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The things one learns on a movie shoot — like that tap-dancing on asphalt is hard.

"It's quite a thing," said the actor Emma Stone. "It was amazing how different that is than being on a wood-floor dance room."

Stone learned this lesson when she and co-star Ryan Gosling tapped across a Los Angeles street in a scene in their new movie, the musical romance "La La Land" (which opens in Salt Lake City on Friday, Dec. 16).

The movie, written and directed by Damien Chazelle ("Whiplash"), is an unabashed valentine to old movie musicals and to the city of Los Angeles. It centers on two strivers — Mia (Stone), an actor struggling through one cattle-call audition after another, and Sebastian (Gosling), a jazz pianist who dreams of opening his own club — whose love affair is captured the way Hollywood did in the old days: singing and dancing.

Stone, in a recent phone interview from Los Angeles, said Chazelle approached her about the role after he saw her in her Broadway debut playing the vulnerable Sally Bowles in "Cabaret."

"I guess that was kind of my unofficial audition, because I didn't know I was auditioning for this musical, but I was," Stone, 28, said with a laugh.

Like Mia, Stone said she "definitely had some pretty intense audition stories. The thing that sticks out most to me is the memory of not getting to audition after a while, being rejected enough times that your agents don't send you out anymore."

Stone said her turning point came with a casting director, Allison Jones, for whom she has auditioned, unsuccessfully, for numerous TV pilots.

"On a Friday night, she called me and said, 'Hey, I want you to come in tomorrow. I just want to put you on tape for something, because I got a feeling about this one,' " Stone said. The movie was the 2007 teen comedy "Superbad," which became Stone's breakout role.

"All those years of seeming rejection, auditioning for her, she remembered me and gave me that chance," Stone said. "It's hard to even think back about rejection and to see there was a silver lining to not getting those TV shows."

Stone was lured in to "La La Land" by Chazelle's script and characters. "I loved [Mia's] journey, feeling like she's eventually going to give up at the beginning, and she's stuck in this rut," she said. "The ending really was the kicker for me, the thing that got me the most."

Stone said she grew up on "Grease" and animated Disney musicals, and "when I saw 'Singin' in the Rain,' I was blown away." For inspiration while making "La La Land," she also got to watch Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies, and the French musicals of Jacques Demy, such as "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg." ("Those movies are so important to Damien," Stone said.)

One of the challenges, she said, was singing live on the set. "It was lucky I had done 'Cabaret,' " she said, adding that when she sang in her 2010 high-school comedy "Easy A," she lip-synched to her own pre-recorded track. ("I told Will [Gluck], the director, I would absolutely die if had to sing live," she said.)

"The challenge is getting out of your own way," she said of singing in "La La Land." "For me, I'm never going to be a technically perfect singer in any way, shape or form. And Damien wanted that. He wanted it to be very natural and not sound like Broadway voices."

It helped that Stone's romantic dance partner was Gosling, with whom she had worked twice before — in "Crazy, Stupid, Love" (2011) and "Gangster Squad" (2013).

"It makes it so much fun," she said. "Learning to ballroom dance, and to sing together, is much more comfortable when you know the person. … I knew that if we both showed up and got into it, that we could find it eventually, because that's what we've done before."

While "La La Land" is a romance between Mia and Sebastian, it's also a love letter to Los Angeles. The movie shot on location all over the city, including an opening dance number that shut down part of I-105 for two days.

"We saw so many great different parts of L.A.," Stone said. "Going to Angels Flight and Watts Tower — all these wonderful, kind of iconic spots that are maybe not seen as frequently on screen. It was really fun to go visit those."

Twitter: @moviecricket