-
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.
Damien Chazelle -
I feel like a lot of directing is casting.
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 -
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 -
'La La Land' is about the city I live in. It's about the music that I grew up playing; it's about movies that I grew up watching. Even the big spectacle of the movie feels private to me in that way.
Damien Chazelle -
Mozart was born Mozart. Charlie Parker was born Charlie Parker.
Damien Chazelle -
I love the ending of 'The Wrestler.'
Damien Chazelle -
What I love about jazz is that it's full of legends, full of myths. It's an oral history because it started in New Orleans and Kansas City, under the radar.
Damien Chazelle
-
My first movie was totally improvised.
Damien Chazelle -
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?
Damien Chazelle -
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.
Damien Chazelle -
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.
Damien Chazelle -
The go-to reflex all over Hollywood is still likeability. I've always had a problem with it because I think I have a weird barometer in the sense that some of the characters I've cared about the most in movies are characters that are often thought of as despicable.
Damien Chazelle -
I'm a terrible procrastinator.
Damien Chazelle
-
People aren't inherently sympathetic.
Damien Chazelle -
I love movies where you can sense that the director risked biting off more than they can chew.
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 -
First time that I cried at a work of art was at a drum solo that I saw. A drummer named Winard Harper, part of the Billy Taylor Trio, gave back in - I would have been in high school - 2005 or something.
Damien Chazelle -
I like movies that are specific. Movies that home in on a very specific subculture, a specific discipline, a specific world.
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 was a jazz drummer, and it was my life for a while: what I lived and breathed every day.
Damien Chazelle -
'Whiplash' scared me. I feel you should only do projects that scare you to some degree. I get motivated by those sorts of feelings.
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 -
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