‘La La Land’ Music Supervisor Steven Gizicki on Lost Musical Numbers, Gosling’s Piano Lessons, A Flock of Seagulls, and Daring to Dream

A la the dream sequence that forms the lengthy epilogue of La La Land, the Oscar-darling film’s music supervisor, Steven Gizicki, isn’t quite sure that he isn’t living in a dream right now.

“For those of us that grow up loving these old-fashioned movie musicals,” says Gizicki, “we always think, ‘Wow, wouldn’t it be great to work on something like that? It’s too bad they don’t make them anymore.’ We got to make one, and I’ve just been pinching myself ever since.’”

Heading into a likely Oscars sweep, we asked Gizicki to let go of his skin long enough to reveal some of the intricacies of how he came to live the dream on La La Land, which went from weird outlier to Best Picture frontrunner faster than you can whistle “City of Stars.”

YAHOO MUSIC: You had to wait a lot of years in your career to get to work on a live-action movie musical. Does the wild success of La La Land augur well for a lot more of them?

STEVEN GIZICKI: For people on the music side of the film business, the success of La La Land is good for all of us, because it’s turning kids on to musicals that never would have been into them in the first place, and it opens a lot of doors. Clearly a lot more musicals will be made. Now, I sort of liken it to Star Wars in 1977, which was the return of science fiction. Luckily we got Alien and Battlestar Galactica out of it, but on the crap side, you had a lot of crap science fiction movies that came down the road after it, too. So I think we’re gonna get probably a mixed bag, but how exciting that the door is open and people are willing to take a chance now where they wouldn’t have been before. And La La Land broke or ignored most of the rules for movie musicals. So, going forward, are the rules still the rules? For the next generation, the reins are off.

It is a little weird to think that a movie heavily influenced by something as non-mainstream as The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is suddenly the mainstream of how people think about movie musicals.

How great is that, to see the words Umbrellas of Cherbourg in every newspaper in the country? I have cousins in Michigan that have been downloading Umbrellas of Cherbourg on iTunes. And you know what? Awesome. If we have achieved anything… Singin’ in the Rain, as well — we take for granted that everybody knows it, but a lot of people don’t. Just knowing that people out there are discovering these things is really rewarding.

You had a lot of functions on this film that don’t usually fall under the duties of a music supervisor. For instance, in the opening number, “Another Day of Sun,” I heard that it fell to you to make sure the musicians inside the truck on that freeway overpass didn’t suffocate.

I do want my musicians to survive the day. That is maybe the most important part of my job! It was a really, really hot day. Taking care of the band and bringing them water, or opening the gate to give them fresh air, these are the things that you don’t necessarily think of as music supervision. But on this one it was part of it.

A lot of us think of the music supervisor as the lucky guy who gets to go through his record collection and find his favorite songs to stick in a movie. But this movie doesn’t have any existing material, except for the A-ha and Flock of Seagulls songs that Ryan Gosling’s character is embarrassed to be playing at a poolside party. And those were already written into the script before you came on, right?

Yeah. I would love to take credit for those, and of course the control freak in me walks in the door and wants to come up with really big, great ideas. But they were too perfect. As with any job, sometimes the best you can do is just get out of the way when things are already working. By the way, I think people might misinterpret Sebastian’s comment about “I Ran” as insulting the song. He’s a serious musician, so the “I Ran” keyboard part is so simple that that’s what he’s commenting on, not necessarily the quality of the song. I would just like to state that for the record as a Flock of Seagulls fan!

So with no room left to pick classic new wave songs, how was the role of music supervisor defined on this film?

Yes, music supervision is traditionally known as the guy or gal that picks the songs and handles the licensing and manages that part of the process. But there’s a sort of companion version of music supervision, which I tend to specialize in, along with other people like Matt Sullivan, who worked on the musicals Dreamgirls, Chicago, and Hairspray. I liken it to what a line producer does on a film, which is just the person that makes everything happen — overseeing the songwriting process, if there are original songs to be written; booking the musicians and singers and the scoring stage; overseeing all the pre-records that are necessary to shoot the production numbers; and working with the choreographer and all the departments to get these musical moments to film.

