Filming
Filming
From the beginning, Chazelle wanted the film's musical numbers to be filmed "head to toe" and performed in a single take, like those of the 1930s works of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. He also wanted the film to emulate the widescreen, CinemaScope look of 1950s musicals such as It's Always Fair Weather. Consequently, the movie was shot on celluloid 4-perf Super 35mm film (not digitally) with Panavision anamorphic lenses in CinemaScope's 2.55:1 aspect ratio, but not in true CinemaScope as that technology is no longer available.
Chazelle wanted Los Angeles to be the primary setting for his film, commenting that "there is something very poetic about the city I think, about a city that is built by people with these unrealistic dreams and people who kind of just put it all on the line for that." Principal photography on the film officially began in the city on August 10, 2015, and filming took place in more than 60 locations both in and near Los Angeles, including the Angels Flight trolley in downtown, houses in the Hollywood Hills, the Colorado Street Bridge, the Rialto Theatre in South Pasadena, the Warner Bros. studio lot, the Grand Central Market, Hermosa Beach's Lighthouse Café, Griffith Observatory, Griffith Park, Chateau Marmont, the Watts Towers, and Long Beach, with many scenes shot in one take. It took 40 days to complete shooting, finishing in mid-September 2015.
The opening pre-credits sequence was the first to be shot, and was filmed on a closed-off portion of two carpool direct connector ramps of the Judge Harry Pregerson Interchange, connecting the I-105 Carpool Lane to the I-110 Express Lanes, leading to Downtown Los Angeles. It was filmed in a span of two days, and required more than 100 dancers. For this particular scene, Chazelle wanted to give a sense of how vast the city is. The scene was originally planned for a stretch of ground-level highway, until Chazelle decided to shoot it in the 105–110 interchange, which arcs 100 feet (30 m) in the air. Production designer David Wasco said, "I thought somebody was going to fall off and get killed." Not every portion of the highway was blocked. Chazelle compared the scene to the yellow brick road leading to the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz (1939).
Chazelle scouted for "old L.A." locations that were in ruins, or were perhaps razed. One such example was the use of the Angels Flight trolley, built in 1901. The funicular had been closed in 2013 after a derailment. Attempts were made to repair and re-open the railway, but to no avail. However, the production team was able to secure permission to use it for a day. Chazelle and his crew then arranged to have it run for shooting (it was re-opened to the public in 2017). Mia works at a coffee shop on the Warner Bros. studio lot; Chazelle considered studio lots to be "monuments" of Hollywood. Production designer Wasco created numerous fake old film posters. Chazelle occasionally created names for them, deciding to use the title of his first feature, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench (2009) for one poster, which reimagines it as a 1930s musical.
| External videos | |
|---|---|
 The full "A Lovely Night" scene via YouTube |
The now-iconic six-minute-long "A Lovely Night" scene (searching for the parked car) had to be completed during the brief "magic hour" moment at sunset. It took eight takes and two days to shoot it. When Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone finally nailed it, "everybody just exploded," Stone said. Since Gosling and Stone were not primarily dancers, the two made a number of mistakes, especially during long uninterrupted single-take musical numbers. However, Chazelle was very sympathetic towards them, understanding their lack of experience and not minding their errors. While shooting Sebastian and Mia's first dance together, Stone stumbled over the back of a bench, but picked right up and kept on going with the scene. In 2024, Gosling reflected on the filming of this scene, wishing he could re-film it to correct the positioning of his hand in the famous still frame from the sequence that was used throughout the film's marketing, saying that "It just killed the energy that way ... It was all leading to what? A lazy ... I call it La La Hand."
Chazelle said that the romantic dinner that Sebastian prepared for Mia was "one of the scenes that I think I wrote and rewrote and rewrote more than any other in the script". Gosling and Stone also helped create the dialogue of the scene to get it to be one of the more realistic scenes in a film filled with fantasy and fantastical elements.
Chazelle spent nearly a year editing the film with editor Tom Cross, as the two were primarily concerned with getting the tone right.
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