Bad Teacher: Damien Chazelle on Whiplash
Nicknamed 'Full Metal Juilliard', Whiplash tells the story of a young drummer dragged to the brink of insanity by his brutal music teacher. Its director, Damien Chazelle, explains how he brought this thrilling movie to the screen
Whiplash, the second feature from American filmmaker Damien Chazelle, should come with a stringent warning to overprotective parents. Not for its sexual content (there is none), nor its violence (which is almost all psychological), not even for its bad language (which is so creatively crude that Malcolm Tucker should be taking notes), but for its suggestion that for someone to be the best in their chosen field, they have to be separated from a lot of losers. In a world where every kid gets a medal on sports day, it’s a daring notion – but it is the bold theme at the heart of Chazelle’s mesmerising new movie, a darkly comic drama following Andrew (played by Miles Teller), an ambitious 19-year-old drummer, and his tutelage/torture at the hands of Fletcher (JK Simmons), the conductor of his music school’s prestigious jazz band.
Fletcher's method for nurturing the finest musicians in the country is simple: he pushes them to the limit (physically and mentally) to weed out mediocrity. At one point he tells Andrew “there are no two words in the English language more harmful than ‘good job.’” What makes the film uneasy is that his brutal methods seem to work. It quivers on this tension and tentatively asks the audience: might Fletcher’s ends justify his means?
It’s the kind of question that often comes up when you consider artwork forged in hardship and pain, and The Skinny puts it to Chazelle when we meet ahead of the film’s UK premiere at the London Film Festival. “A lot of art, maybe most art, is not born in that way,” says the 29-year-old filmmaker, “but certainly there’s a lot of art that’s come into the world through a lot of suffering and so, whether it’s a Van Gogh painting or a Charlie Parker solo or the pyramids, built by slaves, it’s either the artist’s own suffering or there’s suffering inflicted on others a lot of the time. In those cases, are we OK with the result? That was the question that I wanted to pose through this very specific story.”
It’s a story that’s been brewing for a while. In high school, Chazelle too was a prodigious musician with a teacher who, like Fletcher, would humiliate any student who dared to be any less than perfect. “It was ten years out of the band that it occurred to me that it could be something,” he explains. “I think it was that basic emotion of feeling fear as a musician that made me realise that there was something to be done there that was different than a lot of music movies. Actually turning it into a thriller seemed like an interesting approach to talk about how you become a musician.”
This opening of old wounds has ended in a triumph. Since its premiere at Sundance, where it won both the audience award and the Grand Jury Prize, Whiplash has received raves at every festival at which it’s screened, from Cannes to Toronto. Here in London, up against Oscar favourites like The Imitation Game and Foxcatcher, it’s the talk of the town. What makes it all the more remarkable is that Chazelle has created such a towering movie on such a small budget: shot in only 19 days, the film’s relentless pace was matched by its intense shooting schedule.
“This was not an easy movie to make,” he admits. “For anyone!” Like Fletcher, Chazelle does, and did, ask a lot of the people he works with. Just ask Miles Teller. “There wasn’t a whole lot of time for a lot of takes or whatever, so for a lot of the movie I’m actually playing to exhaustion,” the charismatic young actor tells us. This turned into something of a blessing, though: “All that drumming stuff is hard, and it’s not really an instrument that you can fake. You see Eric Clapton shred on the guitar and he hardly moves. Drums are physical. I didn’t have to act exhausted because I was exhausted.”
Chazelle admits to being a perfectionist and an obsessive, but there does come a point where his and Fletcher’s methods diverge. “I think you can achieve those sorts of things Fletcher strives for while still treating people with respect, and treating them like human beings,” he says. “If anything that’s usually better for the art: a better movie will result from a compassionate set, a compassionate environment.”
Even more daring than the film’s ambiguity towards Fletcher’s methods is its approach to character. The teacher may be a monster, but his star pupil is no prince either. Andrew’s vulnerability is paired by an arrogant swagger. He wants to be the best jazz drummer in the world and he’s not shy about telling people – or stepping on his peers to get to his dream. “Everyone was telling me, ‘There’s no one to root for here, these are two despicable characters.’” Chazelle had little patience for this type of note, however. “First of all, the idea that a movie has to spell out to you who you have to root for is so…” he cuts himself off, still clearly angry from the suggestion, and takes a breath. “A movie’s not a soccer game,” he continues, “it’s such a reductive way of looking at cinema.”
He also takes issue with how the movie world defines likability. “You don’t necessarily have to sympathise with everything a character does, but empathy is important. It’s kind of what art is all about. I think that burden is on the viewer or the reader sometimes: to try to be compassionate and try to understand why people do what they do.”
“Everyone was telling me, ‘There’s no one to root for here, these are two despicable characters’... a movie’s not a soccer game” – Damien Chazelle
What helps the audience get behind such loathsome characters is the glee with which they’re both performed – particularly JK Simmons as Fletcher. Like all great movie villains, he’s seductive and charismatic. Chazelle sees him as a showman. “He kind of performs for his band in the same way that they perform for him. He’s constantly doing stuff that’s ultimately going to keep them coming back to him for more – more abuse, more abuse. And JK is just great at playing those muscles.”
Simmons has form with tyrannical characters. Sometimes they’re comic (he’s Peter Parker’s unscrupulous editor in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films) and sometimes they’re dark (see his turn in HBO prison drama Oz as a white supremacist), but Fletcher lets him bring both these qualities together, and Simmons clearly relishes the opportunity. “He doesn’t really have to over do it,” says Chazelle of Simmons, who’s currently the bookies’ favourite for best supporting actor at this year’s Oscars. “There’s almost an effortlessness to how he can just walk into a room and your eyes just go to him. He has such a great face, such a great voice. The physicality of him is so great that he definitely turned what was on the page into this fully realised, three-dimensional thing.”
These great performances are matched by a cinematic form that’s tapped into the DNA of the music running through the movie. “Cinema and jazz were born at roughly the same time,” points out Chazelle, “and they’re both these kind of quintessential 20th century art forms, so they do have this great relationship together that I think is really beautiful.” The camerawork and particularly the editing are fully in tune with the jazz rhythms and it’s what gives the film its breakneck propulsion. “I wanted to edit a lot of this movie the way the silent Russian directors would edit things. The sense of punctuation, the sense of juxtaposing images, juxtaposing angles, left juxtaposed against right, up against down, just a sense of kineticism pure and simple – not just through camera movements, but through cutting like you get in Eisenstein movies or Pudovkin movies, which I think you don’t see any more.”
The type of films Whiplash most resembles, however, are a lot less lofty. It’s not Battleship Potemkin that directly comes to mind during the snarling head-to-heads between Fletcher and Andrew, but Rocky or The Fighter. “For sure,” says Chazelle when I bring up boxing movies. “The brute physicality of boxing is not that far from the physicality of drumming. You know, your hands bleed as a drummer; you’re beating stuff for a living. Obviously it can be extremely subtle and gentle as well, but I wanted to showcase the more violent side of drumming.” In this he succeeds. Whiplash is a film to make your heart race and your head spin. It leaves you punch drunk and reeling in the aisles.