Chazelle is very clear about the influence of 1950s musicals on La La Land. So keen was he to pay homage to this era of movie making that the opening credits of La La Land announce that it's shot in CinemaScope. This credit first appears in black and white, and then morphs into Technicolor, in equal acknowledgement of our modern era. Although not possible to actually shoot in CinemaScope today, the movie was shot on film (and not digitally). "For Whiplash, digital made sense to me," Chazelle says. "I wanted to have that sort of clean, right-edge precision to it, but for this movie, as with Guy and Madeline, I wasn’t going to do it if it wasn’t on film."
On the look of the film, Chazelle comments: "It’s very saturated, deep blues and reds trying to get that look you get in the ’50s and ’60s, but there’s also a lot of [French New Wave director Jacques] Demy in it, pastels and pinks and purples. Most of the night skies in this movie are not true black but that deep Disney blue. You can do a lot in post, but it’s hard to compete with what that color sky looks like in real life shot on 35mm." Chazelle also points out that "the tonal juggling act of the movie was tricky. There were a lot of conversations between me and the leads and the crew about where the movie would sit tonally. My hope was that it would always feel like one cohesive statement, ranging from total realism to some of the most fantastic moments you can imagine and hopefully it will all feel like one single idea." Chazelle was keen that the acting would always be very human and relatable. Even when Stone and Gosling are dancing and singing, the acting is naturalistic rather than heightened, so the viewer never loses sight of the characters.
Still only 32 years old, Chazelle's work to date has been heavily influenced by music. Growing up playing the drums, Chazelle muses, “I love the idea of thinking of cinema as not that far from music. A lot of my favorite movie makers, the way they move their cameras, or the way they cut just feels 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.” Chazelle spent a year editing the film with editor Tom Cross. It was key to both of them that they spend time getting the tone and musicality of the film right. In terms of the singing in the film, Chazelle decided ahead of time which songs would be lip-synced and which would be performed live.
Chazelle insisted from the outset that the musical numbers in the film would be shot in a single take, again echoing works of greats like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. "There’s one concert scene that we shot and edited Whiplash style—multiple angles, a Steadicam and a crane and a locked-off camera," explains Chazelle. "But everything else was carefully pre-choreographed, single takes that we would rehearse for most of the day and then shoot in a window of a few hours." The Prius scene, after the pool party where Sebastian and Mia properly meet for the first time for instance, took six minutes to shoot in one take and they had to get the work done during the brief "magic hour" before sunset. They did about six takes each day over two days. Perhaps inevitably, mistakes were made by Stone and Gosling, but Chazelle embraced the realism of these "errors," believing it made the moment feel more alive: "we’re not doing a ton of post work to smooth out moves or eliminate hitches. Sometimes there’ll be a hint of a bump or sway, but to me that’s beautiful. If you look at the old dream ballets of Singin’ in the Rain or An American in Paris, they’re filled with that stuff and it gives a sense of humanity which really helps when you’re doing giant, spectacular sets."
Los Angeles is the primary setting for the film, and so a lot of the film was shot on real locations. Chazelle explains, "it’s very much a movie about old movies, and that’s partly why it’s set in L.A., where you can see all those old films still haunting the streets and the alleyways...The idea was to do an old-fashioned MGM-style musical but about real people having real lives in LA today." Production designer David Wasco added “the fact that we were doing an L.A. movie in L.A. was a great thing. It’s not common now."
