Damien Chazelle

My motivation for being a good drummer was born out of fear, which, in a way, seems so antithetical to what art…

— Damien Chazelle

It's interesting when you wind up distilling all your ambitions and your goals and dreams into one single person. It's giving that…

— Damien Chazelle

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…

— Damien Chazelle

Real practice means working on stuff you're not good at. Real practice is about butting your head against the wall repeatedly until…

— Damien Chazelle

It's a little difficult when something goes from being an utter obsession - a thing where your skill defines you as a…

— Damien Chazelle

I love the ending of 'The Wrestler.'

— Damien Chazelle

It was only through getting interested in more out-there and avant-garde forms that the musical suddenly seemed like such a wonderful genre…

— Damien Chazelle

I feel like a lot of directing is casting.

— Damien Chazelle

If you're an artist, you want to draw from real life; you want to draw from experiences, emotion, and it's something that…

— Damien Chazelle

I was interested in music and making movies about musicians, but my own experiences, and doing what it felt like for me…

— Damien Chazelle

There are a lot of musicians in my life. But movies came first for me. That was my original passion.

— Damien Chazelle

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…

— Damien Chazelle

At the upper echelon of musicians in general, I guess performers in general, you have to have this kind of live-or-die, cutthroat…

— Damien Chazelle

If you want to make a movie, there may be many forces trying to pull you down, but really, a lot of…

— Damien Chazelle

I would break a lot of cymbals. You whack the cymbals hard enough, and they will crack in half. Drums are not…

— 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…

— Damien Chazelle

I was in this public high school in Princeton, and it had this topnotch jazz program - if you were a musician…

— 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…

— 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…

— Damien Chazelle

I was a kid living in New Jersey, who - I'd wanted to make movies since I was a little kid, so…

— Damien Chazelle

I had seen a lot of music movies that celebrated music or that showed the kind of joys from playing music, which…

— Damien Chazelle

Certainly, I've loved musicals for a while, so I did some short films in college that had musical numbers and things like…

— Damien Chazelle

I love the idea of using film language similarly to how musicians use music - combining images and sounds in a way…

— Damien Chazelle

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

— Damien Chazelle

There were so many specific things from high school jazz band that I remembered: the conductor searching out people who were out…

— Damien Chazelle