Damien Chazelle

Everyone dances to their music. Concerned about what must be left behind when dreams come true, he has made clear his extreme passion for jazz and classic cinema. With “La La Land”, Damien Chazelle is on his way to becoming the youngest winner of the Oscar for best director.

The son of Celia Martin, writer and teacher, and French-born scientist Bernard Chazelle, Damien Sayre Chazelle always affirms that cinema was his first love, because he wanted to dedicate himself to it from a very young age. During a stage of his life, he was unfaithful to music, while he was studying at the institute with a strong-willed drum teacher, who was going to be inspiring for his films.

When he realized that he was never going to succeed in this field, he returned to the Seventh Art. While graduating from Harvard, in Visual and Environmental Studies, he became intimate with a classmate who was to prove decisive in his career, Justin Hurwitz . They both dreamed together of succeeding one day. Damien Chazelle only lived to direct films, the other only thought about composing, so they complemented each other, because if the first came up with a film that began in a traffic jam, the other would come to mind the notes that would accompany the images.

After finishing their studies, they both moved to Los Angeles. “I always wanted to make movies. And that was the reason why I came to the mythical city that in my head is not a city, it’s Hollywood”, she recalls. Once they settled in, they discovered that the producers didn’t even want to hear about their outlandish ideas. In spite of everything, they obtained a budget, quite low, to shoot their first feature, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench , where they already made their identity signs clear, since it had as its central character a trumpet player who tries to overcome the break with his girlfriend. For the rest, few words and a lot of music.

As the film was not quite successful, Damien Chazelle dedicated time to the scripts, as in the case The Last Exorcism: Part II , written in four hands with the director, Ed Gass-Donnelly . He also wrote a commission for the Spanish production company A3media, Grand Piano . Eugenio Mira ended up directing the film, where Elijah Wood played a talented pianist who was targeted during a concert by an anonymous sniper.

With the money he collected he was saving… He conceived a script inspired by his former mentor in his stage as an aspiring musician, which he defines as “a drama with two rooms and a drum set”. But Whiplash ‘s script did not quite convince any production company. To see if anyone made up his mind, he took the first fifteen pages and shot a short as a test, where JK Simmons , a prestigious secondary, played the demanding instructor who frightens his students. Hurwitz played notes at a frantic rhythm.

The show drew an ovation when it was screened at Sundance, which allowed him to get the financing to turn it into a feature film. He recruited Miles Teller to get into the skin of the protagonist, a jazz student who aspires to become one of the greats. It could be said that it is a “good job” if it were not for the fact that Simmons’ character defends in the footage that those words prevent the person to whom they are addressed from continuing to make an effort… He won the Audience Award and the Grand Jury Prize in the Sundance Festival the following year, and three Oscars, for editing, sound and secondary (a simply impressive Simmons).

With such success, a large company, Lionsgate, endorsed a project that it kept in a drawer after having walked around it without success. “I wrote Star City (La La Land) in 2010. But if I had made the movie then I probably would have screwed it up,” he explains. “I would have been inexperienced, or I wouldn’t have had the right cast. Hollywood is a place that can make you very impatient, and I am already impatient by nature. In many moments of the process I lost my temper, and I felt that there was a conspiracy against me. But, I insist, it was better that way.”

In their third joint project, Hurwitz shines more than ever, as he composed some fresh songs. Damien Chazelle recruited the leads, Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone , because they showed him how to sing and dance. “Actors have to move with their emotions so that the dance feels natural and grounded,” he said. They play a jazz pianist and an aspiring actress who live an intense love story, while the former tries to get hold of a jazz venue and the latter to become a star. It is a heartfelt declaration of love for music, the city of Los Angeles and cinema, especially the musical, with undisguised tributes to classics like West Side Story andThe Cherbourg Umbrellas .

Tragicomic, like the previous films, there is a harsh central theme behind it, the price paid for success, and fulfilling dreams, when aspirations collide with feelings. It swept the box office by proving musical-hating audiences just how wrong they were. The City of Stars (La La Land) made history by becoming the film with the highest number of Golden Globes, triumphing in seven categories. Shortly after, he would be the most nominated for the Oscars, with fourteen award options.

Damien Chazelle does not only think about the Seventh Art and jazz. In his life there is also a girlfriend, Olivia Hamilton, and a dog, Colin, a black-haired dachhund.