6 Filmmaking Tips From Damien Chazelle

Film School Rejects article featuring advice from La La Land writer-director.

One of my favorite sites, Film School Rejects has aggregated several sources featuring Damien Chazelle and his advice on making movies. The talented young filmmaker, who made a big splash with the movie Whiplash, has followed it up with the audacious musical La La Land.

The first piece of advice: Start with a short.

“You’d think that’d be all you need.” Chazelle writes in a 2015 MovieMaker article about the moment he finally found producers interested in making Whiplash and how that wasn’t enough. It was still difficult for those producers to secure financing for “a movie about a jazz drummer.” So they told the filmmaker to choose a scene from his feature script and shoot that alone as a short, as a taste. He continues:

Now, I’ll be honest: I did not want to make a short. I’d written Whiplash as a feature, and that’s what I wanted to do. But, as it turned out, the producers’ idea was a brilliant one. Not only did it arouse interest in the project that hadn’t existed before, it also allowed me to get my feet wet, to fine-tune what I really wanted this movie to be.

He discusses the process further in a 2014 Variety article:

Yes, it was a film about jazz musicians, but I wanted it to play like a thriller or an action movie. I was a newbie director, and so people were essentially telling me, “Show me first” … With the influx of material, I don’t think people really read anymore, so a little piece of footage can go further than a 120-page script … It was handy, because it was one location, and it was a way to introduce our approach, to show that you can put musicians in a room with a teacher, where there are no guns or ticking bombs, and make that feel like life or death. If we could make that work, then we knew the movie as a whole could work.

The other five filmmaking tips:

Have Patience and Persistence

You’re Not Born With It

“The More a Project Scares You, the More That Probably Means It’s Worth Doing.”

Make It Personal

Make Art But Make It Marketable

For the rest of the article, go here.

For the La La Land movie website, go here.

Twitter: Film School Rejects.