Director delivers an emotional beating
Whiplash off ers a powerful look at the relationship between a mentor and his protege
Whiplash Friday, 6: 30 p. m. and 9 p. m. | The Centre, Vancouver Playhouse Tickets and info: viff . org
Great art involves suffering. It’s a hugely romantic notion that conjures images of painters in poofy shirts traumatized over flaking tempera and poets throwing themselves from the highest cliff, quill in hand.
Striving for perfection is a Sisyphean struggle, but Harvardeducated film director Damien Chazelle says he was curious about the accepted protocols when it comes to shaping and nurturing creative genius, which is why he wrote a feature- length script called Whiplash.
The story of an aspiring jazz drummer named Andrew, Whiplash focuses on the mentoring process, and just how far anyone should push a young protege. It deals with personal growth, commitment, natural talent and all the pain that comes from repeated failure.
But no one was interested in making Whiplash. Chazelle shopped the script but found no backers, so he decided to make a short film based on a single scene. When that short landed at the Sundance Film Festival, Chazelle found the support he needed and the very next year, the young director was back in Park City, Utah, greeting the Sundance audience on opening night.
Speaking to him the day after, he still looks a little dazzled by the journey as he explains where it all began.
“I was a drummer myself, so a lot of the story was autobiographical,” he says. “I was in a jazz ensemble in high school, and it was all about Buddy Rich and Art Blakey and Papa Jo Jones. Like, if you are going to play a drum kit and attain the highest calling, there’s classical drumming — which is more percussion- oriented and it’s a lot simpler — and there’s jazz,” he says.
“And when you are looking at Jo Jones, you are looking at the greatest drummer who ever lived, so that is what this movie is about,” Chazelle says. “It’s about people trying to do things that are too hard.”
Starring Miles Teller ( Footloose, Divergent) as young Andrew and J. K. Simmons ( Spider- Man) as the relentless instructor at an elite music school, Whiplash definitely builds to a Rocky- like crescendo, but Chazelle was desperate to recreate the formula, or at least syncopate the fourfour beat of genre expectation.
“I have been trying to do films a lot longer than I was trying to do music,” says Chazelle, who grew up in a house full of instruments with a matriarch who worshipped The Partridge Family.
“But it felt almost like the same world to me: like 99 per cent rejection and one per cent where you actually break through. I wanted to make a film about how hard it is to do something and … about that process of beating your head against the brick wall.”
More than anything, Chazelle wanted to look straight into the eye of failure, and what might happen if you never scored the knockout punch and simply disappeared back into the beige masses. What if all that work and misery amounted to nothing?
“I made a movie in high school about the joy of jazz … but here I wanted to do the flip side,” he said. “You know, by all accounts Bach was a nice, well balanced family man, but for every one of him there is a Charlie Parker who is suffering for his art. And I wanted to focus on the suffering.”
In this story, it’s the tyrannical mentor who inflicts all the psychic torture.
“I had a conductor who inspired the character and some of the stuff that comes out of J. K.’ s mouth is verbatim to the stuff I went through. He did make me a lot better ( a) drummer,” Chazelle said.
“But I didn’t just want to make a movie about him … I wanted to ask at what point is it worth it? I find everything the guy does in the movie to be absolutely horrifying but I also wanted to make the music very powerful as well, and that’s the dilemma,” he says.
“To condone the brutality or not condone the brutality? You know, my conductor never took it to the point of abuse. But I wanted to make this as brutal as possible to make sure you couldn’t really condone it. You know, if I had made it any softer, you’d think well, the ends do justify the means, and I wanted to make sure it wouldn’t be that easy.”