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The Great Gatsby
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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Damien Chazelle Quotes

If you look at ‘West Side Story,’ a lot of those numbers are actually pretty cutty, but the cuts are always musically motivated.

– Damien Chazelle

I would break a lot of cymbals. You whack the cymbals hard enough, and they will crack in half. Drums are not actually as sturdy as they look. They’re actually somewhat fragile instruments.

– Damien Chazelle

I remember being inspired myself when smaller films, whether it’s ‘Beasts’ or ‘Winter’s Bone,’ wound up in the Oscars lineup.

– Damien Chazelle

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.

– Damien Chazelle

I didn’t feel the kind of joy every day playing drums that I thought you were supposed to feel.

– Damien Chazelle

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.

– Damien Chazelle

I find L.A. kind of romantic, actually. As a movie junkie, it’s a city that was built by the movies. There’s something really weird and surreal about it that I find energizing.

– Damien Chazelle

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.

– Damien Chazelle

‘Whiplash’ was always the song I hated the most because it’s a song designed to screw with drummers.

– Damien Chazelle

My version of a stress dream is, really, showing up on a concert stage with a drum set and not knowing the chart.

– Damien Chazelle

I tend to latch on to things and not let go.

– Damien Chazelle

It’s a little difficult when something goes from being an utter obsession – a thing where your skill defines you as a person – to it just being a thing you occasionally do.

– Damien Chazelle

At the upper echelon of musicians in general, I guess performers in general, you have to have this kind of live-or-die, cutthroat mentality.

– Damien Chazelle

I remember when I first met Jason Reitman with the ‘Whiplash’ script; he quickly became a mentor figure who guided me through the process and also protected me and made sure that when it came time to actually make ‘Whiplash,’ I was able to make exactly the movie I wanted to make.

– Damien Chazelle

I actually grew up wanting to be a filmmaker. I wanted to make movies, and music was a detour, almost.

– Damien Chazelle

I’ve always wanted to make movies that are fever dreams.

– Damien Chazelle

My first movie was totally improvised.

– Damien Chazelle

I’m predisposed to never be in pure celebration mode.

– Damien Chazelle

I wanted to look at the mentality that can breed that sort of intensity, that kind of cutthroat, pressure-cooker feeling, especially a form of music like jazz, that should be – or you’d think should be – all about liberation and improvisation and everything.

– Damien Chazelle

I don’t think of ‘Macbeth’ as the villain. I don’t think of ‘King Lear’ as the villain. I don’t think of ‘Hamlet’ as the villain. I don’t think of ‘Travis Bickle’ as the villain.

– Damien Chazelle

My motivation for being a good drummer was born out of fear, which, in a way, seems so antithetical to what art should be.

– Damien Chazelle

Certainly, I’ve loved musicals for a while, so I did some short films in college that had musical numbers and things like that, so I’ve kind of been obsessed with Fred and Ginger and Vincente Minnelli and Stanley Donen and Jaques Demy forever.

– Damien Chazelle

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.

– Damien Chazelle

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.

– Damien Chazelle

It’s easy to show terrible people’s behavior on screen, and we all just kind of nod and go, ‘Isn’t that terrible.’ It’s more interesting when you can show terrible behavior in the interest of something good.

– Damien Chazelle

I had seen a lot of music movies that celebrated music or that showed the kind of joys from playing music, which is a big part of it of course, and not something that I would want to deny.

– Damien Chazelle

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.

– Damien Chazelle

As a drummer, you’re always fighting for a level that you never quite attain.

– Damien Chazelle

I like movies that are specific. Movies that home in on a very specific subculture, a specific discipline, a specific world.

– Damien Chazelle

As delicate as ‘Guy and Madeline’ was, it was important that ‘Whiplash’ come off as more of a fever dream.

– Damien Chazelle

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