Damien Chazelle

“I was a writer for hire. I wrote to pay the bills.”

“I think, especially living in L.A., it's very easy to get wrapped up in weekend announcements and the trades and the whole social life of the city, and to get divorced from what actually matters.”

“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.”

“The greatest thing has been that projects that were pipe dreams before 'Whiplash' are now feeling more realistic.”

“I was a jazz drummer, and it was my life for a while: what I lived and breathed every day.”

“I guess art itself is insane. Its actual function is rarely clear, and yet people give their hearts and souls and lives to it, and have for all of history.”

“Certainly, my manager Gary Ungar was the first person to give me any attention and hustle for me. This was back in 2009.”

“I actually grew up wanting to be a filmmaker. I wanted to make movies, and music was a detour, almost.”

“If you look at 'West Side Story,' a lot of those numbers are actually pretty cutty, but the cuts are always musically motivated.”

“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.”

“'Whiplash' scared me. I feel you should only do projects that scare you to some degree. I get motivated by those sorts of feelings.”

“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.”

“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.”

“If there's a good review, I'll skip over the headline, but I always find the bad reviews and read those. I don't know why. It's a little sick and demented.”

“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 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.”

“As a kid, I was just writing scripts and taking whatever film classes I could in college.”

“I want to do an American 'Umbrellas of Cherbourg.'”

“I love movies where you can sense that the director risked biting off more than they can chew.”

“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.”