Damien Chazelle’s La La Land Celebrates a Decade of Enchantment in Venice

For Chazelle, the anniversary offered a chance to look back at the unlikely journey of the film, which began at the Venice Film Festival. La La Land premiered in competition there on August 31, 2016. Ten years later, he’s living in London and working on a new film that reunites much of the La La Land crew, including song and score writer Justin Hurwitz and editor Tom Cross. The film should be completed by early next year. But Friday night was all about looking back.

“I think the Venice Film Festival is maybe the most elegant and chic experience anyone can encounter, right?” said Bloom, who has his own triumph on the Lido this year with Bucking Fastard. Bloom, a Londoner, convincingly plays an Irish rogue in the film. He knew that he had nailed the accent when his Irish costar Domhnall Gleeson said he was in the clear. “Funnily enough, I’m getting my Irish passport,” says Bloom. “My grandfather was Irish.”

Bloom also waxed poetic about working with iconic director Werner Herzog, whose career has spanned more than six decades. “I think you really have to be sensitive to appreciate who Werner is,” he said. “The absolute drive, passion, vision, almost obsession when it comes to making film.”

His costar Kate Mara knows something about sensitivity, having starred in Bucking Fastard with her literal sister, Rooney Mara. Together, the pair deliver almost one performance, delivering the majority of their lines in unison. “Well, we definitely rehearsed,” says Mara, joining me and Bloom in the corner of the bar at the Gritti Palace. “We spent a lot of time together talking about it, trying to figure out how we were going to do it, so there was a lot of just conversation about the script and the characters.”

The Maras also worked with a vocal coach over Zoom to get everything just right. “I have some really special videos of us doing the most embarrassing things,” Mara says.

And the preparation didn’t stop there. “We would have little songs that we would sing before we would go to set or on our walk to set,” she says.

Embarrassing or not, the result is truly incredible to watch. In keeping with an event celebrating a film from the past, Bucking Fastard made Kate look back at her own past—and her relationship with her sister and costar. “It’s interesting hearing your sibling’s perspective of what your childhood was like because I’m the older sibling with Rooney, but I’m also the younger sibling with my older brother,” says Kate.

“She has a different perspective of what our dynamic was. But now as adults, I really look up to Rooney and I like to let her lead. I don’t know what she would say, but I definitely now as adults really let her lead and want her to lead in a lot of ways. But it’s impossible to ignore all of the family dynamics of an entire childhood, so a lot of that came into play.”

If anything, working together forced the sisters to stop trying to distinguish themselves from one another and embrace just how similar they really are. “You spend a lifetime trying to separate from your siblings, especially just if you like the same things or whatever. You want to be unique and you want to be different,” she continued. “But for this, it was so important to find the similarities. And I guess the surprising part about it was that it all came for free. We’re so similar in so many ways, in so many really scary, freaky, weird ways. And that I think was the beautiful part about it was that we got to discover each other in a really specific way at work.”

The evening also had Chazelle thinking about his own past. Growing up in Princeton, he would drive to Lawrenceville, New Jersey, for drum lessons with the late Tony DeNicola, a relationship that would eventually serve as the basis for his breakout film Whiplash. “He was great, this old Italian American from the big band years,” said Chazelle. “He had his old kit that was from god knows when with the old calf skin heads and it was amazing.”