COMMENTARY: Hi, I'm Damien Chazelle, I wrote and directed Whiplash.
I'm J.K. Simmons, I play the bald guy.
I love that Right of Way logo, by the way. Right of Way Films.
Another film that you were in. Briefly.
A little Clooney silhouette there.
Brief but memorable.
I mean, that leads me to, I guess, the person who brought us together.
Indeed. Young Mr. Reitman. Mr. Jason Reitman.
The-- I had initially written this script
and it's a jazz drummer script, not the easiest to convince people to finance.
I was sending it all around town, anyone I knew, anyone I didn't know
and it wound up, through sort of a circuitous route
in the hands of Helen Estabrook and Jason Reitman.
And I think-- In fact, I still have the e-mail.
The very first thing they suggested as soon as they were--
I don't know if they were on board yet, what do you think of J.K. for Fletcher?
And...
There was just something--
It especially had to do with the roles you had played in Jason's movies
that made me love the idea more than if you had only done stuff like Oz.
Right. Cool. There was a surprise element I wanted.
I wanted a little bit of that sort of like-- Juno's dad, the dark side.
Juno's dad goes fucking nuts.
And here's young Miles Teller who, you know, was--
I thought was gonna be here today. Apparently, he's--
It's only 11:30 in the morning so he's probably hungover
in his own dried-up puke at this point.
It's kind of how Miles rolls. Probably a fair picture.
Since he's not here,
basically, this commentary will largely be at his expense.
Yep. Largely character assassination is what I'm after here.
Much like my role in the film.
People will realize just how similar to Fletcher you actually are.
There I am, wearing my own clothing.
When we shot the short version of this film
there were I think $11 in the wardrobe budget
and I let the other actor have that.
No, the $11 actually just went to my salary.
Ah. That was your salary for the short. Yes. Yeah.
Doubled it for the feature. Yep.
Oh, no, yeah, we had a luxurious time on the feature.
One of the really cool things about the casting of Miles--
And Damien had Miles in mind as he was writing this.
It was shortly after Rabbit Hole had come out.
Damien did not know that Miles
had been playing the drums since he was 15.
And basically, between Damien and another teacher,
they had three or four weeks to prep Miles
and turn his cheesy rock drumming into accomplished jazz drumming.
Teaching him how to use his left hand and--
If you notice, Miles' left hand, he's doing what's called traditional grip,
which is not a--
Even jazz drummers these days normally don't use traditional grip.
They use matched grip where both hands are matching.
They're both doing the same thing.
And it seems like a sort of simple thing
to kind of alter in your posture
but it dictates a different physical approach to the drums.
And I remember when Miles first started learning this stuff
it didn't matter that he'd had experience on the drums before
because he looked just like a beginner.
And so I have video footage of him looking very worrisome to my eyes.
So blackmail footage, basically.
Total blackmail footage. Yeah.
And then he-- Something clicked, you know.
At a certain point, he got adept at the grip
and as soon as he was adept at the grip, everything followed.
Because Miles is just a sponge. He is so good at picking stuff up.
Yeah, he still owes me money, actually.
Well, that too. Yeah.
He's a sponge, and a terrible human being.
But he-- He's wonderful
at sort of imitating and picking stuff up like just nothing else.
He's a good dancer, got good rhythm, so everything else kind of followed.
I remember being excited when I came in a couple weeks into his rehearsals.
Came into rehearsal and saw him playing.
And suddenly he was a drummer. He was a jazz drummer.
This, to me-- Complete non sequitur.
This sequence here justified our going to New York for a day
even though all my New York stuff was cut.
There's such a good feel and a throwback feel--
We wanted you along for moral support. For moral support.
Plus, I got to go-- This is L.A.
Yeah. But everything up to this
all those exteriors were-- Yep.
Sort of established the New York vibe.
The trip to New York was worth it because I got to go to Two Boots.
Well, there you go. I remember you sent me a picture of it.
Yeah. Yeah. Melissa-- Melissa--
We're establishing our two main supporting actors,
Melissa Benoist and the great Paul Reiser.
JIM: You okay? Hm? Yeah.
COMMENTARY: What was fun about sort of, you know, filling out the--
You know, we started out by casting you and Miles,
and then it became a matter of figuring out
who made sense opposite these people.
Melissa auditioned and just blew me and everyone away with her audition.
I remember it was the end of a long day, of a lot of auditions
and I was kind of sort of in a daze.
Everybody's favorite process, by the way, auditions.
Oh, yeah. No. I mean, it's wonderful. Yeah.
I get to scream at people and, you know, it's great.
No. I mean, it was-- She came in and she immediately--
It, you know, became immediately apparent that it had to be her.
And Paul Reiser, I mean, obviously, I've loved since, you know--
I love him in Diner, I love, you know, obviously Mad About You and Aliens.
But I-- But what actually made-- Reminded me of him
is the Soderbergh movie Behind the Candelabra
where he plays a lawyer
and you know, it's sort of-- It's a very non kind of comical performance.
Very sort of in the pocket, but really beautifully human
and so understated, so kind of subtly observed.
It was exactly that. People who know him
from his comedy stuff--
And, of course, Damien has been on the planet less than half as long as I have
and has seen 10 times as many films
so I never even saw the Soderbergh film you're talking about.
I had seen enough of Paul's work- Heard of Soderbergh?
He's some guy who-- What does he do?
Something with movies. Yeah. Yes, yes. Okay, good.
I was afraid there for a second. But, no, you--
I mean, I knew enough about Paul's work to know
that, you know, he was gonna be a wonderful choice to play Miles' dad.
Lovely insert there on the
jealous Andrew Neiman looking at the--
You would be surprised how long we worked on the ear insert.
