DAMIEN CHAZELLE

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 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.

'Whiplash' was always the song I hated the most because it's a song designed to screw with drummers.

Certainly, my manager Gary Ungar was the first person to give me any attention and hustle for me. This was back in 2009.

My version of a stress dream is, really, showing up on a concert stage with a drum set and not knowing the chart.

As a drummer, you're always fighting for a level that you never quite attain.

I tend to latch on to things and not let go.

I was in this public high school in Princeton, and it had this topnotch jazz program - if you were a musician of any kind of caliber, your holy grail was to be in that orchestra. It was that claim to fame of the school, of the town, other than the university. But it was better than the university band.

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.

Going back to my film education, I always have that voice in my head that's always screaming, 'Sell out!' And that's good: you want that, because it keeps you on your toes, and it's important to remember what's actually important.

Practicing is not normally fun. Sometimes people say they're practicing, but they're really just enjoying themselves and the instrument. That's not real practice.

My first movie was totally improvised.

I'm predisposed to never be in pure celebration mode.

I wanted to look at the mentality that can breed that sort of intensity, that kind of cutthroat, pressure-cooker feeling, especially a form of music like jazz, that should be - or you'd think should be - all about liberation and improvisation and everything.

I actually grew up wanting to be a filmmaker. I wanted to make movies, and music was a detour, almost.

I think, especially living in L.A., it's very easy to get wrapped up in weekend announcements and the trades and the whole social life of the city, and to get divorced from what actually matters.

I think there is something to be said for not coddling people and not accepting good as good enough.

I like a set to be a happy place, where people can feel free to experiment.

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.

There's something very particular about the kind of rage you feel when you're alone in a practice room by yourself, unable to master a simple thing like a rudiment.

It's a little difficult when something goes from being an utter obsession - a thing where your skill defines you as a person - to it just being a thing you occasionally do.

Nothing is guaranteed to last, so you should just enjoy it as it happens.

I was really trying to sell to people who hate jazz: to make a case for the art form as youthful and energetic, not the sort of rarified intellectual activity it's painted as.

I feel like a lot of directing is casting.

I would break a lot of cymbals. You whack the cymbals hard enough, and they will crack in half. Drums are not actually as sturdy as they look. They're actually somewhat fragile instruments.