Quotes from 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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. You keep trying to master this very basic thing, and when you don't get it, you just scream. I broke a lot of drum heads, and I broke a lot of sticks.

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.

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.

I love the idea of thinking of cinema as not that far from music. A lot of my favourite movie makers, the way they move their cameras or the way they cut just feel very musical - even if the movies have no music in them at all.

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.

I was a kid living in New Jersey, who - I'd wanted to make movies since I was a little kid, so that came before music for me. But I started playing drums just as a hobby, and I wasn't even really into jazz that much.

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.

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.

There something to be said for having even unrealistic dreams. Even if the dreams don't come true - that, to me, is what's beautiful about Los Angeles. It's full of these people who have moved there to chase these dreams.

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.

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?

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.

I love the idea of using film language similarly to how musicians use music - combining images and sounds in a way that they create an emotional effect.

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.

Certainly, grades only matter so much when you're in Hollywood. But I became an utterly motivated, devoted, committed student. I was a good student because I was convinced that it would somehow help me in my quest to become a filmmaker.

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.

There are no large-scale original musicals being made right now. They're all Broadway adaptations and jukebox musicals or catalog musicals, and they just don't interest me as much.

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