There was ear, there was eye, there was insert on kissing.
It was all-- It's all about kind of trying to figure out a fast shorthand
at the beginning of a movie to get into the mind-set,
the way of viewing of Andrew.
Also, going back to the New York stuff, that dictated how we shot that.
Everything about the New York images were about
showing New York less as it really is now
and more as it was in '70s movies where it was all about New York,
the scary crime capital.
So a lot of blacks and greens, a lot of fluorescents,
and just a lot of buildings towering over you.
I remember how New York used to feel when I was a kid.
I grew up in New Jersey and I'd go into New York with my mom
and just coming out of Penn Station in midtown
where we shot that New York stuff, just looking up at these buildings
that looked like gargoyles just staring down at you,
that was the feeling I wanted to capture.
It also dictated a lot of the interiors that we wound up doing in L.A.
This is in the Palace Theatre in downtown L.A.
Yeah, almost all of our L.A. shooting was downtown. So with the--
Which has that kind of seedy grandeur sort of feel that New York used to have.
It came as close to having New York-- Especially anachronistic New York vibe.
And especially when you're down there for 16 hours and wrapping at 4 a.m.
When you're hearing the sirens that start going.
Hold the roll, hold the roll. Ha, ha.
Yep. The shootings.
We joke, but I do remember at a certain point in the shoot
they had to start instituting an actual shoot protocol for people leaving set.
People weren't allowed to walk to cars on their own
We had to-- Some people had escorts. when we'd be doing night shoots.
And we just saw Nate, one of the other--
Well, we've just seen both the other drummer,
actor/drummers in the movie.
Yeah, Nate Lang plays Carl.
He was in the short film that J.K. was in as well,
which is what we did to help raise money for the feature.
And Nate was that perfect, you know, combination,
an actual trained thespian, but also a professional drummer.
So he not only slipped in easily-- You know, slipped easily into the role
he also became Miles'-- Basically Miles' drum coach on set.
I was there, as a drummer myself, to kind of oversee stuff when I could
but Nate was sort of by Miles' side a lot.
Miles based a lot of his style on Nate's style,
which, again, is sort of old-school, traditional-grip jazz playing.
And then-- And Austin Stowell, who plays Ryan,
or as you like to refer to him, The Leprechaun, was--
We'll get to that. Is actually not a redhead.
And initially, we were just looking for redheads
and Austin, again, just, it was a matter of in auditions
we did a lot of improv with him
and he's so-- The funny thing is, he's such a nice guy in real life
but so good at playing an utter tool.
Much like myself.
That same range of being
just a stunningly wonderful human being
but being able to play such a raving asshole.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, no.
The only person who was not a wonderful human being was Miles.
Miles. You know, pain in the ass. But, you know,
the ultimate end product was worth it. Love the shoe shot.
Yes. And there's another one coming up.
Damien did such a great job of establishing my character
by other people's response to me.
And in this scene here
and in the earlier scene where-- That we were blathering over
where we see my silhouette in the doorway,
Right. everybody paying attention.
And in a scene to come where I enter studio band,
the top band for the first time, it's--
So much of the movie lives on people's reactions to what's going on.
We'll see that again when we get to the scene--
The scene-- I don't wanna give it away in case you haven't seen the movie yet.
But another scene with Miles and Melissa.
I hope they're watching the movie with commentary.
With us blathering over it.
And this scene, this was really-- Everyone dies at the end.
This was fun to shoot because, again, these musicians are real players.
And they're all-- All this stuff is-- This is all live playing.
Yeah. So it was a combination
of what he wrote and then of what Damien wrote
and then responding to exactly what came out of somebody's horn
or, in this case, off the kit.
One shout-out I wanna give is to Damon Gupton
who's off-screen right now. Yes.
But is-- Plays the Nassau band conductor.
And I kind of modeled him to a certain extent on--
I was in, you know, a lower--
In my school, there was Nassau band and studio band.
I even borrowed the names.
And I developed this really nice relationship
with the Nassau band conductor, this really sort of sweet guy.
And Damon--
Damon just has such a kind of compassion in his face
and he's just in so many ways the opposite of you.
Right, Yeah. And just-- And a nice jazz vibe.
And, again, you know, he's just a good actor, so you get that sort of--
That same anachronistic feel from him that you were looking for in the movie.
Yeah, he knew the lingo, and the stuff he was saying
in the earlier scene was just stuff he came up with.
You know, I'd just kind of written bare bones sort of directions for him
and he just came in-- He's a musician himself
so was able to fill out the character.
It is one of those small roles that I think really pops
because of the right actor.
I love this shot, by the way
that brought Miles to me over the back of my head,
never left Miles, watches the back of him turn around
and watches him absorb the whole reality of what happened
and then incorporates Ryan also at the end of the shot.
Ryan looking somewhat disgruntled. Yeah.
And in this scene here, you will notice,
very French, if I may say, mister-- Monsieur Chazelle.
The whole scene lives right here.
It's a two-shot, and it was another scene that, you know, Damien had scripted
and the actors took the script and, you know,
he gave them enough leeway with it to sort of make it their own
and just be so comfortable and so human and natural.
And this was-- This was--
You know, we joke about how fast we had to shoot this movie
and how it doesn't give you the option to do lots of takes most of the time.
This was one of the scenes where we-- It took a while to get the rhythms right.
Especially because I sort of knew I wanted to play it all in one.
And I think, you know, the initial takes were--
Often what I find is nice, is you sort of--
You start with takes where you are hewing very closely to the script,
then you kind of give the actors complete rein
to just literally do whatever they want,
then you wind up in this kind of halfway point
where you're sort of walking over the beats of the script,
you're getting the beats, but they're giving their own inflections.
