I'm predisposed to never be in pure celebration mode.
— Damien Chazelle
I find L.A. kind of romantic, actually. As a movie junkie, it's a city that was built by the movies. There's something really weird and surreal about it that I find energizing.
Certainly, I've loved musicals for a while, so I did some short films in college that had musical numbers and things like that, so I've kind of been obsessed with Fred and Ginger and Vincente Minnelli and Stanley Donen and Jaques Demy forever.
I think there is something to be said for not coddling people and not accepting good as good enough.
My motivation for being a good drummer was born out of fear, which, in a way, seems so antithetical to what art should be.
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.
Certainly, my manager Gary Ungar was the first person to give me any attention and hustle for me. This was back in 2009.
I've always, especially through old Hollywood musicals, loved just to watch tap dancing; I adore it. I think it's fantastic.
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.
My version of a stress dream is, really, showing up on a concert stage with a drum set and not knowing the chart.
I was a writer for hire. I wrote to pay the bills.
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.
I would break a lot of cymbals. You whack the cymbals hard enough, and they will crack in half. Drums are not actually as sturdy as they look. They're actually somewhat fragile instruments.
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.
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.
I like a set to be a happy place, where people can feel free to experiment.
By the end of high school, I had this fork-in-the-road moment where part of me considered going to vocational music school to really pursue it.
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.
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.
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.
I don't like the idea the viewer can kind of sit there and go, 'Make me like this person.' People aren't inherently sympathetic.
I'm a terrible procrastinator.
I remember being inspired myself when smaller films, whether it's 'Beasts' or 'Winter's Bone,' wound up in the Oscars lineup.
As a kid, I was just writing scripts and taking whatever film classes I could in college.
It's a weird thing where, especially in jazz, you have to totally mention cutting sessions and people one-upping each other and people being super, super tough on each other. And out of it emerge these genius musicians.
At the upper echelon of musicians in general, I guess performers in general, you have to have this kind of live-or-die, cutthroat mentality.
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.
I handle screenings and award ceremonies really badly.
I actually grew up wanting to be a filmmaker. I wanted to make movies, and music was a detour, almost.
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.
The greatest thing has been that projects that were pipe dreams before 'Whiplash' are now feeling more realistic.
If you look at 'West Side Story,' a lot of those numbers are actually pretty cutty, but the cuts are always musically motivated.
I didn't have traditional stage fright. If there was 500 people in the audience or three people in the audience, it didn't really make a difference. What made a difference was the conductor. Everything that I was scared about as a drummer was him.
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.
It was only through getting interested in more out-there and avant-garde forms that the musical suddenly seemed like such a wonderful genre to me.
I was a jazz drummer, and it was my life for a while: what I lived and breathed every day.
One interesting thing about jazz, or art in general, but jazz especially is such an individual art form in the sense that improvisation is such a big part of it, so it feels like it should be less soldiers in an army and more like free spirits melding. And yet, big band jazz has a real military side to it.
'Whiplash' was always the song I hated the most because it's a song designed to screw with drummers.
As delicate as 'Guy and Madeline' was, it was important that 'Whiplash' come off as more of a fever dream.
I remember when I first met Jason Reitman with the 'Whiplash' script; he quickly became a mentor figure who guided me through the process and also protected me and made sure that when it came time to actually make 'Whiplash,' I was able to make exactly the movie I wanted to make.
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.
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.
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.
I didn't feel the kind of joy every day playing drums that I thought you were supposed to feel.
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.
It's a little difficult when something goes from being an utter obsession - a thing where your skill defines you as a person - to it just being a thing you occasionally do.
I love the ending of 'The Wrestler.'
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.
There were so many specific things from high school jazz band that I remembered: the conductor searching out people who were out of tune, or stopping and starting me for hours in front of the band as they watched.
There are a lot of musicians in my life. But movies came first for me. That was my original passion.
