Interview (Written): Damien Chazelle (“La La Land”)

The writer-director of critically acclaimed musical in a WGA conversation.

How to follow up writing and directing the taut psycho-drama Whiplash? How about the musical La La Land. That’s what Damien Chazelle has done and the only narrative element connecting the two is music. Oh, and great scripts. And superb directing.

Here is a recent WGA interview Chazelle did:

You actually wrote this script before Whiplash, which you wrote as a film to get more easily made…But you never quit on this thing. You’re either stubborn or insanely inspired.

What kept your hand on the plow? The real secret sauce [is that] I had two producers, these two young guys, Fred Berger and Jordan Horowitz, who I essentially developed this thing with, starting back in 2010, early 2011 — they actually wound up bringing the project to Focus. Then after we were at Focus for about a year, Focus put it into turnaround. But that was the moment where a lot of producers would have gone, “Well, okay. We tried. Let’s go on to the next thing.” But they were less shaken or bummed then I was — I feel like I handled it worse and was like, “Oh okay, it’s probably time to throw in the towel.” But they just kind of kept the energy alive. When I went on to work on Whiplash, they didn’t take a moment’s rest. They were pounding on doors throughout the whole process and trying to keep interest alive…So they had lined up enough prospective interest hinging on Whiplash being decent that as soon as Whiplash premiered at Sundance and I was back in L.A., we were able to hit the ground running with finance meetings and studio meetings, and use whatever little mileage I had at that moment to lock down the financing. That’s what we were able to do with Lionsgate within a couple months of Sundance. But then again it was all thanks to them never once giving up the torch.

From a writing standpoint, a lot of people when they sit with a script this long and they have to make changes and it goes through a couple different machinations, they can lose steam, focus, or interest. But this comes off the screen bursting and fresh. There’s a lot of love and inspiration in it. Did you ever lose heart? Did you ever lose that inspirational mojo, and if not, how did you keep it going?

There were numerous moments when I lost heart for sure. Any of those times were somewhat fleeting and temporary, and I’m not sure entirely why, other than I felt so passionately about this particular project and doing a musical like this and doing it with Justin doing the music. There were just certain elements that [made me feel] like, I have to somehow find a way to do this. Maybe it’ll take a year, maybe it’ll take 50 years, but eventually I’ll be happy that I made this. I’m not sure I’ll be able to say that for that many projects and ideas, but my love for musicals and my particular kind of working relationship with Justin, and the way this project got developed, all those things conspired to make it a movie I couldn’t give up on, no matter how unlikely it seemed at any given moment.

Takeaway: It’s a miracle any movie gets made. Persistence. Faith. Hope. A filmmaker and screenwriter needs all three to survive in this business.

La La Land goes wide in theaters this weekend. If you care about indie and original movies, go see it. It’s terrific!

For the rest of the interview, go here.

La La Land movie website here.