Damien Chazelle
Damien Chazelle
Damien Sayre Chazelleis an American film director and screenwriter. He made his directorial debut with the musical Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench. In 2014, he wrote and directed his second feature film Whiplash, based on his award-winning short film Whiplash. The film premiered at Sundance Film Festival and went on receiving 5 Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture. Chazelle received an individual nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScreenwriter
Date of Birth19 January 1985
CityProvidence, RI
CountryUnited States of America
My version of a stress dream is, really, showing up on a concert stage with a drum set and not knowing the chart.
There's something very particular about the kind of rage you feel when you're alone in a practice room by yourself, unable to master a simple thing like a rudiment.
Practicing is not normally fun. Sometimes people say they're practicing, but they're really just enjoying themselves and the instrument. That's not real practice.
I think, especially living in L.A., it's very easy to get wrapped up in weekend announcements and the trades and the whole social life of the city, and to get divorced from what actually matters.
I've always wanted to make movies that are fever dreams.
It's certainly no coincidence that big bands became the entertainment of the army in WWI and WWII, and that jazz drumming style is very military influenced. The snare drum comes from the military and becomes the core kind of sound of jazz drums.
I guess art itself is insane. Its actual function is rarely clear, and yet people give their hearts and souls and lives to it, and have for all of history.
I was a jazz drummer, and it was my life for a while: what I lived and breathed every day.
I was really trying to sell to people who hate jazz: to make a case for the art form as youthful and energetic, not the sort of rarified intellectual activity it's painted as.
First time that I cried at a work of art was at a drum solo that I saw. A drummer named Winard Harper, part of the Billy Taylor Trio, gave back in - I would have been in high school - 2005 or something.
The end result of my personal story is that I became a really good drummer, and I know myself well enough to know that I wouldn't have without this really tough conductor and this really cutthroat hostile environment I was in.
'Whiplash' was always the song I hated the most because it's a song designed to screw with drummers.
What's great about musicals is their energy and go-for-brokeness - stopping the story to sing and dance. How can you not love that?
There are a few musicians that I know who seem on the outside like very asocial or somewhat unemotional people, people who aren't capable of emotions, and people think they're very cold inside.