Damien Chazelle

Damien Chazelle's biography

Damien Sayre Chazelle is 37 years old film director born at Providence. Damien was born on Saturday 19th of January 1985. According to year of birth 1985 he belongs to Millennials. Birthday on 19th of January means he is Capricorn. These people are stable in nature. As the sign lord is “Saturn”, the person will be judgemental in his approach.Damien was married 2 times.

Damien Sayre Chazelle's spouse

He is married to Olivia Hamilton

Damien is white american. He is citizen of United States of America. Damien´s primary profession is to be film director. You can know him also as screenwriter, cinematographer. Damien is recently known as film producer. Damien received Sundance Film Festival U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize Award Whiplash in 2014

Damien Chazelle's dad

Damien Chazelle's father's name is Bernard Chazelle.

Damien Chazelle's mom

Damien Chazelle's mother's name is Celia Chazelle. She is known as writer. Damien´s mother was born on Wednesday 7th of April 1954. Damien Chazelle was born when she was 31 years old.

Damien Chazelle's family

Damien Chazelle's wife

Damien Chazelle's ex wifes

Jasmine McGlade

Damien Chazelle and Jasmine Mcglade have been together since 2010 for 4 years. She is known as film producer. His ex wife was born on Wednesday 5th of June 1985 in Philadelphia.

Damien Chazelle's schools

We found 2 schools Damien attended. Complete list of schools: Harvard University, Princeton High School.

Detailed informations about his schools

• Graduated from Harvard University with a degree in Visual and Environmental Studies.

Damien Chazelle's career

Damien´s main focus is to be film director. He is famous thanks to For La La Land.

Is Damien Chazelle gay ?

Damien is known to be straight.

Awards and competitions

Damien Chazelle's Awards

• His Best Director Oscar win for La La Land (2016) at age 32, made him the youngest recipient of this award category in the Academy's history (26 Feb 2017).
• He is the youngest person to ever win the Academy Award for Best Director at the age of thirty-two. The previous record holder, Norman Taurog, had held the title for eighty-six years.
• Between 2013-17, he was the only non-Mexican Best Director winner at the Academy Awards. He was also the only American Best Director Oscar winner between 2010-17.

Damien Chazelle's Nominations

• Damien was nominated for Academy Award for Best Writing, Adapted Screenplay
• He was nominated for Academy Award for Best Director
• He was nominated for Academy Award for Best Writing, Original Screenplay

What else you don't know about Damien Chazelle ?

His middle name is Sayre.

