Why Oscar winner Christopher Nolan loves La La Land?

Filmmaker Christopher Nolan (left); and a still from Damien Chazelle's musical La La Land (2016), starring Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone.

Christopher Nolan has finally won his first ever Best Director and Best Picture Oscars, for Oppenheimer (2023). Nolan's most accessible and commercially viable Oppenheimer picked up eight Oscars, of its 13 nominations, at the 96th Academy Awards last Sunday in Hollywood.

Prior to 2024, Nolan's films have been nominated for the Oscars three times: Memento (2002), Inception (2011), Dunkirk (2018), but never won.

While Nolan's filmmaking is known for its cerebral indulgences, Nolan, who himself doesn't like 'musicals' genre much, uncannily loved La La Land. A book houses his confession for how much he liked Damien Chazelle's La La Land (2016), the film which featured Ryan Gosling (more recently and more famously Ken from Barbie) and Emma Stone, who won the Best Actress Oscar in 2017 for the musical and this year, too, she won it for Poor Things, the next best Oscar favourite which bagged 11 nominations and four wins.

Tom Shone’s insightful book The Nolan Variations: The Movies, Mysteries, and Marvels of Christopher Nolan (2020) has many great Nolan nuggets besides delving deep into Nolan's approach to filmmaking: meticulous attention to detail & willingness to take risks and experiment; the ideas that inform his work; a detailed account of his creative process, inception to culmination. The career graph in the book of the auteur charts the journey from his early low-budget films (Following, 1998) to his blockbuster hits to this day; the philosophical underpinnings of his films; and how the recurring themes and motifs have evolved over time.

In the book, Nolan said, "La La Land, to me, is an extraordinary film. I saw it three or four times, it's just an amazing piece of directing, and I don't usually like musicals."

La La Land pushes the boundaries of the genre while paying homage to the films that defined film musicals.

With themes of love, ambition, dreams and deceit in Hollywood, La La Land's world is visually stunning, vibrantly coloured and its cinematography on point, while its witty dialogue and catchy soundtrack make for a fun watch.