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
The go-to reflex all over Hollywood is still likeability. I've always had a problem with it because I think I have a weird barometer in the sense that some of the characters I've cared about the most in movies are characters that are often thought of as despicable.
What I love about jazz is that it's full of legends, full of myths. It's an oral history because it started in New Orleans and Kansas City, under the radar.
There were so many specific things from high school jazz band that I remembered: the conductor searching out people who were out of tune, or stopping and starting me for hours in front of the band as they watched.
As a drummer, you're always fighting for a level that you never quite attain.
I was in this public high school in Princeton, and it had this topnotch jazz program - if you were a musician of any kind of caliber, your holy grail was to be in that orchestra. It was that claim to fame of the school, of the town, other than the university. But it was better than the university band.
I was always pretty decent at fast stick work or doing stuff that seems impressive that's not really; I was pretty tasteful and had good ideas musically. But I had a terrible sense of tempo, which is like being a blind painter.
One interesting thing about jazz, or art in general, but jazz especially is such an individual art form in the sense that improvisation is such a big part of it, so it feels like it should be less soldiers in an army and more like free spirits melding. And yet, big band jazz has a real military side to it.
When you're trying to paint a portrait of a very specific world, you're trying to show what makes the world different. So, sometimes it means exaggerating certain kind of aspects, but I don't think it's that important or it's that much of an issue as long as you get an emotional truth across.
Certainly, my manager Gary Ungar was the first person to give me any attention and hustle for me. This was back in 2009.
I was in high school, and when you get to be 14, 15, you start to feel a little more like your own person so that you can assert your adulthood a little bit.
I like movies that are specific. Movies that home in on a very specific subculture, a specific discipline, a specific world.
'Whiplash' scared me. I feel you should only do projects that scare you to some degree. I get motivated by those sorts of feelings.
If there's a good review, I'll skip over the headline, but I always find the bad reviews and read those. I don't know why. It's a little sick and demented.
It's interesting when you wind up distilling all your ambitions and your goals and dreams into one single person. It's giving that person a lot of power.