Original subtitles

And now

let's look at the dramatic opening of La La Land.

Damien Chazelle had thought the movie would begin

with a very long main title sequence.

He started would begin with the studio logo,

summit pictures starting,

and then it would go

into the titles of the movie

starring Ryan Gosling starring Emma Stone.

Edited by Tom Cross.

Directed by Damien Chazelle.

And it was going to be almost like an overture.

Damien wanted it to be like an old fashioned

musical movie, like West Side Story or The Sound of Music.

And a lot of those movies would begin with an overture

where music would play over black or over some type of

some type of abstract imagery.

So he wanted to emulate that.

So originally we had a beautiful palm

tree set against this nighttime sky,

and it was kind of abstract but very beautiful.

And we had all these titles and this beautiful overture music

written by Justin Hurwitz.

It was important to Damien because all of Justin's

melodies throughout the movie would be played during this overture.

So the overture would basically give you a road map

to all the musical themes that were going to come later in the movie.

We couldn't figure out what was what was really the problem

because we loved the overture.

So something about the traffic sequence didn't work.

And so we.

It's funny to think of this,

but we actually removed the traffic sequence of the movie.

So the way the movie started for the longest time was it had this overture

and then it went into Emma Stone's

character on the freeway.

No musical number,

but we just cut to her on the freeway and she's reading her lines.

And then Sebastian starts honking behind her

and they have a little exchange, and he gives her a dirty look

and she flips them the finger, and then they go on their way,

and she goes to work at the coffee shop, and then we follow their stories.

Well, it didn't really feel much of a like a strong beginning,

something that Damien Chazelle feels really strongly about.

He really likes to try to put his best scene at the end of the movie.

The last scene should be the strongest in the second strongest scene in the movie

should be the first, the first scene.

The problem we had is we took out the musical number, which

didn't feel right, and all of a sudden we had a very mediocre beginning.

It wasn't really much of a way to start a movie.

You just had these two characters on the freeway

and then they give each other the finger and then that's it.

It wasn't exciting, it wasn't cinematic, it wasn't daring.

And but we didn't know what to do because the musical number felt.

Wrong.

There was something wrong about it.

The movie and this number used to start with

introducing Mia and Sebastian first,

and then the camera panned around and then people started

getting out of their cars and they started dancing.

There was a musical number.

And then when the musical number was done,

we went back to Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone.

What didn't make sense to us and to people watching the movie, the rough cut

we found was that it didn't make sense to introduce our characters

and then go away to other characters for a musical number.

It seemed odd that Ryan Gosling and Emma

Stone were not participating in the musical number.

It didn't make sense, but we didn't know that right away.

We just knew that the musical number had a problem.

It didn't work. People it was people thought it was too

fake and it was taking them out of the movie.

So our solution at first was to remove the scene.

We even had a special preview screening

where we recruited 400 people for an audience screening and

just to test a rough cut.

And we played it without that opening musical number.

And our grades, our scores were not very good.

And I can't help

but think that it was because we had a very bad opening to the movie.

When we started thinking about what the problem was that we realized

that there was a problem with the original concept.

It wasn't that we edited it incorrectly, it's

that the concept was flawed before the idea that you introduced

your main characters, then went away from them

for a musical number, then went back to them.

What it required from us was, was

a lot of thinking outside of the box.

We really had to think hard how we were going to fix this scene,

which hadn't been designed to go together.

So specifically, since it was all a single supposed to be a single take.

There was no that's all he shot.

There was no coverage to cut to in order to join the pieces together differently.

With the help of our visual effects team,

we had to come up with a solution

that would correct it.

Basically, what we ended up doing is what you have

now in the movie, which is we start, we introduce the freeway,

we start big , we start wide, you have the musical number.

We present this as a world.

This is the world of Los Angeles.

It's a strange place. It's a musical place.

Then the camera moves in on our two main characters.

It goes from wide establishing to close.

That makes more sense.

The transition we made here.

We were able to join

and I told you the piece coming up after the Lala Land title used to be part one.

Now it's part four of four pieces that used to be part one.

So this right here was the supposed to be the end of the

the musical number.

As it is now.

It is the end, but.

This really was the end before.

Title comes up.

And then after the title leaves, the camera will go down.

So this was the end of the shot.

So somewhere in here, the visual effects team

made a digital transition to transition from

two different shots.

They had different cars in them.

They're very similar in composition.

The scene started with this upper wide, and it ended

with this camera up as a single, but they were not exactly the same.

So there is a transition here to. To

what used to be the first shot.

And in fact, if you take a close look,

if I can go backwards here.

If you take a close look at the cars

in front of Ryan Gosling's car, the red car.

Red car.

This other car in front.

If we come around.

To his windshield.

By the time we come around here, you see that there are different cars.

Because we've transition to a new shot.

This is this is what used to be the opening shot.

So the visual effects team seamlessly put these two things together,

something that you would think would be almost impossible.

And that's something that I didn't do.

But we made the cut.

So when I did this, I just made a rough cut because we

we were confident that we could get them to make it work.

But the idea was we found the right order to shuffle these pieces into.

And for that, we really had to think outside of the box.

We had to we had to in a way, think

beyond our constraints.

And that's sometimes very difficult to do because it's very easy

to look at something like this, especially something as pre-planned is as this.

It's very easy to say we can't do that because it's not supposed to be that way

or it's impossible.

How can we make this cut happen? How can we make this work?

We had to.

We had to.

We had to imagine it.

We had to imagine and figure and really think about what would make this.

What would solve this?

What would change the scene in a big thing that would change it is the idea

of changing the concept instead of the way it was originally designed.

Think of something different, and that's what we had to do.

And so now the scene, really.

Felt like it was in the right order,

but we still had to have added touch to it.

That it didn't have and.

That was to make this

to make this musical number.

Become kind of our overture in a way,

to become a separate little

piece before the actual movie starts.

And we did that

by not having the overture with the title sequence.

We did away with that because we figured the problem is not

we had started to solve the traffic sequence.

That's not the problem in terms of length.

The problem is the overture.

We don't need that.

So we took that away and now the movie starts the way it does.

But we the

final touch we added was that we put the title here

at the very last part of this musical number.

So when they close the doors.

We figured this was a good place

to put the title of the movie.

Uh huh.

And that creates a separation from this.

Thank you.

From this opening sequence,

our overture, if you will, and the rest of the movie.

So any overt

stylization in terms of what the camera does, in terms of the characters

who are dancing and singing, it becomes

acceptable to a certain extent.

It doesn't feel like.

It's so different from the rest of the movie

because you're adding a separation.

You're adding a chapter break.

And that's what that title, by putting the title there on that downbeat,

that's what that did.

And so I would say that was the final touch for us

that said now that was the overture and now we're going to move in

and begin our

real story with our real characters.

We started big, we started wide, and now we're focusing in

on the two characters who are going to lead you through the rest of the story.