After that, it moves into overseeing the orchestra and the mixing and the soundtrack album and other ancillary stuff. It’s very soup-to-nuts. Anything dealing with music for musicals goes through music supervisors. The music supervisor generally is not on set very much, but here I was on set essentially every single day, with the exception of a few [music-free] moments like when Mia goes to visit her family in Boulder City. Even in scenes where a character is just hearing music, like when Mia is at the restaurant and imagines she hears Sebastian’s song coming out of the speaker, we would have a playback [to get a reaction from the actor], so I’d have to coordinate with the sound department on that. My job does encompass the traditional elements, but there’s a lot more frosting on top.

What was the biggest obstacle you personally faced?

Well, the biggest obstacle for the music department in general was teaching Ryan how to play piano. We hired this brilliant piano teacher, Liz Kinnon, who worked with him two-plus hours a day, six days a week, for three to four months leading up to the shoot, and then continued to work with him during the shoot. So that was the most challenging thing on the to-do list for the music department, I suppose.

The most challenging thing for myself might have been something that seems rather simple, but it was casting the voice for the male lead that you hear in “Another Day of Sun.” It was played on camera by our assistant choreographer, the guy in the white, buttoned-down shirt. Everyone you see onscreen is a dancer and not singer, so we had to double them with session singers. But Damien [Chazelle, the director] and Justin [Hurwitz, the composer] were very wisely set on making these voices sound like actual, genuine human people, with no artifice. So finding that voice took us so long. Our vocal contractor kept throwing me dozens and dozens of guys to listen to, and we held what was basically a cattle call where we went through a hundred or more singers for that spot. I was sending clip after clip to Damien and Justin and getting a note back: “Nope, too boy band.” “Nope, too American Idol.” “Nope, too Broadway.” And this kid Sam Stone, who we eventually cast, came in quite literally at the 11th hour, as we were mixing the film, a day or so before the deadline where we just had to be done. It’s always that thing you don’t expect to break the camel’s back that does, right? We’re at the end of the road, and Ryan could play piano, and Emma [Stone] knocked “Audition (The Fools Who Dream)” out of the park — but I still can’t find a damn singer for that one little part.

You didn’t end up using a hand double for Gosling at all in the finished film, right?

I forgot — that might have been the other most challenging part of my job, finding a hand double for Ryan Gosling. Much like you sure hope that the house doesn’t burn down, but you just have to have fire insurance, it was the same thing here, with the hand double for the piano. We always were confident and very hopeful that Ryan would be able to do everything himself, but you have to have the insurance of having someone on hand just in case the wheels fly off the cart. And as soon as Ryan learned that we had engaged somebody to potentially do this, just to have on deck, I think he upped his game one level higher, because he didn’t want the guy to leave his trailer. He was so determined to do it all himself. And he did. Everything you see onscreen is Ryan. No trickery.

I’m shocked at how many people, even journalists, state with confidence that it’s Gosling playing on the soundtrack. That’s a testament to how good he got.

Exactly. Randy Kerber, who actually did play it on the soundtrack and in the film, was a piano consultant and helped us. Liz taught Ryan the mechanics of where you put your fingers on the keys, but Randy Kerber helped him with the performance aspect of it and the positioning of what does a piano player look like while he’s performing.

If you’re looking closely, Gosling is leaving out some notes in some of the more complicated runs. But a tiny, tiny fraction of the audience will ever notice that.

There were some minor cheats.

It beats digitally grafting on someone else’s hands.

I’m sure anything is possible, but I can state for the record we did not go there.

Is it true Gosling had to lip-sync someone else’s whistling?

That was the incomparable Justin Hurwitz. As it turns out, Ryan Gosling cannot whistle. So Justin whistled it on a demo, and we just kept it. You know, it’s probably comforting to the men of America that there’s one thing Ryan Gosling cannot knock out of the park.

Two of the songs, “Audition” and the “City of Stars” reprise duet, were sung live. Is that a lot more challenging than the pre-recorded stuff?

