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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Damien Chazelle Quotes

My hands were constantly blistered or bloody; my ears were always ringing. I tore through drumheads and drumsticks like there was no tomorrow.

– Damien Chazelle

By the end of high school, I had this fork-in-the-road moment where part of me considered going to vocational music school to really pursue it.

– Damien Chazelle

In a weird way, I’m always going to ground myself. I’m an insecure kind of pessimist, but I’m always kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop.

– Damien Chazelle

I like the idea of working my way up. I don’t feel impatient to immediately jump into something that could literally bring down a studio if I don’t do it well.

– Damien Chazelle

‘Whiplash’ scared me. I feel you should only do projects that scare you to some degree. I get motivated by those sorts of feelings.

– Damien Chazelle

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.

– Damien Chazelle

I remember moving out to L.A. straight after college and just starting to try to write scripts and trying to get stuff off the ground.

– Damien Chazelle

I was a jazz drummer, and it was my life for a while: what I lived and breathed every day.

– Damien Chazelle

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.

– Damien Chazelle

I do truly believe that the smallest stories can wind up being the biggest because it’s through the specific that a writer can best access the universal.

– Damien Chazelle

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.

– Damien Chazelle

I was interested in music and making movies about musicians, but my own experiences, and doing what it felt like for me to be a drummer? Nah, I wasn’t interested in that.

– Damien Chazelle

There are a lot of musicians in my life. But movies came first for me. That was my original passion.

– Damien Chazelle

Certainly, my manager Gary Ungar was the first person to give me any attention and hustle for me. This was back in 2009.

– Damien Chazelle

Nothing is guaranteed to last, so you should just enjoy it as it happens.

– Damien Chazelle

People like Art Blakey and Buddy Rich, you look at them playing music, and it’s just like looking at a heavy metal drummer. I mean, they’re playing with the same amount of ferocity. It’s not to say all jazz is like that.

– Damien Chazelle

If you’re on the varsity team, the responsibilities are a lot bigger and there’s more stress, but you also walk around feeling probably like you can hold your head high.

– Damien Chazelle

I didn’t have traditional stage fright. If there was 500 people in the audience or three people in the audience, it didn’t really make a difference. What made a difference was the conductor. Everything that I was scared about as a drummer was him.

– Damien Chazelle

The greatest thing has been that projects that were pipe dreams before ‘Whiplash’ are now feeling more realistic.

– Damien Chazelle

If you’re an artist, you want to draw from real life; you want to draw from experiences, emotion, and it’s something that a lot of musicians juggle with. I’ve always found it so fascinating.

– Damien Chazelle

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.

– Damien Chazelle

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.

– Damien Chazelle

People aren’t inherently sympathetic.

– Damien Chazelle

It’s a weird thing where, especially in jazz, you have to totally mention cutting sessions and people one-upping each other and people being super, super tough on each other. And out of it emerge these genius musicians.

– Damien Chazelle

Going back to my film education, I always have that voice in my head that’s always screaming, ‘Sell out!’ And that’s good: you want that, because it keeps you on your toes, and it’s important to remember what’s actually important.

– Damien Chazelle

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?

– Damien Chazelle

I was a writer for hire. I wrote to pay the bills.

– Damien Chazelle

I like a set to be a happy place, where people can feel free to experiment.

– Damien Chazelle

If you want to make a movie, there may be many forces trying to pull you down, but really, a lot of it is will power. You can will it into being if you just believe that you are going to make a movie.

– Damien Chazelle

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.

– Damien Chazelle

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