Quotes from Damien Chazelle

Mozart was born Mozart. Charlie Parker was born Charlie Parker.

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.

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.

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

There's something about some of my favorite musicals that they put me in a sort of heightened state where I feel like I'm floating out of the theater rather than walking out.

Real practice means working on stuff you're not good at. Real practice is about butting your head against the wall repeatedly until you get it right.

I never desperately wanted to be a jazz drummer. If anything, I was motivated a lot by fear. Fear of the conductor, fear of the future.

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

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

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

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

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.

'La La Land' is about the city I live in. It's about the music that I grew up playing; it's about movies that I grew up watching. Even the big spectacle of the movie feels private to me in that way.

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.

I'm too self-serious for a comedy.

People aren't inherently sympathetic.

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.

As a kid, I was just writing scripts and taking whatever film classes I could in college.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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