Really challenging. “City of Stars,” the duet, we shot at a crappy apartment in Panorama City, and someone had unfortunately been shot or something down the street that day, so there were police helicopters and sirens everywhere. On top of that, it was a very creaky hardwood floor, and a squeaky piano bench, as we were trying to record the vocals live. Somehow the sound department was able to not only make it usable, but make it brilliant, and they deserve a medal of honor for that.

In breaking the rules for a musical here, you don’t really have an “11:00 number.” The “Audition” song might count as that, but then it’s followed by a long instrumental dream sequence that really is the climax. So maybe “Audition” is a 9:30 or 10:00 number?

I don’t have an answer for that myself! But I remember reading the “Epilogue” number that you’re referring to when I read the script, and in my first meeting with Damien, I actually looked at him and said, “This is going to be my favorite sequence in a movie ever, in history.” And he laughed and said “Oh, Gizicki.” But I was absolutely serious. And it is. I could watch that thing on a loop constantly. Sometimes you get pulled out of a screening because you have to go do another thing. But I always look at my watch and make sure that I can get back into the theater in time to watch the epilogue again, because I still enjoy the ride. It still makes me cry every single time. I’ll never get tired of it.

When did you get a sense this would be beloved by audiences and a runaway favorite for the top Oscar? It can’t have been during the test screening process, because reportedly you had two test screenings that didn’t go all that well. Was it a matter of fine-tuning the film that much after those screenings, or is more about priming the audience for what they’re going to see, and when they know critics and festivals have already loved it, they’re more inclined to go with it?

A little of both. The two test screenings we had were not entirely what you see in theaters now. Damien would screen it for family and friends and kept refining little things based on those, too. Those two screenings, as you say, didn’t go as well as we had hoped, but they were really useful in helping us get there. As for the question of when we knew: Clearly you always hope, right? You hope that your baby is a cute baby. Sometimes it’s not. And we didn’t know for sure until opening night of the Venice Film Festival in August. People applauded after every single number, and it was at that moment that we all realized, “Oh, wow, people are going to love it.” Because musicals are a polarizing genre.

It’s funny that before Frozen came out, Disney’s trailers didn’t even give any indication that it was a musical — that’s how scared they were to let people know it had songs in it. Then it had one of the biggest soundtracks in modern history.

Into the Woods was the same thing, right? I was working on this thing for a year and a half or so before anybody in the outside world saw it. When your friends ask what you’re working on, and you say, “Oh, I’m working on a movie with original songs, shot in L.A.,” some people would get excited, but a lot of people give you a suspicious “Mmmm, OK!” kind of reaction.

I read that in one of the test screenings, the opening numbers were completely cut out, and you didn’t hear anybody sing for the first 20 minutes. Ultimately you made the decision to immerse people immediately. With a musical, it seems like it’s better to do that than ask people who are uncomfortable with the genre to deal with that first transition from dialogue into song.

You’re referring to what will maybe go down as the legend of La La Land, which is that our second test screening did not have the opening number, “Another Day of Sun.” That’s part of the test-screening process, just trying everything. But at the end of the day, we moved some bits around and made it work. We wanted to let the audience know from moment one: This is a musical; you are either in or you’re out. Buckle up!

If that had really worked for a test audience, leaving out the freeway scene have made for the most elaborate and expensive DVD extra of all time.

We did have a good laugh about that.

And then you had a version with even more music, with an overture at the beginning, over a blank screen, like some movie musicals did in the ‘50s and early ‘60s. Quentin Tarantino got away with that on The Hateful Eight, but only on a “roadshow version” that played for select audiences. It would be hard for most modern audiences to get that. But a lot of us would have loved to see and hear that.

