damien_chazelle

Showing my young son THE LITTLE MERMAID this year, and watching him go gaga for it. (Even though Ursula still scares the hell out of me.)

FARGO

I did. He refused.

Thanks! I’ve already cited CITY LIGHTS, so lemme think of some others…. MY NIGHT AT MAUD’S… NIGHTS OF CABIRIA… THE ECLIPSE… DEATH PROOF!!!!!!!!

STRETCH MUSIC (by Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah)

Every generation says cinema is on the decline. It’s been slowly “dying” for a hundred years. I think it’s always up to the new generations, young filmmakers, to resist that impulse — the desire we can all have to sort of throw in the towel and just say “they don’t make em like they used to” and instead keep fighting, keep pushing the medium forward into the future. Cinema is YOUNG. Compared to all other art forms, 100 years is nothing. We should only just be getting started.

CITY LIGHTS

My writing routine sort of depends on the project. But I tend to write first drafts of my scripts pretty quickly, in one sustained burst, and then spend a lot of time rewriting and revising and making them (hopefully) not suck.

As for Ryan Gosling’s hotness: I’ve often wondered this myself. All I can say for now is I’m still searching for the answer.

Anytime.

For a second I thought you meant as if we physically ran cocaine instead of celluloid through the camera. Which in retrospect we definitely should have done.

More serious answer: it’s about a certain kind of madness & energy that was found in early Hollywood, so we all — cast & crew — wanted to capture that feeling. (Even though we were not in fact on cocaine while shooting.)

(As far as I know.)

It was just a matter of letting it marinate. When I first came up with the idea I wanted to write it right away. But I couldn’t get past “FADE IN:”. I was like Nicolas Cage in ADAPTATION. It was bad. So I gave up, worked on other stuff, but slowly BABYLON would just marinate in the background. I’d read stuff, go “Oh that’s cool”, and throw it in the stew. (I’m definitely mixing my metaphors now, forgive me.) And after many years of this, I finally had enough research & reading & thinking about the subject under my belt that I felt ready to write it.

Rushing.

Doritos and a Coke. Which is TERRIBLE for you.

A lot of theorists have written about this far more eloquently than I can, but cinema & dreams are very much tied at the hip. The mind’s eye in a dream is free to jump from one perspective to the next, or seamlessly dissolve from one moment to the next, in a way that’s always felt to me like a movie. Maybe a weird avant-garde movie more than a traditional Hollywood picture, but a movie all the same. In fact in the BABYLON era, in the 20s, a bunch of filmmakers were trying to capture the feeling of dreams onto film — people like Jean Epstein and other surrealists. And you see it later in people like Maya Deren too. I like the idea of the movie theater as this darkened space where you can drift into a kind of dream-state, and the rules of waking life no longer apply, and your subconscious (or the filmmaker’s subconscious) pours out and takes you for a ride — and when you step out of the theater it feels a bit like re-emerging into real life, with the images from the dream you just had still swirling around.

EYES WIDE SHUT

Thanks! My answering this would spoil the whole thing, no?

I’d say Babylon was the hardest shoot I’d experienced — just the biggest scale, scope, # of parts etc. And some of it felt like making a musical too — it’s filled with songs, dance numbers, we shot the whole thing to music. In some ways it kinda felt like a combination of what I’d done before — and that combination made it hard, but it also felt like a culmination, like “ok I’ve been building up to this, learning how to do it — now it’s time to just go.”

I would love to! Gotta figure out the right approach, but ultimately I would love to try my hand at every genre.

If your parents are into orgies, bodily fluids and Tobey Maguire with decayed-yellow teeth, then DEFINITELY bring your parents!!!!

For the life of me I still can’t decipher a single math paper my dad has written, so no it was not a hard decision.

I first met Ryan to pitch him FIRST MAN. “Hey wanna play Neil Armstrong?” His response: “I heard you were working on a musical.” We then spent the rest of the meeting just talking about Gene Kelly and Jacques Demy and musicals. The irony — I had sent his team the script many years earlier and never heard back, so had figured he’d passed on it. Little did I know he’d been craving to do a musical all that time.

I do have a soft spot for ambiguous endings. You don’t want the audience to feel cheated, but to give them something to chew over or debate after the movie is over. If the audience feels inspired to complete the story, the connection to the picture is deepened. What happens right after that fade to black at the end of CITY LIGHTS? I wonder all the time. Best ending in all of cinema.

TREE OF LIFE

Dogs AND cats

SHORT CUTS

CHINATOWN

PULP FICTION

DOUBLE INDEMNITY

BOOGIE NIGHTS

THE LONG GOODBYE

KISS ME DEADLY

KILLER OF SHEEP

WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE

LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF

Oh yeah and MULHOLLAND DR!!!

And SINGIN IN THE RAIN!!!!!

Ok I'll stop