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. Damien Chazelle Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
If you’re an artist, you want to draw from real life; you want to draw from experiences, emotion, and it’s something that a lot of musicians juggle with. I’ve always found it so fascinating. Damien Chazelle Read Quote
