Damien Chazelle Quotes

Damien Chazelle

Profession : Director

Birth : January 19, 1985

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

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

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

I feel like a lot of directing is casting.

Damien Chazelle

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

Damien Chazelle

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.

Damien Chazelle

Practicing is not normally fun. Sometimes people say they're practicing, but they're really just enjoying themselves and the instrument. That's not real practice.

Damien Chazelle

I was really trying to sell to people who hate jazz: to make a case for the art form as youthful and energetic, not the sort of rarified intellectual activity it's painted as.

Damien Chazelle

I love movies where you can sense that the director risked biting off more than they can chew.

Damien Chazelle

I like movies where you feel like it was actually thought through.

Damien Chazelle

I was always pretty decent at fast stick work or doing stuff that seems impressive that's not really; I was pretty tasteful and had good ideas musically. But I had a terrible sense of tempo, which is like being a blind painter. The conductor would just rip into me, and it lasted for years.

Damien Chazelle

When someone is playing drums, they aren't actually moving around a space; they're just moving their arms and limbs. They're stuck behind the drum set. So to film someone playing the drums and make it feel as kinetic as a car chase or a shootout or a battle scene was the challenge.

Damien Chazelle

I'm too self-serious for a comedy.

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

Whiplash' was just a lucky kind of convergence of events in that I'd been trying to get a bigger project off the ground with no success for a while, and then finally, out of frustration, I just wrote this leaner, meaner, personal script about my experiences as a jazz drummer, and that's the one that wound up getting made.

Damien Chazelle

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.

Damien Chazelle

I guess I'm kind of interested in that elusive search for a bond between life and work and between compassion and competitiveness. There's always something at the end you have to find to live a full life, but it's hard to find.

Damien Chazelle

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.

Damien Chazelle

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.

Damien Chazelle

I want to do an American 'Umbrellas of Cherbourg.'

Damien Chazelle