Damien Chazelle

Damien Chazelle

Director
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Life Story

Damien Sayre Chazelle is an American director and screenwriter. He was born in Providence, Rhode Island. His mother, Celia Sayre (Martin) Chazelle, is an American-Canadian writer and professor of history at The College of New Jersey. His father, Bernard Chazelle, is a French-American Eugene Higgins Professor of computer science at Princeton University, originally from Clamart, France. Chazelle has a sister, Anna, who is an actress and circus performer.

Family

Jasmine McGlade (26 June 2010 - 2014) 

Trivia

Met his former wife, director-producer Jasmine McGlade, at Harvard University. She was his co-worker on several projects and movies.
Graduated from Harvard University with a degree in Visual and Environmental Studies.
Directed 3 Oscar nominated performances: J.K. Simmons, Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone. Simmons and Stone won for their performances in his films.
He is the son of Celia (Martin), a writer, and Bernard Chazelle, a computer scientist. His father is French, from Clamart. His mother was born in California, to an English-born, Beverly Hills-raised, father, and a Calgary-born, Canadian mother. Damien's mother was later herself raised in Calgary, before returning to the U.S.
Brother of actress Anna Chazelle.
All of the films he has directed feature a Jazz musician as a protagonist.
His Best Director Oscar win for La La Land (2016) at age 32, made him the youngest recipient of this award category in the Academy's history (26 Feb 2017).
His maternal grandfather, John Sayre Martin, Jr., a professor of English, is the son of John Sayre Martin, who worked for Paramount Pictures in London, and Eileen Earle, who was a stage actress.

Personal Quotes 

I didn't have traditional stage fright. If there was 500 people in the audience or three people in the audience, it didn't really make a difference. What made a difference was the conductor. Everything that I was scared about as a drummer was him.
By the end of high school, I had this fork-in-the-road moment where part of me considered going to vocational music school to really pursue it.
I don't think of 'Macbeth' as the villain. I don't think of 'King Lear' as the villain. I don't think of 'Hamlet' as the villain. I don't think of 'Travis Bickle' as the villain.
When you're trying to paint a portrait of a very specific world, you're trying to show what makes the world different. So, sometimes it means exaggerating certain kind of aspects, but I don't think it's that important or it's that much of an issue as long as you get an emotional truth across.
There are a lot of musicians in my life. But movies came first for me. That was my original passion.
My version of a stress dream is, really, showing up on a concert stage with a drum set and not knowing the chart.

Filmography

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