This is the interview I’ve been waiting for all year. Whiplash wowed me on opening night of Sundance and has been my favorite movie of the year. Here we are in October and it’s opening in New York and Los Angeles this weekend, with an expansion to follow.
The film is about the volatile relationship between aspiring drummer Andrew Neiman (Miles Teller) and his instructor Terrence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons). The length to which Fletcher terrorizes his students to elicit masterful performances raises complex questions about discipline, and gives the film the momentum of a Fast and the Furious movie. So nine months of provocative themes percolating through my soul later, I finally got to sit down with writer/director Damien Chazelle to discuss Whiplash.
Related: Miles Teller & Paul Reiser on ‘Whiplash’ (Exclusive Video)
CraveOnline: We might spend the whole interview discussing this question: Do artists want this? To have a Terrence Fletcher pressure, do real artists want this?
Damien Chazelle: Yeah, I don’t know. I think every artist is different. I think there is something to be said for not coddling people and not accepting good as good enough. So I think sometimes that can be helpful, but I wanted to push Fletcher to the extent to which his behavior is almost completely irredeemable so that there’s almost no gray area about whether or not he’s a “good guy.” But then still have someone who gets results, because that way it makes the questions a little sharper edged and a little clearer than if you’d humanized him a bit more or if his results were less than good. That was the question there. I think in terms of what artists need, I know I needed someone really terrifying and hard to be a good drummer.
But do you need someone terrifying and hard to be a great screenwriter and director?
Personally, no. Of course, who knows if maybe I’d become even better with someone like that. That’s impossible for me to say, but I kind of terrorize myself enough that I don’t necessarily need an outer manifestation of that in the form of another person. But this is also a movie about education. It’s a movie about someone who’s just starting out and isn’t quite sure what kind of mark they’re going to leave on the world. So there’s that critical time. In my case it was high school. In this case it’s a few years after that, but that sort of becoming an adult time where those sort of authority figures can be really, really formative, in both good and bad ways.
As far as getting results, since it’s a movie, he can very definitively get results with his methods. Does that allow you to ask the question, if it’s guaranteed to get results is it still okay to behave this way?
I think that’s the question. I don’t really have an answer for it and I think anyone who thinks they have an answer probably hasn’t thought through the question enough, because I think you could look through human history and say, “We’re going to remove any achievement in human history that required suffering or required someone to make others suffer.”
If you do that, and that’s a perfectly moral stance to take, but you have to know that you’re then removing everything from major scientific advances to the moon landing to the Paris Boulevards that Haussmann created by displacing families or the pyramids that were built by slaves to the Sistine Chapel to Charlie Parker’s solos to Buddy Rich’s big band. Just a whole slew of stuff. That still doesn’t mean it’s necessarily worth it.
I’m usually not a utilitarian, so those kind of typical question of “would you torture someone if you knew torturing them would save five million people” or whatever. I usually side on the “you don’t torture them” side of the argument. So I’m as non-utilitarian as you get, but as an appreciator of art and as a believer in the idea that humanity should leave something behind, and that’s kind of what art is, it becomes a murky question.
Was the Fletcher dialogue scripted with the exact rhythm in which J.K. Simmons delivered it?
No. The words were all there on the page but he gives it his own inflection, his own tempo. I know there were certain lines that I had initially intended to be shouted out that he delivered in almost a whisper, and that makes it even scarier. When you have someone of his caliber, you’re a very lucky writer because he can make bad dialogue sing. He can make good dialogue be incredible. He can read the phone book, that old saying. And he talks a lot in this movie. It was fun working with him and Miles because at the end of the day, the performances sort of break down in terms of J.K.’s the one who talks. Miles is the one who looks and listens and responds through his instrument.
I love his drum face.
The drum face, yeah. I remember when I first saw the drum face when I was teaching Miles jazz drums. He’d be struggling to get something and I could see that little grimace and we videotaped his drum rehearsals to see what angles he was best at. As soon as I saw that face, I knew that had to be a big part of the movie.
When he leaves his drumsticks behind, I think we know what that sequence is building to. Did you want to stretch that out as long as possible when we’re expecting something bad to happen?
Yeah, I wanted to make that whole sequence the idea of like a nightmare that won’t end, that just gets worse and worse and worse. So it’s where you become sort of a sadistic writer, where you just think of let’s have one bad thing happen, now let’s build that into another bad thing, now let’s build that into another bad thing. Now let’s build it to such a bad thing that you think the movie is over. Now let’s keep making it even worse.
