Damien Chazelle
- France
- United States
- Film director
- screenwriter
- producer
2008–present
-
Jasmine McGlade(m. 2010; div. 2014)
2
For Whiplash, he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. His biggest commercial success came with La La Land, which was nominated for 14 Academy Awards, winning six including Best Director, making him the youngest person to win the award at age 32.[4][5] He has directed two episodes of the Netflix limited series The Eddy (2020).
Early life and education[edit]
Chazelle was born in Providence, Rhode Island[2] to a Catholic family.[6][7] His French-American father, Bernard Chazelle, is the Eugene Higgins Professor of computer science at Princeton University.[8] His mother, Celia,[9] is from an English-Canadian family based in Calgary, Alberta, and teaches medieval history at The College of New Jersey.[10]
Chazelle was raised in Princeton, New Jersey, where, although a Catholic, he attended a Hebrew school for four years due to his parents' dissatisfaction with his religious education at a church Sunday school.[7]
Chazelle has a sister, Anna Chazelle,[11] who is an actress.[9] Their English-born maternal grandfather, John Martin, is the son of stage actress Eileen Earle.[9]
Filmmaking was Chazelle's first love, but he subsequently wanted to be a musician and struggled to make it as a jazz drummer at Princeton High School. He has said that he had an intense music teacher in the Princeton High School Studio Band, who was the inspiration for the character of Terence Fletcher (J. K. Simmons) in Chazelle's breakout film Whiplash. Unlike the film's protagonist Andrew Neiman (Miles Teller), Chazelle stated that he knew instinctively that he never had the talent to be a great drummer and after high school, pursued filmmaking again.[12] He studied filmmaking in the Visual and Environmental Studies department at Harvard University and graduated in 2007.[13][14]
At Harvard, he lived in Currier House as roommates with composer and frequent collaborator Justin Hurwitz.[15] The two were among the original members of the indie-pop group Chester French, formed during their freshman year.[16]
Career[edit]
2008–2013: Early work and career beginnings[edit]
Chazelle wrote and directed his debut feature, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, as part of his senior thesis project with classmate Justin Hurwitz at Harvard.[17] The film premiered at Tribeca Film Festival in 2009 and received various awards on the festival circuit, before being picked up by Variance Films for limited release and opening to critical acclaim.[18]
After graduation, Chazelle moved to Los Angeles with the ultimate goal of attracting interest to produce his musical romantic drama La La Land.[19] He worked as a freelance writer in Hollywood; among his writing credits are The Last Exorcism Part II (2013) and Grand Piano (2013). He was also brought in by J. J. Abrams' Bad Robot to re-write a draft of 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016) with the intention of also directing, but Chazelle ultimately chose to direct Whiplash instead.[20]