"Audition (The Fools Who Dream)" is a song composed by Justin Hurwitz with lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul for the musical film La La Land (2016). Sung by American actress Emma Stone in her role as Mia, the emotional ballad forms the film's climax. "Audition" sees Mia describing what it means to be someone who seeks a career in the arts; it has overall themes about dreamers and the importance of actors.

The final song he wrote for La La Land, Hurwitz began working on "Audition" in 2011. He revisited the track in 2014 after the film was picked up. During pre-production, Stone worked extensively with the music crew, in which she learned the song's technical points and tried to memorise it as well as she could. She performed it live on set with Hurwitz accompanying her on the piano. "Audition" garnered acclaim from film critics, as did Stone's emotional performance. It received nominations for the Academy and Critics' Choice Movie Award for Best Original Song. At the 89th Academy Awards, singer and pianist John Legend performed "Audition" and "City of Stars" in a medley accompanied by several dancers.

Damien Chazelle wrote the screenplay for La La Land in 2010. His idea was "to take the old musical but ground it in real life where things don't always exactly work out", and to salute creative people who move to Los Angeles to chase their dreams. He conceived the film's concept while he was a student at Harvard University with his classmate Justin Hurwitz. Chazelle said that La La Land reflects his own experiences as a filmmaker working his way up the Hollywood ladder. Chazelle was unable to produce the film for years as no studio was willing to finance an original contemporary musical with no familiar songs. Five years after Chazelle wrote the script and following the release of his critically acclaimed Whiplash (2014), Summit Entertainment and Black Label Media, along with producer Marc Platt, agreed to invest in La La Land and distribute it.

Hurwitz described the music as an "unbelievable amount of work and an unbelievable amount of passion". When writing the film's songs and score, he focused on whether the audience would remember them after watching La La Land. Hurwitz began by writing themes for the film and characters, some of which turned into songs. He and Chazelle selected duo Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (known collectively as Pasek and Paul)—who had written the songs to the stage musical Dear Evan Hansen—as the film's lyricists after they pitched the opening lyrics to "City of Stars".

"For 'Audition', I wasn't really listening to anything [for inspiration]. I wasn't really trying to sound like anything. I was just composing at the piano, and for that reason, I think the song comes from a very pure place and I felt like I was really composing from a place of emotion."

"Audition (The Fools Who Dream)" was the final song Hurwitz wrote since he and Chazelle "wanted to understand what the rest of the music was in the movie before we tackled this". He started writing "Audition" in 2011, after Chazelle had finished La La Land's script. He partially based the song on "I Will Wait for You" from the musical film The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964). When La La Land was picked up in 2014, Chazelle and Hurwitz revisited a number of tracks, including "Audition". The song was composed quickly this time. According to Hurwitz, this was "because it had been percolating for so long"; as a result, he related to the story and Mia's character much more, as well as "the idea of being frustrated and not being able to do what you can do, ... because of so many years of not being able to get this movie made". According to Hurwitz, Emma Stone, who portrays Mia, sounded "better in one key for the fragile opening, and another for the emotive climax", so the music team had to explore some challenging modulations. In the film, "Audition" transitions from speech to song; Hurwitz initially wrote the spoken lines with pitches. He removed them, however, after rehearsing with Stone and Chazelle, and it became evident Mia had to "slip into song".

Chazelle allowed Pasek and Paul to write lyrics with detailed narratives. According to Paul, "[t]here was never a push to write sort of more accessible pop-ified lyrics that were general and didn't tell stories much." Pasek was told by a musical theater professor that "a theater song you have to approach like it's a verb: It's what the action is and what's going to change"; Pasek and Paul attempted to make "Audition" as much of a "verb" as possible, as once Mia sings it, everything changes for her. They also took inspiration from a monologue Chazelle wrote for Stone.

During pre-production, the music team worked with Stone extensively. There are no cuts in the scene; thus, it had to be perfected entirely in one shot. Multiple rehearsals were held so she could learn the song's technical points, notes, and form; the plan was for her to memorise "Audition" so well that she focus on her character's emotions when filming. The camera movement was meticulously planned by the filmmakers, who shifted sets, pulled tables out, dimmed lighting, moved the camera around 360 degrees, and pulled back. While this was happening, Stone needed to ignore it and pretend none of it was occurring.