There’s a Sidney Lumet movie, Before the Devil Knows Your Dead, that I really love, that to me narratively basically operates from that premise. It winds up almost like watching rats in a cage and there’s something very, I don’t know. It’s at once disturbing and exhilarating to watch, but certainly also looking at things like the coked up sequence in Goodfellas. characters who are pushed totally beyond the brink of insanity and they keep butting up against the real world and somehow forcing the world to bend to their insane rhythms until it won’t.
And Andrew goes through it without any complaining or moping about it.
I think his character’s at the point where he knows that complaining isn’t going to get him anywhere. At the end of the day, I think he’s also a character who does a lot of shitty things, and that’s been another interesting thing of people’s different reaction to his character and how “likable” he is. Certainly when I was writing the script, that was the big complaint, was that no one was going to root for this guy because he was such an asshole. Which of course I took personally, because I had basically written myself.
I think he does a lot of bad things in the movie, but at least I feel that all of them are understandable in the circumstances and that I don’t know if anyone else would do any better. I think the one thing that he does have that I find heroic, even though he’d certainly not a traditional hero, is his drive, the fact that he won’t give up, that he won’t step down. Obviously, that’s a very traditional heroism sort of thing that we like to celebrate usually. When paired with a sort of asocial, almost sociopathic guy like this, it’s maybe a harder pill to swallow. At the end of the day, he’s driven to accomplish something and there’s a real courage in that I think, and something worth celebrating.
Did that dinner table conversation with the football players come from real life?
Certainly the impetus of that scene came from various dinner tables that I’ve been at. I never had the chance to lay in on people with one-liners. The dinner table scene was sort of like what I wished I could say or could have said at any number of dinner tables.
Do you have backstories for all the other musicians in Terrence Fletcher’s music program?
Yeah, a lot of this was based on a jazz program I was in, so a lot of the other characters, especially the other drummers are very closely based on the people who I played with. Maybe I shouldn’t even say that, but I sort of shamelessly did that. While making the movie, I even worked with some of the kids who I’d been in the band with, sharing our own memories and putting them on the screen. Most of the stuff in the movie, or at least a good chunk of the stuff in the rehearsal scenes is stuff that we went through. Then there’s the additional 20-30% that is more pulled from anecdotes I heard from people who went beyond me and into music school, or from jazz history and so on and so forth.
It seemed like each one of them could have their own movie about how they got into the program and how they dealt with Fletcher.
Yeah. One interesting thing about jazz, or art in general, but jazz especially is [it’s] such an individual art form in the sense that improvisation is such a big part of it so it feels like it should be less soldiers in an army and more like free spirits melding. And yet, big band jazz has a real military side to it.
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. That also in the way big bands were cultivated and led and trained in the ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s and the heyday of that sound, that there is this real authoritative streak in these bands. The music became famous for how tyrannical the bandleaders were and how abusive they could be.
If you think Fletcher’s bad, you can just go on YouTube. There’s audio of Buddy Rich, candid audio the players secretly recorded on their devices of Buddy Rich laying into his band on a bus after a show. So, that to me is kind of interesting. You have an art form that seems like it should be celebrating individuality and it winds up at the same time turning military, turning warlike which we think is the antithesis of art and especially jazz, but big band jazz is its own beast.
After seeing Whiplash at Sundance, I came home and did my homework and watched Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench.
You and two other people.
It was on Hulu Plus. Was that your first experiment in how to use music and musicians in a film?
Mm-hmm. Certainly I’ve loved musicals for a while so I did some short films in college that had musical numbers and things like that, so I’ve kind of been obsessed with Fred and Ginger and Vincente Minnelli and Stanley Donen and Jaques Demy forever. So Guy and Madeline was basically let’s do that but with the means that I have, so let’s do it like a neo-realist documentary.
Then is La La Land another tale of musicians and music?
La La Land is sort of a return to the full fledged song and dance musical that Guy and Madeline was kind of a sketch on. Where Guy and Madeline was sort of scruffy and 16mm, this is gonna be more like a ‘60s musical, Cinemascope, 35mm, Technicolor, that whole thing.
With Miles again?
With Miles again, yeah. I’m going to put him through his paces again. This time he’ll play piano and sing and dance.
What are your favorite movies about musicians, real or fictional?
Certainly any Fred Astaire movie if you can count those. I love ‘Round Midnight with Dexter Gordon playing himself essentially. I love Amadeus. That certainly was a formative movie for me growing up. A lot of movies about music I think actually don’t get it right, so the few that do I really love.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode Ever. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
