Damien Chazelle Quotes

31 quotes in 395 categories

• 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.
• There are a lot of musicians in my life. But movies came first for me. That was my original passion.
• I like a set to be a happy place, where people can feel free to experiment.
• 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…
• I actually grew up wanting to be a filmmaker. I wanted to make movies, and music was a detour, almost.
• I was in this public high school in Princeton, and it had this topnotch jazz program - if you were a musician of any kind…
• I handle screenings and award ceremonies really badly.
• I was a writer for hire. I wrote to pay the bills.
• My version of a stress dream is, really, showing up on a concert stage with a drum set and not knowing the chart.
• 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 had seen a lot of music movies that celebrated music or that showed the kind of joys from playing music, which is a big…
• As a kid, I was just writing scripts and taking whatever film classes I could in college.
• Certainly, my manager Gary Ungar was the first person to give me any attention and hustle for me. This was back in 2009.
• 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…
• 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 think there is something to be said for not coddling people and not accepting good as good enough.
• 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…
• I was a jazz drummer, and it was my life for a while: what I lived and breathed every day.
• 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.
• My first movie was totally improvised.

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