Whiplash creator grounds his thriller in fact and memory

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The film Whiplash, a psychological thriller about a jazz-drumming student and his maniacal instructor, is up for five awards at the 87th Academy Awards, including best picture. We spoke to the film's writer-director Damien Chazelle, a former jazz-drumming prodigy himself.

Your film is up against, among others, Selma, which has been maligned in some circles for possible historical inaccuracies. Given your music background, can you say how realistic the extreme behaviour of Whiplash's face-slapping music instructor is?

It definitely is a heightened film. I wanted to make a thriller out of the subject matter, and it definitely abides by the tropes of the genre. But the actual observations in the movie are all grounded in, or at least inspired by, facts or my own memories. These are things that happened to me as a drummer in a competitive jazz-band ensemble, or are anecdotes from jazz history, involving tyrannical bandleaders. That being said, the resulting movie is totally fiction.

One of the catch phrases of the instructor, played by J.K. Simmons, is "not my tempo." Can you talk about the challenge of making a film with such a strong, intense pace to it?

There was a lot of thinking about the rhythm and the pacing and the tempo of the movie. I wanted a breakneck speed, with an intensity that did not let up. But you do need to balance the crazy musical stuff with different sides of the characters, and different sides of the world. So it was about trying to find that equilibrium, while keeping that high speed.

A lot of that force comes from Simmons. How much of his character's intensity came from him, and how much came from the script?

J.K. was really smart about how to modulate the anger of the character. Certain lines that were written as screams, he actually would dial back and turn them to whispers. So even though the dialogue was on the page, he really helped bring it to life. He had such a command of who this guy was. J.K. had been to music school himself. He knew conducting. He knew composition. He knew the world.

You say J.K. knew who the character was, but to me, he's a bit of a mystery as to what makes him tick. Is he a frustrated player, or is he a frustrated teacher?

We do see the character playing in a jazz bar, later in the movie. He plays the piano beautifully, very tenderly and gracefully, but he's absolutely not a virtuoso. So his calling is trying to find that great musician in someone else.

But where does his anger come from?

Potentially, there's a dissatisfaction with himself, buried deep inside. But I was more interested in the case of him and in the case of Andrew the drummer. These are two characters with a completely monomaniacal focus on a single goal. In both their cases, the philosophy is that the end justifies the means, and that it doesn't matter how many casualties are strewn along the way.

Does the film answer the question of whether such destructive behaviour is worth it, as long as it creates great art or a great artist?

I didn't want the movie to land on one side or the other precisely. I want the audience to decide. I personally don't think it's justified, so I made the behaviour as odious as possible, and the dilemma as dark as possible. But it's still a dilemma. It's more interesting to me to end the movie with a question.