Damien Chazelle Quotes
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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.
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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.
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I handle screenings and award ceremonies really badly.
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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.
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I like a set to be a happy place, where people can feel free to experiment.
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I didn't feel the kind of joy every day playing drums that I thought you were supposed to feel.
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I've always wanted to make movies that are fever dreams.
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It's certainly no coincidence that big bands became the entertainment of the army in WWI and WWII, and that jazz drumming style is very military influenced. The snare drum comes from the military and becomes the core kind of sound of jazz drums.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Before 'Whiplash,' I'd had a string of failed scripts. I'd pour my blood, sweat and tears into them, and no one would like them.
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I was a writer for hire. I wrote to pay the bills.
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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.
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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.
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I like the idea of working my way up. I don't feel impatient to immediately jump into something that could literally bring down a studio if I don't do it well.
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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.
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There are a lot of musicians in my life. But movies came first for me. That was my original passion.
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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.
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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.
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The first thing I did as a child was draw. I wanted to make animated movies. I think Disney's 'Cinderella' was the first movie I ever saw. 'Peter Pan' was the first movie I ever saw in the movie theater. I grew up with 'Dumbo' and 'Pinocchio' and 'Sword in the Stone.' Those were the movies I wanted to make.
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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.
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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.
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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.