THE PERFECTIONIST

Damien Chazelle on the parallels between two very different films of the decade.

It’s an interesting combo of befuddlement and amazement,” is how writer/director Damien Chazelle reacts to the news that his films landed on the #3 and #2 spots on our Films of the Decade list after the votes were counted. “And certainly immense gratitude. But maybe befuddlement mixed in with gratitude.”

For all their surface differences – Whiplash plays like an action movie,

La La Land is a swooningly romantic musical – they both explore the personal cost of pursuing career ambitions beyond all else. “Part of why it is funny for me to actually think of them as two things sitting side by side [on TF’s list], is that they are sort of overlapping.”

But these two films might also share DNA because they were pinballing around Chazelle’s brain at the same time. “I was initially trying to get some kind of musical off the ground,” recalls Chazelle. “That wasn’t going anywhere. So out of a certain amount of frustration,

I wrote Whiplash. And then Whiplash wasn’t really going anywhere, so I returned to the musical and wound up writing La La Land. And then literally the day that La La Land got put into turnaround at a studio, Whiplash got picked up by the producers who wound up helping me make it.”

Whiplash debuted at Sundance in 2o14, where it won the Audience Award and the Grand Jury Prize (Dramatic). That was the start of a long journey to the Academy Awards, where it was nominated for five awards (and bagged three). Chazelle calls the entire experience “surreal and gratifying”.

“Each of those things were steps that kind of made the whole thing a fun adventure, almost like you keep getting to go to the next level of a videogame,” he laughs. The success of Whiplash got the ball rolling on Chazelle’s musical passion project, but La La Land had changed since his first idea, partly influenced by his own LA experiences.

“It mutated a lot,” Chazelle says. “There were certain basic things that [stuck]… like, some sort of a planetarium-set dance number, and the lovers floating up in the air. The basic, Umbrellas Of Cherbourg-inspired thrust of a love story that doesn’t quite work out.”

Casting Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone transformed La La Land further still, as they added to their characters. “I had originally written Sebastian as almost [Whiplash’s] Andrew a few years older,” explains Chazelle. “An early twentysomething, and still with that kind of adolescent chip on the shoulder. And Ryan coming in and playing it as someone about 10 years older, adapting the role for him… I think it made the role a lot richer.”

La La Land’s reception was even more ecstatic, earning a joint-record 14 Oscar noms, and winning six, including Best Director (Chazelle remains the youngestever recipient of that prize). Of course, the night was a rollercoaster, as La La Land was mistakenly announced as the Best Picture winner, which was actually Moonlight. “Looking back, it is funny, because it does feel like something straight out of the La La Land playbook,” laughs Chazelle, pointing to the awards-circuit friendship with the Moonlight gang as a silver lining.

Chazelle admits to sharing his characters’ perfectionist tendencies (“That’s very much me”), so which does he most closely relate to? “I’m sort of afraid and embarrassed to say Andrew,” he squirms, admitting that he was queasy about sharing the screenplay for Whiplash, given that it was so personal. “But at the same time, I guess I would say that Andrew really corresponds most to someone I was when I was younger.”

After La La Land, Chazelle made superlative space drama First Man in 2018, and he already has two more projects on the horizon: Netflix series The Eddy (“something really different for me”) and a new movie, reportedly called Babylon, and set in 1920s Hollywood, during the shift from silents to talkies. “We’re looking to shoot next year,” says Chazelle. “That will be another fun adventure for a number of reasons.” Count us in, and maybe start saving a spot on your ‘Best Films Of The 2020s’ list…

WHIPLASH AND LA LA LAND ARE AVAILABLE ON DVD AND BLU-RAY.