Damien Chazelle's quotes

• I didn't have traditional stage fright. If there was 500 people in the audience or three people in the audience, it didn't really make a difference. What made a difference was the conductor. Everything that I was scared about as a drummer was him.
• 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.
• I don't think of 'Macbeth' as the villain. I don't think of 'King Lear' as the villain. I don't think of 'Hamlet' as the villain. I don't think of 'Travis Bickle' as the villain.
• There are a lot of musicians in my life. But movies came first for me. That was my original passion.
• My version of a stress dream is, really, showing up on a concert stage with a drum set and not knowing the chart.
• I was a writer for hire. I wrote to pay the bills.
• As a drummer, you're always fighting for a level that you never quite attain.
• It's easy to show terrible people's behavior on screen, and we all just kind of nod and go, 'Isn't that terrible.' It's more interesting when you can show terrible behavior in the interest of something good.
• I handle screenings and award ceremonies really badly.
• 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.
• 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.
• I actually grew up wanting to be a filmmaker. I wanted to make movies, and music was a detour, almost.
• If you look at 'West Side Story,' a lot of those numbers are actually pretty cutty, but the cuts are always musically motivated.
• I was interested in music and making movies about musicians, but my own experiences, and doing what it felt like for me to be a drummer? Nah, I wasn't interested in that.
• There were so many specific things from high school jazz band that I remembered: the conductor searching out people who were out of tune, or stopping and starting me for hours in front of the band as they watched.
• I like a set to be a happy place, where people can feel free to experiment.
• I was always pretty decent at fast stick work or doing stuff that seems impressive that's not really; I was pretty tasteful and had good ideas musically. But I had a terrible sense of tempo, which is like being a blind painter.
• I didn't feel the kind of joy every day playing drums that I thought you were supposed to feel.
• If you're on the varsity team, the responsibilities are a lot bigger and there's more stress, but you also walk around feeling probably like you can hold your head high.
• The greatest thing has been that projects that were pipe dreams before 'Whiplash' are now feeling more realistic.
• I love the ending of 'The Wrestler.'
• 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.
• 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.
• It's a weird thing where, especially in jazz, you have to totally mention cutting sessions and people one-upping each other and people being super, super tough on each other. And out of it emerge these genius musicians.
• Certainly, my manager Gary Ungar was the first person to give me any attention and hustle for me. This was back in 2009.
• As a kid, I was just writing scripts and taking whatever film classes I could in college.
• I've always, especially through old Hollywood musicals, loved just to watch tap dancing; I adore it. I think it's fantastic.
• The end result of my personal story is that I became a really good drummer, and I know myself well enough to know that I wouldn't have without this really tough conductor and this really cutthroat hostile environment I was in.
• People like Art Blakey and Buddy Rich, you look at them playing music, and it's just like looking at a heavy metal drummer. I mean, they're playing with the same amount of ferocity. It's not to say all jazz is like that.
• 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.
• I was a kid living in New Jersey, who - I'd wanted to make movies since I was a little kid, so that came before music for me. But I started playing drums just as a hobby, and I wasn't even really into jazz that much.
• I hadn't seen that many movies that really go deep enough into the fears of playing music or the language that musicians can use to treat each other or, like, the way that you can see it dehumanize and the way that it can feel like boot camp.
• I had seen a lot of music movies that celebrated music or that showed the kind of joys from playing music, which is a big part of it of course, and not something that I would want to deny.
• 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.
• 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.
• I was a jazz drummer, and it was my life for a while: what I lived and breathed every day.
• I find L.A. kind of romantic, actually. As a movie junkie, it's a city that was built by the movies. There's something really weird and surreal about it that I find energizing.
• 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.
• I was in high school, and when you get to be 14, 15, you start to feel a little more like your own person so that you can assert your adulthood a little bit.
• I'm a terrible procrastinator.
• I remember being inspired myself when smaller films, whether it's 'Beasts' or 'Winter's Bone,' wound up in the Oscars lineup.
• As delicate as 'Guy and Madeline' was, it was important that 'Whiplash' come off as more of a fever dream.
• 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.
• 'Whiplash' was always the song I hated the most because it's a song designed to screw with drummers.
• 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 think there is something to be said for not coddling people and not accepting good as good enough.
• 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.
• 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.
• If you're an artist, you want to draw from real life; you want to draw from experiences, emotion, and it's something that a lot of musicians juggle with. I've always found it so fascinating.
• 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.
• There are a few musicians that I know who seem on the outside like very asocial or somewhat unemotional people, people who aren't capable of emotions, and people think they're very cold inside.
• 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.
• First time that I cried at a work of art was at a drum solo that I saw. A drummer named Winard Harper, part of the Billy Taylor Trio, gave back in - I would have been in high school - 2005 or something.
• I like movies that are specific. Movies that home in on a very specific subculture, a specific discipline, a specific world.
• My dad is a big jazz fan, and that was the reason I first got into jazz.
• 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.
• If you want to make a movie, there may be many forces trying to pull you down, but really, a lot of it is will power. You can will it into being if you just believe that you are going to make a movie.
• My first movie was totally improvised.
• I'm predisposed to never be in pure celebration mode.
• 'Whiplash' scared me. I feel you should only do projects that scare you to some degree. I get motivated by those sorts of feelings.
• 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.
• 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 like the idea of working my way up. I don't feel impatient to immediately jump into something that could literally bring down a studio if I don't do it well.
• 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.
• Nothing is guaranteed to last, so you should just enjoy it as it happens.
• I tend to latch on to things and not let go.
• I feel like a lot of directing is casting.
• My hands were constantly blistered or bloody; my ears were always ringing. I tore through drumheads and drumsticks like there was no tomorrow.
• I've always wanted to make movies that are fever dreams.
• Mozart was born Mozart. Charlie Parker was born Charlie Parker.
• 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.
• 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 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• See also Other Works |  Publicity Listings |  Official Sites

Damien Chazelle's height, body shape, eye color

Lets describe how Damien Chazelle looks. We will focus on his height, body shape, eye color and hair color. Damien is tall as 5' 9½" (177 cm). Body build is average. Damien´s eyes are tinted black. Damien´s hair is shade of black.