Honestly, that was heart-wrenching to cut, because collectively we were all so in love with that piece of music. Justin’s music as a whole is beautiful and timeless, and it feels like it’s always existed. And the overture was absolutely stunning, and it was something that we always understood would be part of the film. As we were test-screening it, the overture that was two and a half-ish minutes, followed by “Another Day of Sun,” which sort of feels like another overture. It’s the old saying, “You have a hat on a hat.” It just felt like too much. The one critique that the test audiences kept giving us, which we really listened to, is that it took a long time for Mia and Sebastian to connect. And if you have two overtures giving you an additional 10 minutes or something up at the top of the film, that’s a problem. But God, I miss it!

Besides the overture, you also cut out a verse from the second number, “Someone in the Crowd.” Will any of these things show up as extras?

I don’t think so, because we never actually recorded them with the orchestra. Sorry to break the music completists’ hearts out there, but they only exist in synth demo form. With “Someone in the Crowd,” when losing that verse was first mentioned as a possibility, the music department collectively clutched our chests and were about to have a heart attack. And the same with the dance department, because it was so much work to film that. But it was a huge, sprawling number at that point, and by removing that, we shifted focus from the song being about the roommates, and then it became more about Mia and her journey, which made so much sense.

And there were reports of a title track, “La La Land,” that would have been another big ensemble number late in the movie. Was that song even filmed?

No. It was demo-ed, and as the story continued to evolve, it just didn’t fit any longer.

So, no three-hour director’s cut to look forward to?

Exactly.

The music in the movie is imbalanced, or asymmetrical, in a really interesting way. The first two numbers are big, energetic, tropical-flavored ensemble numbers. And there are no more big ensemble songs after that. The middle of the movie is these intimate, piano-based duets and solo pieces, and then there’s only one vocal piece at all in the last third of the movie, followed by a sort of dream ballet that finally takes the movie into full-on old-school movie music. But the audience is so energized by the first two numbers, maybe everyone is sated and doesn’t mind that it never comes back to that.

I describe it like an inverted triangle. It starts off so big, then it slowly focuses on the two of them as the film goes on. One of our producers described it as not necessarily so much a musical in the way that you think of a musical as a film with musical moments. It doesn’t follow the rules. There is no “I want” song, really, except for Mia’s little bit in the bathroom in “Someone in the Crowd,” and there certainly isn’t a reprise of that “I want” song. So we took the rules and threw them out, which we get a lot of flak for on some message boards. But it works.

What was your career highlight, before this?

Sometimes the best experiences are on projects that are maybe the least well received. I was working at Lucasfilm on this project that eventually became known as Strange Magic, which is an animated musical. It was an epic bomb and got some of the worst reviews in history. However, the road to get there was one of the great highlights of my life. I got to work with George Lucas for many years really closely, and I could ask him any Star Wars question that I could think of. And if it weren’t for that film, I wouldn’t have met [executive music producer] Marius De Vries and wouldn’t be on La La Land.

The low point must have been working on an animated Star Wars series for years and then having it get killed after Disney bought Lucasfilm.

Detours — that was really unfortunate. It was a partnership between Lucasfilm and Seth Green’s company, and it was sort of Family Guy meets Star Wars. It was so out-there and so fun. Over many years we produced two seasons of this animated show, which is a lot, and the show was never released, which is a shame. Hopefully one day it’ll see the light of day.

Before Lucasfilm, you worked for years for Disney’s now-defunct direct-to-DVD division, which cranked out a lot of sequels in the ‘90s and 2000s. That may have prepared you some for La La Land, because most of those home-video releases were sequels to Disney’s theatrical animated musicals.

Those were so much fun, because while Disney feature animation was not doing big Disney musicals, we were, and we were just having a ball. Now, luckily, we have the Frozens and the Moanas, but here was a period there where there wasn’t anything, except for what we were doing at DisneyToon Studios. Getting to work with Melissa Etheridge and Phil Collins was so much fun. It was like musical boot camp. That is a corner of Disney animated history that perhaps people don’t talk about much anymore. But I discovered, now as I do public speaking stuff, when I talk to twentysomethings, that these are the kids we raised, because parents would buy these DVDs at the grocery store. This one girl that I met recently watched Mulan 2 a gazillion times and could quote me every line. Those, maybe much like La La Land, influenced a generation to love musicals.