Director of Whiplash Damien Chazelle talks about writing the semi-autobiographical script in a moment of frustration
How did this project startIJ
I was living in los Angeles, working on a script that wasn’t really becoming what I wanted it to be. Finally I gave up on it and it was that moment of frustration, not really knowing what I wanted to write — this was 2011 and then I just decided to write this script. It was the most autobiographical thing I had written. I was a jazz drummer in a competitive jazz orchestra with a teacher who had this philosophy and I had these very severe, still very strong memories of that. The teacher himself wasn’t the level of this guy, but it posed the same kind of questions for me. So I decided to write it. I wrote it really fast and then sat on it for a while. Finally I showed it to some producers and it got into the hands of both Jason Reitman’s and Jason Blum’s company and they wound up pairing up. To help raise money for what was not exactly the most commercial script ever written, they had the idea to do a short part — to basically pull a scene from the script and do it cheaply in a couple of days — just to give people an idea of what the style would be. So we shot that, took it to Sundance and that helped to get it seen and open some doors. Then we found financiers a few months after that, then we shot the feature the next Fall and we took that back to Sundance. It became a very fast process but only once the short was out there.
Was it quite cathartic, considering it was autobiographicalIJ
It was in a way. I’ve had nightmares once a month since high school about this jazz ensemble and I naively thought that writing this script would expel the nightmares but that hasn’t happened.
How old were you when you played in the ensembleIJ
It was from 14 to 18 when I played in the ensemble and in the movie the characters are 18 to 22 years old. I never considered playing professionally. It started as a hobby and it was really because of this teacher that I got obsessively into it but it was really a phase. It was a pressure cooker situation and at the time it felt like life or death but it was a phase and movies came first for me. I wanted to make a movie about the other version of me — the version that could have considered going professional with music.
Where did you grow upIJ
My father’s French, so I grew up a little bit in France but mainly New Jersey. The high school we’re talking about was in Princeton, New Jersey.
Will the teacher recognise himselfIJ
No, I don’t think he would. He was the best teacher I ever had. He was not at all a monster, like the character in the movie. He died actually shortly after I graduated high school and it was very sad. But he was very strict and the only thing we cared about in the world was pleasing him.
Do you think everyone can relate to that experience with a hard teacherIJ
We’ve all had someone like that. It’s the age where you’re starting to leave the hearth. Your parents have been that figure for most of your life and you’re starting to be your own free person. You’re out of their orbit and so you’re very vulnerable to whatever the next big planet it is, to start orbiting.
Was it hard finding an actor able to play drumsIJ
There was a lot of discussion, ‘how are we going to find someone for the roleIJ,’ ‘should we be looking at drummersIJ’, ‘should we be looking at actor-drummersIJ’ and I made a decision early on that everyone in the movie, as much as possible, I wanted to be a real musicians, even if it meant not actually being real actors. Most of the people in the band, other than Miles and the drummers he works with, are all musicians. That was important to me but I decided, just because of the demands of the arc, that ultimately the movie was less about the actual technical musicianship and more about the emotional journey, so I just had to look for the best actor there was and then try to teach him how to drum. The lucky thing with Miles was that even before I knew anything about his musical experience, I saw him in Rabbit Hole, fell in love with him and wanted him to do the movie. I found out that he did have some drumming experience. It was just one of those lucky things. He knew his way around a kit and he’s also a superb mimic and superb at picking things up really quickly. We had to give him a crash course in hard-core jazz drumming, teach him the right grip, the right sort of moves and formalise his training because he’d never had a lesson. We did that and he just took it upon himself to practise like a crazy person.
One scene in particular, where Fletcher won’t let the drummers stop playing, is harrowing to watch. Was it difficult to filmIJ
Yeah that scene in particular was probably the most exhausting for them because whereas most of the movie was very heavily storyboarded and we knew exactly where the camera would be, that scene on the other hand I just wanted to go loose. That was just two cameras circling at all times, hand-held and we did the entire scene in a single take and then just cut it between takes. We just did one take after another and continued like that.
What was your approach to filming the musicIJ
For me it was just about making the music feel exciting and not making it our grandfathers’ jazz, that it be like punk rock, that it be like war, that we shoot like action sequences. The references were not music scenes, they were the boxing matches in Raging Bull and they were the war scenes in Saving Private Ryan or The Thin Red line or Paths of Glory. They were scenes from gangster movies, from Scorsese, the heist in Rififi — those kinds of pure cinema set pieces. I love the old school idea of set pieces — scenes that exist within a movie, but that really stand as mini stories of their own.
Why was JK Simmons the right guy for Terrence FletcherIJ
It was Jason Reitman, who’s a producer of the movie, and the producer he works with, Helen Estabrook, who initially suggested the idea of casting Simmons. I wrote the role thinking of no one in particular, thinking of a mix of my old teacher, Buddy Rich, the drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket, Miles Davis and a few other very famously tough bandleaders in jazz history.
So those guys really were toughIJ
Oh yeah. I highly suggest, just for amusement, going on YouTube and searching Buddy Rich bus tape — something like that — it’s a candid audio recording that a musician did of Buddy Rich yelling at his band on the tour bus after a performance and he just goes on for about 10 solid minutes of the most withering abuse. It’s quite something. I was thinking of that and then Reitman and Helen suggested JK and I loved the idea immediately because I remembered him from Oz and also the fact that he actually hadn’t done something like this in a long time. It is totally different from what we now know him as, which is, on screen, a lot of comedies, a lot of kinder, gentler, men — Juno’s father, for instance — there’s such a decency that you sense in him, in those movies. So I just thought it was a brilliant idea. I sent JK the script right away. He was the first person to sign the movie. He did the short with us and it was very quickly apparent to me that he was perfect for the part.
What about the abuse about the boys’ weight or homosexualityIJ
Part of why I put the script in the drawer for a while is, to me, the story was all about that: it was about going as far as you can possibly go. That also, of course, made me a little anxious and embarrassed to show the script to people because I didn’t know how it would reflect on me. I think there’s also a little bit of this tension in the movie and it’s interesting seeing how different people react and whether it’s actually making a case for that behaviour. Seeing it with a crowd and the way they react at the end…they’re into it. It seems to me like it is a kind of fascist, ‘This is what it takes,’ kind of movie, whereas in my personal life, I am the farthest from that, in terms of my own feelings about that kind of behaviour. But that’s actually kind of the beauty of it too, you make the movie with your own ideas, and then it eventually becomes the audience’s.