This was probably a take somewhat later in the process.
It was probably the second to last take or so.
But they just developed this kind of rhythm.
And this is such a great shot here, pulling Miles away
and, you know, watching his smug little "I did it" smile there.
The little "I did it" smile that's about to get slapped out of him quite literally.
Sure, my alarm clock didn't go off. All right.
This is-- Again, this is art imitating life here.
Miles, you know, drunk, passed out, looking exactly like that as we speak
except with a little dried puke around his mouth.
Oh, Miles, I hope he doesn't listen to this.
Oh, he will.
He will rue the day he didn't show up. It'll be too late by the time he hears.
We will have moved on. You'll be working with him.
I know. Can you believe it? Miles and Damien--
Signing up for the Miles wagon yet again.
No, I mean, I think to--
Look, I'm gonna take a brief moment to not insult Miles,
then we can get back to it. Sure.
Go ahead, I'm gonna take a potty break.
Cool. The thing about Miles
that I think I just find myself endlessly fascinated by, is just--
Is just, he's got these eyes that,
you know, enables a movie like this to live in close-ups.
He's got these eyes that are so full of emotion, so expressive,
can do so many different things, but in such a subtle way.
And, really, I mean, it's-- This is a tough role.
Because most of this role is actually listening or reacting
to this kind of force of nature, which is you, which is Fletcher.
I think a lot of actors could have just wound up existing in the shadow.
He doesn't have as much dialogue as Fletcher.
In fact, he communicates a lot of his emotions through the drumming.
And so it's a more kind of physicalized, less vocalized performance.
And for an actor of his age, it's just rare to find someone who--
Normally, you have to have a face that's weathered a lot of stuff
to have that sort of expressivity.
And he's able to just be, you know, boyish when he wants to be,
vulnerable when he wants, cocky when he wants,
but express all that stuff just through--
Not through dialogue, but just through his face.
In real life, he specializes in cocky.
He doesn't do the other two so much. Right, right, right.
[BAND TUNING]
COMMENTARY: So I remember, for this I drew a lot
from stuff that I remembered my first day in--
You know, I was in a cutthroat competitive jazz ensemble
and I remember my first day in there.
There you are with the shoes. I remember--
Now we see all the faces. The bandleader coming in.
I remember everyone getting silent.
We see my hideous mug here, but then we see--
I love how you take off the earbuds,
just how you place your jacket so deliberately.
He's a precise human being, yes.
There's something really so elegant about it.
I mean, that was another thing, I think, the wardrobe was really your idea.
The sort of-- The black, the T-shirt.
But it also obviously brings to mind dance
and there's something so physical about your performance as Fletcher
that was not on the page. The words were on the page, to some extent,
but the whole physical apparatus of the character was not
and you turned him into this kind of-- This sort of evil Fred Astaire.
Fred Astaire gone to seed.
That was an example right there, you know, a little close-up on Miles
that tells us so much, you know, about his, you know--
Struggling to feel like he belongs right there in that moment.
And then all these guys are, you know, other than Miles,
everyone here is a real musician.
You know, Nate is a musician and an actor. Most of the other guys are--
Had never been in a movie. Some of them had.
But most of them are music students in the area, or professional musicians.
And so we were able to kind of get into the groove
of doing scenes with guys playing.
Sometimes what you're hearing is post dubbed, or pre-recorded
but when we were on set, guys are blowing sounds in their instruments
and they know what they're playing.
For you and Miles, it helped create-- And for me as well, to be honest.
It helped create this feeling of actually being in a band room.
We were living-- This was a set, it was all built, it was not a real room at all.
And so we tried to kind of make it feel after a while
that we were just at band rehearsal
with a very mean conductor. Yeah. Yeah.
And it really did too, and it was nice
that Miles had, you know, the drumming background.
And I have a musical background, I studied music in college.
So we both were able to establish a little credibility with these guys
who really, really played.
And there were-- Yeah, there were extended periods
where we were really cranking it.
I keep having to not say we were really rocking.
Oh, dear God. We were really jazzing
in the room there,
both here and then with the pro band later on at Carnegie Hall.
The color palette of this room was something
that the DP, Sharone, and I talked a lot about.
The short that you and I had done, J.K., had a very different color palette.
It was based on what the band room looked like in my experience.
My own band room, white walls. More neon.
Right, yeah, like fluorescent. I mean, fluorescent.
And big open windows, a lot of whites.
And for this, we decided to go kind of 180
and really give it this windowless, claustrophobic sort of feel
and yet still, there's still a beauty to it.
There's something about how top lights, these orange or yellow lights
bounce off cymbals, people's faces. And an old-school feel too.
Yeah, there is a real--
It's just beautiful to me, this kind of, you know, brown on amber on yellow.
I thought you were talking about me. That was a beautiful shot.
That goes without saying, though. Your face is always a marvel.
My beautiful head.
And once we figured out the palette for this room,
that determined the palette for everything.
But I remember we spent so long looking for a room that looked like this.
We did lots of location scouts looking for the perfect band room
and we just couldn't find it. We'd find rooms
where the wooden walls were too dark and swallow up too much light
or where the room itself did not give us enough room to play around in.
Eventually we decided to just build it, so this is also at the Palace Theatre.
We're literally on the stage of the Palace Theatre right now.
Our incredible production designer, Melanie Jones, with a negative budget
Yeah. somehow managed
to build this entire thing for us, and we lived here for a week.
Yeah, and it really created the environment for us.
There's also my office adjacent to this, was part of the set too, that we--
Which was a scene. There was a long scene.
