Damien Chazelle Quotes

Damien Chazelle

Profession : Director

Birth : January 19, 1985

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

Damien Chazelle

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

Damien Chazelle

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.

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

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

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 hadn't seen that many movies that really go deep enough into the fears of playing music or the language that musicians can use to treat each other or, like, the way that you can see it dehumanize and the way that it can feel like boot camp.

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

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

I've always, especially through old Hollywood musicals, loved just to watch tap dancing; I adore it. I think it's fantastic.

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

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

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

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

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

Damien Chazelle

I'm a terrible procrastinator.

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

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

Damien Chazelle

I don't like the idea the viewer can kind of sit there and go, 'Make me like this person.' People aren't inherently sympathetic.

Damien Chazelle

I think there is something to be said for not coddling people and not accepting good as good enough.

Damien Chazelle