Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm too self-serious for a comedy.
I love the ending of 'The Wrestler.'
People aren't inherently sympathetic.
My first movie was totally improvised.
I feel like a lot of directing is casting.
I tend to latch on to things and not let go.
I was a writer for hire. I wrote to pay the bills.
I'm predisposed to never be in pure celebration mode.
I handle screenings and award ceremonies really badly.
I've always wanted to make movies that are fever dreams.
Mozart was born Mozart. Charlie Parker was born Charlie Parker.
My dad is a big jazz fan, and that was the reason I first got into jazz.
Nothing is guaranteed to last, so you should just enjoy it as it happens.
I like a set to be a happy place, where people can feel free to experiment.
As a drummer, you're always fighting for a level that you never quite attain.
I love being in the editing room and playing with tempo and with the rhythm of shots.
As a kid, I was just writing scripts and taking whatever film classes I could in college.
I was a jazz drummer, and it was my life for a while: what I lived and breathed every day.
I love movies where you can sense that the director risked biting off more than they can chew.
I didn't feel the kind of joy every day playing drums that I thought you were supposed to feel.
There are a lot of musicians in my life. But movies came first for me. That was my original passion.
'Whiplash' was always the song I hated the most because it's a song designed to screw with drummers.
I actually grew up wanting to be a filmmaker. I wanted to make movies, and music was a detour, almost.
As delicate as 'Guy and Madeline' was, it was important that 'Whiplash' come off as more of a fever dream.
My version of a stress dream is, really, showing up on a concert stage with a drum set and not knowing the chart.
The greatest thing has been that projects that were pipe dreams before 'Whiplash' are now feeling more realistic.
Certainly, my manager Gary Ungar was the first person to give me any attention and hustle for me. This was back in 2009.
My motivation for being a good drummer was born out of fear, which, in a way, seems so antithetical to what art should be.
I've always, especially through old Hollywood musicals, loved just to watch tap dancing; I adore it. I think it's fantastic.
I like movies that are specific. Movies that home in on a very specific subculture, a specific discipline, a specific world.
I remember being inspired myself when smaller films, whether it's 'Beasts' or 'Winter's Bone,' wound up in the Oscars lineup.
If you look at 'West Side Story,' a lot of those numbers are actually pretty cutty, but the cuts are always musically motivated.
I don't like the idea the viewer can kind of sit there and go, 'Make me like this person.' People aren't inherently sympathetic.
Before 'Whiplash,' I'd had a string of failed scripts. I'd pour my blood, sweat and tears into them, and no one would like them.
'Whiplash' scared me. I feel you should only do projects that scare you to some degree. I get motivated by those sorts of feelings.
What's great about musicals is their energy and go-for-brokeness - stopping the story to sing and dance. How can you not love that?
I remember moving out to L.A. straight after college and just starting to try to write scripts and trying to get stuff off the ground.
I never desperately wanted to be a jazz drummer. If anything, I was motivated a lot by fear. Fear of the conductor, fear of the future.
At the upper echelon of musicians in general, I guess performers in general, you have to have this kind of live-or-die, cutthroat mentality.
My hands were constantly blistered or bloody; my ears were always ringing. I tore through drumheads and drumsticks like there was no tomorrow.
By the end of high school, I had this fork-in-the-road moment where part of me considered going to vocational music school to really pursue it.
In a weird way, I'm always going to ground myself. I'm an insecure kind of pessimist, but I'm always kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It was only through getting interested in more out-there and avant-garde forms that the musical suddenly seemed like such a wonderful genre to me.
Real practice means working on stuff you're not good at. Real practice is about butting your head against the wall repeatedly until you get it right.
I love the idea of using film language similarly to how musicians use music - combining images and sounds in a way that they create an emotional effect.
I do truly believe that the smallest stories can wind up being the biggest because it's through the specific that a writer can best access the universal.
It's interesting when you wind up distilling all your ambitions and your goals and dreams into one single person. It's giving that person a lot of power.
I guess art itself is insane. Its actual function is rarely clear, and yet people give their hearts and souls and lives to it, and have for all of history.
If there's a good review, I'll skip over the headline, but I always find the bad reviews and read those. I don't know why. It's a little sick and demented.
What I love about jazz is that it's full of legends, full of myths. It's an oral history because it started in New Orleans and Kansas City, under the radar.