In the final cut, there's a-- We see it only briefly.
And this-- My first victim here. C.J.
Who somehow signed up to be the victim again.
C.J. had been in the short. After I'd spit in his face on the short.
Accidentally.
Of course. Of course.
METZ: Yes.
COMMENTARY: And this I think again, we see--
Yeah, there's me being loud for the first time.
And we see Miles. That's such a great shot there.
It's like, "Oh, my, what the...?"
Yeah, "What the fuck did I walk into?"
I remember you and I talked about--
Speaking of screaming,
there's a lot of screaming that Fletcher does in this movie
and we tried to-- But we wound up failing, and somehow your voice still--
I'm still amazed that you did it.
We tried to kind of initially partition out
the screaming sections, so that your voice wouldn't--
To give your voice a break
and because-- For example, because, like, of this set
that we had to live in, a lot of screaming takes place in this set
so it wound up back-to-back. This week--
The week we shot in the set was probably particularly hard
on your vocal cords.
Yeah, but I mean-- I appreciated the efforts
to break it up, and it still ended up broken up some.
I can't remember where it is, but there is one scene
where I can sort of hear-- When I'm not screaming
I could sort of here that I was-- My voice was a little fragged.
And I try, you know.
Your singing days? I'm a trained actor, I have my--
I used to sing. Yeah.
I have, you know, proper vocal technique and all of that.
But for this screaming, it just had to be so 100 percent balls out.
There was no question of technique or trying to do it correctly. It was just...
I think the only...
The only concrete direction I remember
giving you before the short--
We were in a parking lot the day before the short, and you asked me--
I think you asked me, you know, "How far do you want me to go on some--?
When it says in the script here, 'He screams'
how far do you want it to go?"
And I just said, "As, like-- Farther than humanly possible.
I want it-- I want it to be inhuman. I want it to be animalistic."
And I literally think that's the only thing
I remember actually kind of concretely saying
because I remember day one of the short, you showed up
and you were so the character.
It wasn't the character I'd written. It was better.
It was this fully realized version
of what had been sketched on the page.
And then that, of course, gave me
a sense of what you would do in the feature. The feature felt--
It felt like we just got to enrichen that character.
We just got to sort of expand on and deepen that character
over the course of four weeks instead of three days.
And going back to what was on the page,
Miles and I have expressed this many times to each other
and as we've done.
We're in the middle of doing screenings
and the film's about to be released now as we record this.
We keep coming back to-- People say:
"What attracted you to do this?" "How did you develop this character?"
And for both of us
and for the vast majority of people who were involved in this project,
it was about what Damien put on the page to begin with.
And we felt like our job was just to not screw it up
and lift it off the page. And then--
And, you know-- And then be in the room together,
be in the moment together and...
Which all of these actors did in this film. Obviously, Miles
was the one that I got to work with the most, but Nate and--
I mean, everybody that I had a chance to interact with in this film
brought a nice-- A nice level of both preparation and spontaneity,
which is the environment that Damien created for us.
You know, which is sort of what jazz is all about,
which is a beautiful thing.
And, yes, the infamous--
The infamous moment that I wish nobody knew about
when they went to see the movie. You got it.
This is approaching here. You gotta sell tickets.
It is fun to play with the...
I mean, I know me and the edi-- The editor and I, Tom Cross--
One of those moments you have to admit you have fun with in the editing room
because it's like knowing the bomb's about to go off
but the character doesn't, but maybe he's starting to realize there's a fuse.
And you're slowly building that knowledge
and it's all about Miles' face kind of slowly realizing that.
And also what I love is the face of Nate Lang
Yeah. behind him who is just--
I mean, if you look at him, he's just chewing scenery.
But in this wonderful way of just--
Oh, he's having such a good time Yeah.
that this little upstart he was-- Waiting.
He was worried for a moment that Andrew actually was good
and maybe gonna cost him his seat, now he knows.
"Oh, this is gonna be a delight to watch."
And seeing this, you know-- Or being in Miles' shoes,
in Andrew's shoes,
having seen, you know, the outburst with the trombone player is--
Right. Adds that level of sheer terror here.
As I'm being understanding
and just trying to help him get it right here, you know.
Exactly-- The guitar player is like, "Oh, shit."
It is so funny. I mean, just spend the scene looking at other people's faces.
But that's what the trombonist incident gives you.
It gives you that sort of-- You know, it's like the...
Like your first act of violence in a violent movie
and then you can actually-- It buys you--
It buys you the ability to play with that threat.
We know the threat is there, but not sure where it's gonna come from.
And so you wanna milk it. I mean, I really wanted to milk the tension
in these sort of scenes, and just stretch it as far as you can.
You know, just sort of like a spring.
People sometimes talk about sort of creating tension that way
and you're just waiting for the thing to shoot back.
That's such a great shot of Miles. Now, you know, in most movies
you're gonna see-- You're cutting back and forth between a--
Like a waist up shot of me, full front,
and that profile shot of Miles, which is just--
Oh, and this is my favorite part of the movie. Ah...
The slapping of Miles.
[COMMENTATORS CHUCKLE]
We spent a lot of time on these slaps. We did spend time. Many, many--
Look at the red cheek. Many slaps. Yeah, yeah.
That's good, I've slapped him three or four times.
The red cheek is justified.
Yeah. Now the little wuss starts to tear up.
Oh, boy, this scene was fun.
This was the-- As actually, I mean-- Now--
I think it's...
People might know this was the scene of the short.
So, J.K., you got to kind of-- You got to do this twice.
Yeah, I smacked a couple of actors.
