'La La Land' Choreographer Mandy Moore on Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling's Most Romantic Dance Scene
In La La Land, the romance between two California dreamers (Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone) builds to a knockout finale: a wordless fantasy ballet that retells the story of the film, as if it were all a musical fairy tale building to happily-ever-after. That magical epilogue unfolds like a dream, reaching its peak at the moment that Gosling and Stone re-create their planetarium waltz in an actual sky full of stars. For choreographer Mandy Moore, that epilogue dance was among the movie’s most important scenes. “[Director] Damien Chazelle always said this has to be the thing that you’re waiting for: the two of them to waltz in the stars, just seeing that love in their eyes,” Moore told Yahoo Movies, adding, “It would have been a real buzzkill if they had come out to dance this waltz and it was underwhelming.” In anticipation of La La Land’s big Oscar night (the film has a record-tying 14 nominations), the four-time Emmy-nominated choreographer (not to be confused with the actress-singer Mandy Moore) talked with Yahoo Movies about the invisible work that went into the film’s most romantic moment.
Watch a behind-the-scenes clip of Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling’s waltz in the stars:
“We started training for that early — that was one of the first things we did,” Moore said of Gosling and Stone’s epilogue dance. “Because waltzing is not easy: As simple and as beautiful as it looks, we didn’t have a bunch of tricks and things in there, but that footwork is really difficult. And if Ryan hadn’t learned how to lead and Emma how to follow, that could have been a train wreck for sure.”
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Leading and following, she clarifies, is one of the hardest things for any nondancer to learn, “because it’s natural for most people to want to do it themselves and just kind of be like a one-man band.” And while Gosling and Stone had both danced in their careers (Stone as the lead in Broadway’s Cabaret, Gosling as a child hoofer on The Mickey Mouse Club), neither had much formal training prior to their intensive La La Land rehearsals. The waltz in the epilogue and the earlier waltz scene at the Griffith Observatory were both shot toward the end of production, giving Moore time to teach the actors how to dance together. At no point, however, did she expect them to transform into Astaire and Rogers.
Watch a featurette about the making of the movie:
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“Damien was very clear that these people were supposed to be real people,” said Moore. “As a creator, you create from that. It would not have worked if I tried to create for Ryan and Emma thinking that they’re Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse. Because they’re not, and they were never supposed to be. … Ryan isn’t a dancer in the film and neither is Emma. [His character is] a musician and she’s an actress. But they sing and dance. So it is a fine line, and it was probably one of the hardest things to do in the film overall, to just find that balance of, how do real people fall into song and dance?”
That’s why, she said, “the waltz in the stars in the epilogue was never supposed to have a bunch of crazy spins and turns and leaps and lifts. Even though that would have been beautiful, it would have been out of character for them, even in a heightened fantasy dream ballet.” Moore left the fancy twirls and lifts to the background dancers, professionals for whom she choreographed “my very best shot at a Jerome Robbins-MGM-Gene Kelly mashup of great moves.”
After Stone and Gosling mastered the waltz, they faced an additional challenge: shooting the dance in coordination with a moving camera, on a set designed to look like an endless night sky. “At one point Ryan was like, ‘I don’t know where I’m at in these stars, I’m getting lost!’” Moore recalled, laughing. “You turn around and you’re like, ‘That star looks like the next star, which looks like the next star — it’s like, where am I right now?’”
Gosling and Stone eventually found their bearings, and in the final cut, that complicated waltz looks lighter than air. The beautiful simplicity of Moore’s choreography is highlighted by Chazelle’s classic-Hollywood-inspired camera work: long takes and head-to-toe shots that showcase every move, and even the occasional misstep. “There are times where the lines aren’t exactly right, or there’s a little fumble here or there, but I think that’s part of the charm of it all,” Moore said. “I think it helps [the dancing] be an emotional performance. It doesn’t feel just like a perfectly played thing that you can’t access as an audience; I think you feel something.”
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