When you see baby-faced Damien Chazelle sitting among the nominees at the Oscars and Spirit Awards in a few weeks and wonder how such a young filmmaker with just two features under his belt reached such peaks so early in his career, remember this: Chazelle did slog his way through what he calls “six years of ‘No.’”

At last night’s Directors Close-Up, the 29-year-old writer/director of Whiplash, one of the year’s most exciting and critically acclaimed films, offered advice to young filmmakers hoping to one day follow in those footsteps: make a film that’s personal. The genesis of Whiplash was his personal experience as a young drummer with a “borderline psychotic” teacher. After six years of trying and failing to get projects off the ground, Chazelle said, this is the one that succeeded because “it was a world I knew well.”

Chazelle was joined on stage by his composer Justin Hurwitz and editor Tom Cross to discuss “the rhythm of Whiplash.” The film tells the story of Andrew (Miles Teller), a drummer driven to becoming one of the greats—as in, of all time, as in, Charlie Parker—and the maniac (J.K. Simmons) who conducts/terrorizes the world-class studio jazz band at the prestigious conservatory he attends.

Chazelle had to overcome all the usual obstacles that can flummox a young filmmaker. There was no time; the film was shot in “an insanely short amount of time” as Chazelle put it: four weeks and edited in hyper speed as well. “I’d never worked with an AD before or on a schedule before. It’s annoying because it’s like trying to write with somebody sticking a gun to your head.” He also had to get past Hollywood’s skittishness about subjects that fall beyond tent-pole fare. “Nobody in Hollywood wants to make a movie about a jazz musician,” he said. And don’t forget the anxiety. “I was probably even more nervous doing the short than the feature,” Chazelle said [because the future of the film was riding on its success], “and I was really nervous doing the feature.”

Chazelle got the project off the ground by first making a 17-minute short, a pivotal scene from the feature-length script. With the help of Jason Reitman—who was attracted to the feature script while it was making the rounds—Chazelle was able to cast J.K. Simmons for the short, which was shot in three days and went on to win the best short jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Financing followed and a year later he was back at Sundance in 2014 with the feature that grabbed both the Grand Jury prize and the Audience Prize.

Cross came on board to edit the Whiplash short after reading the feature script, “literally the best script that I’ve ever read in memory. It was dynamite.” Cross agreed to do the short on the promise that if financing for the feature came through, would work on the feature too.

“I knew how I wanted the movie to feel in the edit. It had to have a precision and speed and sense of rhythmic dexterity to it,” Chazelle said. “We talked about Friedkin, Scorsese, Fincher… editing rhythms that have a sense of electricity to them.”

The general editing approach Chazelle said was for anything music related to be fast and frenetic, and anything outside (a dinner table scene with his family and a few scenes with his girlfriend) would be slower.

One of the biggest challenges with scoring the film, said Hurwitz, was figuring out how to create a score that wouldn’t collide with the jazz and big band music on screen throughout. The solution: a score that has the feel of an electronic score but using only the instruments in a jazz big band “so it would feel organic to the onscreen soundscape of the movie but it could still be ambient at times and still have that thriller feel at times. Sax, trumpet and trombones were slowed down and de-tuned. Bass and drums were always at different tempos so they were always rubbing against each other, creating this sort of unsettling feeling.”

“It’s like a hellish version of a big band. Like Andrew’s being tortured by the instruments he makes music with every day.”

Chazelle said finding collaborators he is so in sync with is “one of those lucky things you hope happen to you early in a career.” All three are now working on Chazelle’s next project, a musical for Lionsgate. Said Chazelle, “I hope we do every movie we ever do all together.”

“Even if we go into cement mixing,” Cross joked, “we’ll do it all together.”

Pamela Miller / Website & Grants Manager