Now, here come-- Coming up now soon
is the single tear moment and this is one of the things
that as I watched it in the theater, which I've been able to a few times,
it's one where if you're on stage doing a comedy,
you would hold for the laugh because there's a brilliant line here
that is almost never heard. I say the thing about the single tear--
"Are you one of those single-tear people?"
And that always gets a big laugh.
And the line that follows that up is:
"Do I look like a double rainbow?"
Which is one of my favorite lines that Damien wrote. Here we go.
But no one hears that, but now they will.
FLETCHER: Do I look like a double fucking rainbow to you?
COMMENTARY: Of course, maybe that line's already dated.
You know the YouTube video that it refers to?
Well, only because you told me about it later. I-- But...
But it's actually okay. Double rainbow is a funny word.
Even. Regardless. Yeah, yeah.
It works whether it's a specific contemporary reference or not.
I remember when-- One thing that was kind of great for me working--
Doing this scene, even the first time,
I'd initially written all this whole stream of dialogue in the script
as just delivered at a nonstop kind of--
In my mind, delivered at a nonstop sort of volley at full-volume pitch.
Actually what you did was you wound up shaping it a lot more so that--
Oh, I took a breath once in a while. Excuse me. Ha, ha.
Yeah, so you utterly ruined it. Ha-ha-ha.
No, but, you know, it makes stuff like the single-tear line...
That said at a whisper is so much more humiliating than at screamed out.
And that's actually one thing that I think is really sort of, you know--
It was fun working with you on this character
of figuring out which lines are delivered at full volume,
which are whispered. A lot of the scariest moments
I find with your character, with Fletcher, are the softest moments.
Yeah. Or even the seemingly nice moments.
In the hallway, you're telling him to have fun.
One of my favorite little-- The quote there.
Yeah. Buddy Rich actually--
So people ask me, "Did you come up with that?"
No, no, Buddy Rich actually said that.
Said a lot of stuff very much like that. Buddy Rich is a fount of one-liners.
And the-- Yeah, the jazz musicians in the audience
always appreciate that two seconds onscreen.
This is so-- Again, this was just another:
"Yeah, I'm gonna go on about Miles being a good actor."
He's a kid who's-- I mean, obviously, he's a movie star
and his star is on the rise, and that's a beautiful thing,
and he's enjoying every second. As a matter of fact,
he's, as we said, hungover and sleeping in his own dried puke.
He was out enjoying that last night.
But, you know, the kid is also a trained actor.
Went to theater school, NYU.
I mean, once he decided
that this was what he wanted to do for a living,
he's a very serious and dedicated young actor
and really has all of the tools in his toolbox
to continue to progress and have a career
that's more than just, you know,
a commercial success and...
He's the real deal. I remember bonding with him
over just ambition and the idea of ambition.
Certainly-- If there's one thing that defines this character in the movie,
Andrew, it's ambition, it's drive.
And...
And Miles actually-- I think he's spoken about this in--
I saw him speak about this at a Q&A or something, but...
The idea of how monomaniacal this character is,
in a way how that sort of helps you as an actor. Every scene--
The motivation for every scene for this guy is pretty much the same.
It's, "I wanna drum. I wanna be a great drummer."
I don't know, I guess I find those sort of characters really, really fascinating.
It doesn't mean they're one-note. You can find shading
and Miles is able to find a ton of shading
and even characters that might in other people's hands be one-note.
But at the end of the day, this is Andrew.
If there's one thing that defines Andrew, it's the kid who sits at his drum set
and drums past the point where his hand is bleeding.
And to be honest, that's what I did. I locked myself in a practice room
for hours and hours and hours and drummed way past bleeding hands.
We made a point, in case you missed it
of cutting straight from the blood gushing from Miles' hand
to Melissa looking like she's about to vomit in her napkin.
It's a little inner joke my editor and I-- Ha-ha-ha. Nice, nice. I like that.
No one seems to pick up on, but okay.
And Melissa, she's so wonderful in this movie.
And I-- Well, I don't get out much
or watch much of anything outside of baseball on TV, so I hadn't seen--
I didn't know who she was. I hadn't seen Glee.
Yep. And she's so--
First of all, she's such a stunningly beautiful woman
but this sort of girl-next-door character that she plays
in this movie is just really so sweet, so endearing.
And you really grow to love this character so much,
which makes the later scene that much more devastating.
Yeah. That later scene is what we started with. That was--
The breakup scene is what we auditioned people on
and it was the first scene we shot with Melissa, was the breakup scene.
So that was kind of-- You had to work backwards from that.
And it had to sort of, you know, work in order to make that scene hit home.
And we play that scene mostly on Melissa's face. She's the--
Well, if you had a choice. That face or that face? What are you gonna choose?
Right? The decision is made up for you.
But the...
She's the collateral damage, in a way.
But it was also important that that collateral damage actually be human.
You actually humanize them and you see what makes them tick and...
Well, this is-- And this lays-- Sows or plants, sorry,
the seeds for that. Yeah, sowing, planting, same thing, right?
Because we see-- We see that beat there
where, you know,
Andrew was, you know, a little bit of a dick to her because of--
He has this inner drive and this ambition.
And she's just like, you know, a 20-year-old college kid
who's, you know, just like a normal 20-year-old college kid.
Doesn't know what she wants to do, she's just...
You know, she's vulnerable and sweet and...
You know, now he steps back from that
and they sort of re-bond
but that's the...
To me, a very early hint of...
What's-- Yeah. Of what's to come.
What's to come. What he's to become.
And I loved it. This was shot in L.A., again.
I mean, there's such a New York feel, this shot.
I mean, it looks like dozens of pizza joints that I've been to in New York.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean Sharone...
It's really all color palette.
