It was rumored last year that Emma Watson would be starring in the musical La La Land, written by Damien Chazelle and also starring Miles Teller.  It seems that the news has been confirmed by The Telegraph and Page Six. Emma will reportedly be playing Mia, an aspiring actress trying to make it in the competitive world of Los Angeles. This has not been completely confirmed as of yet.

Of the project, Chazelle says: “I’ve been trying to get off the ground since I lived in LA, in the past five or six years. I wrote the script about four years ago, and I worked with the same guy who did the music on Whiplash. We wrote it four years ago and we were just trying to convince someone to do an original, MGM-style musical, because I don’t think there are enough.”

Justin Hurwitz, Chazelle’s collaborator said:

“Most current musicals are based on stage musicals (like Chicago) or other properties, so it’s really cool Lionsgate are letting us do a totally original musical. Even the few other original musicals made today have diegetic justification for the music, like Once. Now I love Once, but the music is all on screen, as opposed to older musicals where orchestra just swells up behind the actor. Or take the film Enchanted from a few years ago, which I thought was great, but it had a high concept to justify the music – she was a storybook character. There hasn’t been a movie in a while where the music just swells up for no reason other than that the characters are moved and want to break into song.”

A little more information on the film, as seen in The Telegraph:

The film will have eclectic influences. Hurwitz started playing piano at the age of six and is influenced by people as diverse as French musician Michel Legrand and Charlie Chaplin. […] Jazz is a common love for director, composer and main star Tiller. They believe in their films that they have been able to show how much precision goes into jazz, a musical form sometimes considered to be “loose” because of the improvisation involved. But La La Land isn’t a film centered solely on jazz. The creators are taking their style from iconic Hollywood musical films such as Singin’ In The Rain, [A] Star is Born, Gentleman Prefer Blondes and Meet Me in St Louis, as well as French New Wave and Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

According to the article, ‘filming is expected to begin in March and Chazelle says they will pre-record the songs in the style of the old Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies for MGM. As a fan of Harry Potter, Chazelle admits he is looking forward to working with Watson and on a project with a comic touch’

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