In a few weeks, Damien Chazelle will cap off an incredible year at the Oscars, where the young director will likely spend the night seeing his dazzling “La La Land” scoop up a handful of honors, with the musical highly expected to win Best Picture.
When it was first announced, a musical starring Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone sounded like a cutesy little arthouse idea, something that would play to cinephiles, and maybe generate some heat with the mainstream, but few would’ve predicted the film would soar past $200 million worldwide (and counting). But undoubtedly pleased at the reach was Chazelle, who was conscious of making a movie that even those who might initially turn up their nose at a musical would embrace. Here’s what he had to say to NPR:
You hear a lot, especially when you’re making a musical today, how much distaste for musicals exists in the world and how many skeptics there are, so … it was important to me to reach out to the skeptics, to have this movie not just play for a little coterie of musical die-hards, of which I would include myself. …
There is that kind of needle scratch sometimes — you can even feel it in a theater when a song begins and it hasn’t been quite properly set up. So I always thought of the analogy of the frog in boiling water and the idea that if you drop the frog right away in boiling water it feels it and jumps out, but if you put a frog in room temperature water and then slowly boil it over the course of however long, it won’t realize that it’s boiling and it’ll just sit there and die.
So I kind of wanted to put the audience through — this will sound morbid — but through the same sort of process where they kind of don’t even necessarily realize as it’s happening that they’re being sucked into a musical.
That’s quite the analogy, but it’s all part of a fascinating, 45-minute talk that’s worth diving into as we barrel toward the big day. “La La Land” is now playing everywhere.
