Damien Chazelle

I never desperately wanted to be a jazz drummer. If anything, I was motivated a lot by fear. Fear of the conductor, fear of the future. ”

My hands were constantly blistered or bloody; my ears were always ringing. I tore through drumheads and drumsticks like there was no tomorrow. ”

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. ”

There are no large-scale original musicals being made right now. They're all Broadway adaptations and jukebox musicals or catalog musicals, and they just don't interest me as much. ”

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. ”

Whiplash' was just a lucky kind of convergence of events in that I'd been trying to get a bigger project off the ground with no success for a while, and then finally, out of frustration, I just wrote this leaner, meaner, personal script about my experiences as a jazz drummer, and that's the one that wound up getting made. ”