeles.

[jeffrey]

The very large pendulum seen in the observatory scene is called a Foucault pendulum, or Foucault's pendulum, named after the French physicist Léon Foucault. It is a simple device conceived as an experiment to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth. While it had long been known that the Earth rotates, the introduction of the Foucault pendulum in 1851 was the first simple proof of the rotation in an easy-to-see experiment. Today, Foucault pendulums are popular displays in science museums and universities.

[mathew]

At the end of the movie, Mia's husband, played by Tom Everett Scott pulls her into Sebastian's jazz bar, which Sebastian wanted to own so he could play authentic jazz. This is an homage to That Thing You Do! (1996), in which Tom Everett Scott's character, Guy, loves jazz and asks his cab driver to take him to a bar with "good jazz".

[janice]

Damien Chazelle: [Simmons] J.K. Simmons plays a similarly negative character in this and Chazelle's previous film, Whiplash (2014). In the earlier film his character is a jazz obsessive, in this, a jazz hater.

[stephanie]

Emma Stone won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of Mia in La La Land. Stone was previously nominated for an Academy Award as Best Supporting actress for her performance in the film, Birdman. She was six years old when she gave her first public performance at school in a Thanksgiving-themed musical entitled, No Turkey for Perky. She is a native of Arizona.

[addison]

Justin Hurwitz comments that "City of Stars" was Mia and Sabatian's first duet. (You get) "the giggling and all other nuances when you record vocals that way. You pick up all the little smacks of the lips and things like that, that you don't get when you record vocals in a music studio months earlier and then have them lip sync on set."

[norma]

Ryan Gosling on Emma Stone: "She's one-of-a-kind, and brings the same quality to Mia. But you also see that Mia's a bit different and not necessarily what these people in the entertainment world are looking for - where they often want people who are interchangeable with one another. She's just not that."

[sylvia]

The first movie shot entirely on film to earn an Academy Award for Best Cinematography since Inception (2010) won six years prior.

[kenzi]

Rebel Without a Cause was released in 1955 and was the movie that made a star out of James Dean. The movie has a famous set piece at the Griffith Observatory which Mia and Sebastian visit later in the film. James Dean starred in just three feature films before dying in a car accident on September 30, 1955 at age 24. Rebel Without a Cause was directed by Nicholas Ray who also directed the film, In a Lonely Place starring Humphrey Bogart as a struggling screenwriter chasing his dreams in Hollywood.

[aaron]

When the camera focuses on the traffic scene before the opening number "Another Day of Sun" begins, one of the radio stations in the background plays a short snippet of a song from Damien Chazelle's directorial debut Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench (2009) called "It Happened at Dawn."

[tamara]

The interiors of Mia's apartment were shot at The Langham Apartments in Los Angeles. The Langham, a 180 room apartment building, opened in 1927 offering a restaurant, beauty salon, barber shop, billiard room and commissary. The showstopper at the Langham in 1927 was the country's first rooftop swimming pool.

[gabriel]

Ryan Gosling has been in two movies with Emma Stone prior to La La Land; Crazy Stupid Love (2011) and Gangster Squad (2013).