A French-American director, film producer, and screenwriter
Damien Chazelle
I felt permission to explicitly celebrate these things, to fill the screen to the brim with things I personally love
Chazelle was born in Providence, Rhode Island to a Roman Catholic family. His father, Bernard Chazelle, is the Eugene Higgins Professor of computer science at Princeton University, and was born in Clamart, France. His mother, Celia, is from an English-Canadian family based in Calgary, Alberta, and teaches medieval history at The College of New Jersey.
Early life
Chazelle was raised in Princeton, New Jersey, where, although a Catholic, he attended a Hebrew school for four years due to his parents' dissatisfaction with other local schools. Chazelle has a sister, Anna, who is an actress. Their English-born maternal grandfather, John Martin, is the son of stage actress Eileen Earle
Filmmaking was Chazelle's first love, but he subsequently wanted to be a musician and struggled to make it as a jazz drummer at Princeton High School. He has said that he had an intense music teacher, who was the inspiration for the character of Terence Fletcher in Chazelle's breakout film Whiplash. Unlike the film's protagonist Andrew Neiman, Chazelle stated that he knew instinctively that he never had the talent to be a great musician and after high school, pursued filmmaking again He studied filmmaking in the Visual and Environmental Studies department at Harvard University and graduated in 2007.
Early work
Chazelle wrote and directed his debut feature, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, as part of his senior thesis project with classmate Justin Hurwitz at Harvard. The film premiered at Tribeca Film Festival in 2009 and received various awards on the festival circuit, before being picked up by Variance Films for limited release and opening to critical acclaim
After graduation, Chazelle moved to Los Angeles with the ultimate goal of attracting interest to produce his musical La La Land Chazelle worked as a "writer-for-hire" in Hollywood; among his writing credits are The Last Exorcism Part II (2013) and Grand Piano (2013). He was also brought in by J.J. Abrams' Bad Robot Productions to re-write a draft of 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016) with the intention of also directing, but Chazelle ultimately chose to direct Whiplash instead.
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Breakthrough and success
Chazelle initially described Whiplash as a writing reaction to being stuck on another script: "I just thought, that's not working, let me put it away and write this thing about being a jazz drummer in high school." He stated he initially did not want to show the script around, as it felt too personal, and "I put it in a drawer". Although nobody was initially interested in producing the film, his script was featured on Black List in 2012 as one of the best unmade films of that year. The project was eventually picked up by Right of Way Films and Blumhouse Productions, who suggested that Chazelle turn a portion of his script into a short film as proof-of-concept. The 18-minute short was accepted at Sundance Film Festival 2013, where it was well-received; financing was then raised for the feature film, and in 2014 it was released to an overwhelmingly positive critical reaction.Whiplash received numerous awards on the festival circuit and earned five Academy Award nominations, including Best Adapted Screenplay for Chazelle, winning three.
Where Whiplash was aggressive, manic, and confrontational, La La Land is an unabashedly sweet, melancholy throwback musical that channels 1950s and '60s Hollywood in its staging and tone. Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling star as two artists trying to make it in Los Angeles — she's an actress, he's a jazz musician — and losing their way professionally and personally. It's a technically dazzling film, but it also feels like ready-made comfort food for cinephiles, full of old-Hollywood references and the energy of the big classic MGM musicals.
Part of the fun thing about making this movie is, I've been a movie lover my whole life, but some movies give you permission to indulge in that love and celebrate it, and other movies don't. This is, in many ways, a movie about movies, and a movie about the arts. So as a movie fan, as a music fan, as a fan of Los Angeles, a fan of so many of these things, I felt permission to explicitly celebrate these things, to fill the screen to the brim with things I personally love. I guess that's what made the movie feel really personal to me, even private. Sometimes it was like I was raiding my private stash of favorite LPs. That feels very personal. But at the same time, I was trying to find a way to combine those things in new ways, to update or synthesize them, or subvert them, to do something with them where they feel like they're speaking a new language. Where they feel like they're saying something new.
Chazelle next reunited with Gosling on the film First Man (2018), for Universal Pictures. With a screenplay by Josh Singer, the biopic is based on author James R. Hansen's First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong, written about the astronaut. The film received positive reviews, with Owen Gleiberman of Variety writing that "Chazelle orchestrates a dashingly original mood of adventure drenched in anxiety". The film received Oscar for the best visual effects.