So Sharone and I wanted this scene to be green,
and the interior studio band stuff to be
you know, red-orange and an outdoor--
Daylight outdoor stuff was supposed-- Was blue, you know.
Work with the L.A. sun, the L.A. sun is not blue.
The L.A. sun is hard and hard-hitting.
It's figuring out-- We were shooting digitally.
We're shooting on the Alexa. I tend to kind of not like digital as much as film.
Where digital is-- Well, I think you're not alone in that
and it's-- Unfortunately, I think the next 50 films you make--
How many times you think you're gonna work on film?
Do it as much as I can. Yeah? Good for you, man.
But, no, I don't have any illusions.
I think where digital works-- And digital is getting better and better.
Right now, I think where digital works best is in controlled color palettes.
So Sharone and I definitely tried to sort of stick to that and hew to that.
There was a lovely beat where one of the guys from the competitive bands
kind of hip checks one of our guys as he's walking by, you know.
I mean, there's-- Such assholes.
It establishes the level of-- It sort of helps show the stakes.
I remember these competitions that I would go to, and they were all--
Wait. Shh, shh. This is my one nice moment in the entire movie, let's--
Where you get her name wrong? Let's listen.
You call her Ava, and then Amy.
Have you noticed? In the final cut?
Oh, yeah, it's right here. Who the hell edited this movie? What--?
[COMMENTATOR CHUCKLES]
Heart's in the right place, for eight seconds.
Eight seconds.
All right, cocksuckers. Oh, lovely. Lovely.
Funny that moment gets a laugh. You going back to being you.
Yeah. Oh, it's in your nature.
And this was-- Was this at the Palace? The Orpheum?
We are in a high school. What's the name of the high school?
It was... Oh, that's right.
This was our last--
Either our last day or second to last day of shooting.
We basically-- We finished our last week with--
First three days were the Orpheum where we did the Carnegie Hall stuff
and then the last two days
at this school, we did DiNella and Overbrook.
All the kind of competition stuff. And we were just--
I remember at this point, we were just banging through stuff.
This was just-- We set up two cameras.
Did one on you, one on the band. That's it.
That was the extent of coverage on this scene.
FLETCHER: Get the fuck out of my sight before I demolish you.
COMMENTARY: That's Michael Cohen, who plays the stagehand.
FLETCHER: I can still fucking see you, Mini-Me!
COMMENTARY: A.k.a. Mini-Me.
Fresh from the pen of Damien Chazelle.
The vast majority of the streaming expletives
are directly off the page.
Again, we did have-- You're trying to absolve yourself.
Damien gave freedom. "I said what he wrote."
And, you know, there's an insult or two that I threw in on my own,
but he has a lovely twisted mind
full of nasty insults. Yeah, I remember Reitman,
one of the first times I met him, going, "Weird, you seem like a nice guy
but you're really an asshole," sort of flipping through the pages.
This piece they're playing-- I'll talk a bit about the music quickly.
This piece is composed and arranged by Tim Simonec,
who's a great composer. He's done a lot of arrangements
for Michael Giacchino and a lot of other film composers
and sort of relished the opportunity to just do original big band pieces.
He did a couple of the pieces that we see them playing
other than "Whiplash" and "Caravan,"
which were licensed.
And Justin Hurwitz, who's a composer I've known since college,
who I kind of do everything with,
did everything else. So other than "Whiplash" and "Caravan,"
every single piece of music you hear in this movie,
even if it's kind of on a radio or something, is original.
And was either written by Tim or Justin, and all the underscore was by Justin.
But it was all about kind of fitting into that soundscape
of later big band jazz.
Right. Sixties, '70s big band jazz.
I mean, to me it's like the closest jazz gets to, like, punk rock.
It's just like really edgy, aggressive,
energetic, angry at times. It's not the jazz
that you casually sip martinis to. And that was-- We kept talking about.
We do not want this jazz to be the jazz you hear
on a talk show or something. This is--
This is not that kind of jazz.
And it's also well integrated, the stuff Justin wrote,
the stuff Tim wrote,
and the Duke Ellington and the Hank Levy, really so.
There's so much a uniform--
A uniformity of style here and this is--
This is Nate's chance to go off. Oh, yeah.
There's also a moment here where-- Wait, wait. Wait for it, wait for it.
FLETCHER: Tanner!
COMMENTARY: I don't know if you heard someone screaming Tanner.
You think it's J.K., it's actually me.
That's my cameo.
Isn't that amazing--? Little bitch.
That my voice is in the movie as you?
Oh, it's your Alfred Hitchcock moment.
Your Mel Brooks moment. But it's vocal.
I'm doing my little-- Yeah, okay.
This was-- This scene was probably the easiest in the entire movie to cut.
There's some scenes that look easy onscreen that were a bitch to cut
and some that look hard that were easy to cut. But this...
A lot of the material-- Still part of those last two days.
A lot of the stuff we weren't doing a lot of takes of. We didn't have time.
Also we developed as a crew-- We developed a kind of groove.
So-- And you guys-- Well, as a cast too, yeah.
Yeah. And so it's just-- We set up the cameras. Again,
this is living in two angles. Right. Nate and Miles were so present.
I love that shot of my giant, bulbous head between the two.
Between the two.
Tom and I would joke-- The editor and I would joke--
It's the two brothers going to the dad and-- It's almost biblical in a sense.
"He did it. "No, he did it." Cain and Abel.
"He started it."
Then you've got the dad who's just having none of it.
But also just...
You can sense Nate in the corner of the frame just being so angry
when Miles kind of takes--
Takes the reins of the scene and says "I'll play it."
Because Nate knows what's coming.
