La La Land Costume Designer With Emma Stone

2024 Author: Steven Freeman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 08:15

Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling dance and sing in the city of Los Angeles to bring us one of the most anticipated movies of the year: La La Land. Mía (Stone) dreams of being an actress while working in a café and Sebastián (Gosling) struggles to revive jazz music without falling into modernity. A wonderful story with an aesthetic that complements it perfectly, managing to transmit a magical and nostalgic air that reminds us of why we love cinema. We interviewed costume designer Mary Zophres about her work on the film, which she claims will become an instant classic.

The costumes for the film are very classic and retro, but at the same time it feels modern. How did you achieve the look?

[The director] Damien ChazelleHe edited a short film with a mix of movies that inspired him as he wrote the script such as Strictly Ballroom and Sin g ing in the Rain. After having several conversations with him it was clear to me that we were going to make a modern version of a musical, but at the same time it had to be similar to those of the Golden Age of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. We wanted to have one foot on the door of reality and the other on that of fantasy. After that it was a matter of drawing the sketches, investigating and intuitively understanding what we wanted. That was the formula. I have worked with both actors (Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling) previously so I know their bodies and what looks good on them, which was a huge plus. I wanted to align myself with how people dress in the 21st century but take into account that the two characters are lovers of history and the past,then I took silhouettes from the past eras and entrusted them to their bodies, and so we did.

In addition to the director, who else on the team did you work with to achieve the perfect aesthetic of the film?

It was incredible. I have been designing for over 20 years and have never had an experience like this. The script is very evocative and you can understand the intention behind it when you read it. The first three days we met David Wasco, the production designer, and Sandy Reynolds-Wasco who is the stage designer, and we analyzed the script page by page. We knew Damien had been heavily inspired by three Jacques Demy films(Lola, The Young Girls of Rochefort and Umbrellas of Cherbourg). While we were talking about them we saw that they had made decisions between the costumes and the stage design that were similar to what we aspired to. While we were analyzing the script, Damien explained to us what was the intention of each scene and how it was going to be recorded. There is a scene where Mia is on an audition right after he throws coffee on himself and brings a yellow bag, so we think 'all the girls who are in the waiting room to audition look similar, so we have to get everyone to bring a yellow detail and that is the accent color '. So there was one with a yellow bracelet, there was a yellow sweater hanging on a chair, etc. It was that detailed. And for the other scenes when I decided what color Mia was going to use, I warned the team,and when they found a location they would tell me, "this is the shower curtain that Mine is going to come out of", or "this is going to be the color of the wall". Having those three days together was so helpful and, in my opinion, the reason why the movie works so well. It was exciting, informative, collaborative and everything that cinema should be.

In the first scene there is a musical number with around 40 dancers, what was it like to dress them all and make it look so good?

We knew beforehand that we were going to record the scene on that ramp and that we were going to record it in late September, which has been the end of summer in Los Angeles. It is a very vigorous dance number, so we were going to need triple the clothes in case something broke or ended up very sweaty. In one of those meetings during the first days we talked about the progress that was going to be seen in the colors and we had a graph of the emotional content of the film and how it starts from the bottom and then reaches the top during the planetarium scene, and then returns to go down during the time that Mia and Sebastian don't see each other, but go back up during the epilogue where all the "would have" are seen and there the color is injected again. So we had talked about recording this first scene with monochrome looks,but it was at the end of filming so we had already done all the colorful scenes and we had chosen the color palette. Between shots we gave the dancers water and dried their clothes in the sun and with dryers before they put them back on. It was very intense, but we all had a smile on our faces. We were tired, hot and exhausted, but we all knew we were doing something that was going to result in an extraordinary cinematic moment.but we all knew that we were doing something that was going to result in an extraordinary cinematic moment.but we all knew that we were doing something that was going to result in an extraordinary cinematic moment.

What inspired you for the characters of Mia and Sebastian?

Sebastián is a very formal man, he will not leave the house wearing a T-shirt and jeans. In the movie Lola, the character of Marc Michel has a very good look and we end up with a very similar one. A white shirt and pants, but we had to cut [Gosling's] pants by the dance numbers. We are also inspired by jazz musicians like Bill Evans and Hoagy Carmichael. Emma Stone looks great with clean lines, so together we worked on the necklines she was going to wear. For her [inspiration] it was more conceptual and seeing how it was going to look pretty and what was going to work for the dance numbers. I looked at pictures of Grace Kelly,Catherine Deneuve and Ingrid Bergman. There is a screen test from Bergman of when he first came to Hollywood and was wearing a piece with a pink halter neckline and he looked so good… Stone ended up wearing a pink halter dress that looked fantastic to him too. It was actually a combination of many things, but the most important thing was to find a balance between what is classic, beautiful and romantic.

La La Land opens in theaters next Friday, December 9 in New York and Los Angeles, and Friday, December 16 at the national level.