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All Quotes by author - Damien Chazelle
" As a drummer, you're always fighting for a level that you never quite attain. "
Fighting
Always
You
" 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. "
Music
Moment
High School
" I actually grew up wanting to be a filmmaker. I wanted to make movies, and music was a detour, almost. "
Music
Almost
Wanting
" I don't think of 'Macbeth' as the villain. I don't think of 'King Lear' as the villain. I don't think of 'Hamlet' as the villain. I don't think of 'Travis Bickle' as the villain. "
Villain
King Lear
Hamlet
" I find L.A. kind of romantic, actually. As a movie junkie, it's a city that was built by the movies. There's something really weird and surreal about it that I find energizing. "
Romantic
City
Movies
" If you look at 'West Side Story,' a lot of those numbers are actually pretty cutty, but the cuts are always musically motivated. "
Side
Look
Always
" If you're an artist, you want to draw from real life; you want to draw from experiences, emotion, and it's something that a lot of musicians juggle with. I've always found it so fascinating. "
You
Life
Artist
" 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. "
Feeling
Head
Stress
" I guess art itself is insane. Its actual function is rarely clear, and yet people give their hearts and souls and lives to it, and have for all of history. "
History
Hearts
Art
" I hadn't seen that many movies that really go deep enough into the fears of playing music or the language that musicians can use to treat each other or, like, the way that you can see it dehumanize and the way that it can feel like boot camp. "
Musicians
Deep
Language
" I love being in the editing room and playing with tempo and with the rhythm of shots. "
Playing
Room
Rhythm
" I think, especially living in L.A., it's very easy to get wrapped up in weekend announcements and the trades and the whole social life of the city, and to get divorced from what actually matters. "
Think
Weekend
Living
" It's certainly no coincidence that big bands became the entertainment of the army in WWI and WWII, and that jazz drumming style is very military influenced. The snare drum comes from the military and becomes the core kind of sound of jazz drums. "
Coincidence
Kind
Style
" It's easy to show terrible people's behavior on screen, and we all just kind of nod and go, 'Isn't that terrible.' It's more interesting when you can show terrible behavior in the interest of something good. "
You
Behavior
Good
" I was a jazz drummer, and it was my life for a while: what I lived and breathed every day. "
Life
Every Day
Day
" I was a kid living in New Jersey, who - I'd wanted to make movies since I was a little kid, so that came before music for me. But I started playing drums just as a hobby, and I wasn't even really into jazz that much. "
Movies
Music
Me
" I was always pretty decent at fast stick work or doing stuff that seems impressive that's not really; I was pretty tasteful and had good ideas musically. But I had a terrible sense of tempo, which is like being a blind painter. "
Fast
Doing
Ideas
" My motivation for being a good drummer was born out of fear, which, in a way, seems so antithetical to what art should be. "
Drummer
Fear
Motivation
" Nothing is guaranteed to last, so you should just enjoy it as it happens. "
Nothing
Happens
Last
" People like Art Blakey and Buddy Rich, you look at them playing music, and it's just like looking at a heavy metal drummer. I mean, they're playing with the same amount of ferocity. It's not to say all jazz is like that. "
Looking
Music
Look
" 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. "
End
Story
Myself
" The go-to reflex all over Hollywood is still likeability. I've always had a problem with it because I think I have a weird barometer in the sense that some of the characters I've cared about the most in movies are characters that are often thought of as despicable. "
Weird
Problem
Movies
" The greatest thing has been that projects that were pipe dreams before 'Whiplash' are now feeling more realistic. "
Now
More
Greatest
" There are a lot of musicians in my life. But movies came first for me. That was my original passion. "
Life
Passion
My Life
" When you're trying to paint a portrait of a very specific world, you're trying to show what makes the world different. So, sometimes it means exaggerating certain kind of aspects, but I don't think it's that important or it's that much of an issue as long as you get an emotional truth across. "
You
Long
Portrait
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