And another line that gets swallowed up
by laughter, is the Sanjay Gupta line.
Ha, ha. That's another favorite of mine.
Yes, Sanjay Gupta.
I remember this was-- You know, we talked a lot about
how to stage the musical performance scenes and everything...
Similarly to how we worked the Nicole storyline from the breakup,
we worked the musical performances
back from the idea of how we were gonna shoot the ending.
The shot we left, I don't know if we go back to it or not, but it's so beautiful.
You have the bass player, the trumpet player are real musicians. You have--
Yeah, look at that. And Nate's face is just like behind the cymbal,
which is so perfect for what's happening to him.
He does not exist. Oh, the poor guy. He's slowly--
And the rest of his trajectory in the movie is him
to just be slowly sucked into the background.
Yeah.
But the idea, yeah, was to shoot this as simply as possible.
There's flourishes like this. This felt very Hitchcock
The Man Who Knew Too Much.
The sort of-- You know, his remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much.
But other than that, very simple sort of coverage, and...
We didn't wanna give away too many bells and whistles
before the Carnegie Hall blowout.
And other things we do in other musical sequences. Big three-person drum-off
would be handheld, run-and-gun, done in that style.
We made sure that the different pieces
weren't jumping on each other's toes
and that we were keeping the grammar of this movie
as constantly developing and not repeating itself.
And right there at the end of that scene
was a brief glimpse-- There was a little speech
that we shot of me. Oh, right.
And it was a glimpse, and there were several throughout the movie.
A glimpse of Fletcher's, you know, kinder, gentler side,
seeing him bonded with his boys
and being actually very kind and generous and even emotional.
That-- That at the end of the day, Damien thought:
"No, we really-- We have to be very, very sparing
with when we allow the audience
to see a side of this character that is human and humane and...
And it was, you know-- Of course, the first thing you see as an actor
when you're watching a movie is what got cut, but--
I was worried when you saw this. You came into the room
when we were close to pics lock, not quite pics lock,
and Tom and I had a moment of looking at each other and going:
"Well, it was nice knowing you. J.K. is coming in."
We did not do a "life imitates art" explosion there.
No, I think-- At the end of the day, you know, obviously the movie soars.
I mean, it starts and it goes, and, you know, it ends with that climax
and I think there was-- You trimmed all of the fat the right way.
I love the--
I love this moment here.
Nicole pasted over Buddy Rich.
Yeah. Yeah, it's like-- What his life is becoming and...
We used to continue that scene and see him actually ignore the text
and go back to listening to Buddy Rich and--
In a way, that was kind of like a hat on a hat, we sort of get the point.
Again, Miles' face sort of tells you everything you need to know.
This scene also used to be longer.
A lot of quieter moments with Miles and other people
used to be slightly longer and slightly more spelled out
but we were able to let them live on his face or Paul's face.
Another great look he gives. There. That look at Paul
is so not full of admiration, you know.
This was the very first scene we shot.
And I remember this was the AD's idea.
Nick Harvard was our AD on this movie.
He's-- If I can thank one person
for enabling this movie to get shot in 19 days, it's him.
Did you hire him just because of his last name?
That, and he's French. Being the same as the alma mater.
It was perfect. Nationalism and alma mater.
Yes. Yes.
And it was his idea to actually begin
with a scene you would normally never begin a shoot with.
These kind of six-person dinner table scenes
are notoriously difficult to shoot. Time sucks.
This was a scene that even in the script
people were suggesting should be cut
because it was gonna take us too much time and--
You have six different actors, coming together for the first time.
We could've saved a lot of trouble by not doing this, let alone doing it first.
But his thinking, which I think was kind of brilliant, was that...
First of all, we don't have a lot of time to shoot this movie.
Worst thing you could do for the pace of this shoot
would be to begin with something business.
We should begin with something that was really juicy, really meaty.
Let the actors and the crew know that we were not gonna--
Sidney Lumet has this great story of similarly shooting movies this way
where he'll begin--
He would begin his shoots with...
FRANK: You got any friends, Andy? No.
COMMENTARY: With setting up a shot that seems like a bit of business shot, simple shot.
He'd say, "Go," they would shoot it. He'd say, "Good, print it. Moving on."
And suddenly, that tells the crew, "I might use the first take."
And it sets the entire tone. Suddenly people are on their toes.
At least for a couple of movies, until that story gets out.
Now you've blown it for future crews.
Well, this is where other directors get to steal the same story.
But this did that for this shoot.
It told everyone we were not gonna-- We're beginning with the meaty stuff.
And it gave Miles something to really dig into as his character off the bat.
Yeah. And it was great.
It was fun shooting. Chris Mulkey at the head of the table.
Yeah, great ca-- I mean, from--
All the way up and down, the casting in this film
between Damien and the casting people
is really impeccable.
I mean, everybody in that studio band and the pro band, you know, these--
These, you know, people who worked, what, four hours?
You know, was their time on the movie.
Yeah, Terri Taylor was our casting director. Also a cast--
She also did the casting on the short.
That's literally-- I mean, I have to say, one of my favorite processes--
One of my favorite processes making a movie is putting the cast together.
When you start to see-- You know, you kind of have your chart on the wall
of the headshots of people as they start to be cast,
it starts off almost bare.
Started off with just you and Miles,
and then you slowly fill it in. Nicole and Melissa and Paul Reiser.
It slowly starts filling in, and by the end you have a wall full of images.
You get to look at it and you see your cast.
Yeah. You see--
You see it in the flesh, and it's really--
It's exciting. It's one of those moments where the movie starts to feel real.
It starts to feel human and not just like kind of cartoon figures
on storyboards or words on a page.
