Damien Chazelle Quotes
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I was a jazz drummer, and it was my life for a while: what I lived and breathed every day.
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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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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 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.
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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.
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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 feel like a lot of directing is casting.
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I love the ending of 'The Wrestler.'
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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.
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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?
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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.
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I love movies where you can sense that the director risked biting off more than they can chew.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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People aren't inherently sympathetic.
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I like movies that are specific. Movies that home in on a very specific subculture, a specific discipline, a specific world.
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There something to be said for having even unrealistic dreams. Even if the dreams don't come true - that, to me, is what's beautiful about Los Angeles. It's full of these people who have moved there to chase these dreams.
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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.
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'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.
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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.
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I'm a terrible procrastinator.