You're in the office.
I mean, you feel like you're bonding with these guys already.
And then we all get to set and-- Yeah.
You know, I'm the worst in the world at learning people's names.
I go to a reunion and I don't know everybody's name.
You're pretty good at it, I think. Yeah.
I mean, I was just-- One of the musicians--
You only called me Miles like 50 times. Like 1000 times.
You two were interchangeable to me.
All the guys in the studio band, because I spent more time with them.
I mean, we had a great time hanging out, and I--
You know, I probably never learned any of their damn names, except Eugene,
because I ended up asking him for the folder in that previous scene.
Yeah. But so many--
So many great shots of these guys who were--
Again, some of whom had a little acting background.
They were all musicians, and they were all just really focused
and dedicated to making this thing work
and they were really a pleasure to work with.
And, yeah, so one of those guys was at a screening we attended last night.
It was like-- Oh, he was?
Yeah. It was like seeing a long-lost pal.
That's cool. That's awesome. Yeah.
And do I remember his name? No, because that's-- I'm an asshole.
Well, doesn't take much for you to play one, then.
No, no, it was not a stretch at all. Ha-ha-ha.
Yeah, but it's--
It is true that-- You know, all the sort of rehearsal scenes,
I mean, they live or die based on those other faces in the frame.
I mean, I knew this movie was gonna be a movie of faces.
Especially for an audience who maybe isn't familiar with the music
or the style of music or what actually the stakes are in a school like this,
it's the faces of those kids that tell you everything.
They manage to, without words--
Again, most of them without any acting experience at all.
--tell you their ambitions, tell you how important this is to them,
tell you how scared they are of you, how driven they are.
Right. It's all...
It was all their real lives, and it was so fun just getting to--
Especially as a former musician, getting to share stories with them.
We'd do a take and a guy would come up and go, "I remember when my--
You know, I had a conductor who did exactly that to me."
Or they'd come and go, "My conductor was much worse.
He actually threw-- He didn't throw a stand at me.
Threw, you know, a blackboard at me." A tuba.
Yeah, a tuba. Yeah, it was just like always one story after another.
And...
This is the office you talked about-- We used to have a whole scene
in this office, earlier on in the movie, that we spent almost a day shooting.
Somehow in our 19-day shoot, we-- Yeah.
We somehow devoted an entire day.
Yes, he said 19 days.
But, again, I guess it's--
I think all this stuff was good for you guys to sort of...
If it doesn't wind up on-screen, it winds up in the characters.
I love how raw all this shooting was. You know, him going into the office
and then, you know, pulling him out like this, it's...
It's reflecting his emotional-- Certainly reflecting his-- Yeah.
And then we go straight to very perfectly composed
perfectly elegant shooting for this scene, which, to my mind,
is Miles delivering a speech that he's delivered to a wall, probably,
and he might as well be delivering it to a wall right now as well.
In terms of how much humanity he has. In terms of how much he cares.
You can even see it in his eyes. His eyes are starting to go dead
and her eyes are the exact opposite. Yeah. Right.
This is where I think it's really a testament to Melissa as an actress
that we were able to just have the scene live on her
and that you just see all these emotions that are going on in her eyes.
And they're so full of emotion, and yet she's not kind of bursting into tears.
This is one of those things where-- It's really subtle.
And I just discovered this a couple of nights ago.
I only met Melissa recently because, well, we have no scenes in the movie.
But she...
She didn't know this scene was gonna live so much on her face, her listening.
Miles was talking, talking, talking...
Damien has the camera on her. That's what matters.
What matters is the effect his words are having on her.
And she, you know, fortunately, like Miles and like everybody,
is one of those actors that never takes a second off.
I mean, a lot of times, maybe more so in television than film,
you know, when it's not your coverage,
you work with a lot of actors that are just kind of taking a break.
And-- Or when it's not--
When you're not talking, when you're listening,
you figure, you know, "Whatever. They're gonna be on the other guy."
But she was so present in the moment and really--
And just working. Just, you know-- Just--
Just giving and working and being a generous actor, and that's--
That's not something you always find.
Yeah, I think that's such-- It sort of hits the nail on the head
in the sense that that scene could have just been about Miles.
But you put the right actor in the role of Nicole
and it becomes about a lot more and--
And then you see half a second there of him like:
"Shit, I was an asshole there," and then, boom, right back to work.
He goes right back to work. This is what it's about and then, boom!
You are seeing someone who, at this point, is deeply, deeply selfish.
So it's behavior that you're, you know, sort of repelled by, and yet--
Selfish but self-loathing at the same time.
Exactly. And what I love about how Miles plays this next shot right here
where he's, you know-- I certainly, when I'd get really pissed--
Pissed at my own lack of abilities playing drums,
I'd curse and scream and yell.
But coming after what he's done to Nicole,
there's a real self-hatred here that I think comes through.
I love, having seen it now three times, when he's screaming "fuck you" there,
you know, it struck me two different ways.
He's screaming "fuck you" at himself
but then he's screaming "fuck you" at Fletcher
like "I can do this, I can do this." Yeah. Yup.
He's screaming "fuck you" at the world, in a sense of the world for judging him.
I think, frankly, he's saying "fuck you" at Damien.
Miles, at that point in the shoot, it's probably exactly right.
Yeah.
There's definitely a big "fuck you" moment coming up
which I guess we'll talk about later when we get into the drummer, three--
The three-person drum-off.
This is the one scene where-- That Damien kept in the movie
where we actually briefly see a human being
inhabiting the skin of Mr. Fletcher.
Again, I love, you know, how much he lingered on Miles
in that shot there, who's, you know--
He's a movie star and I'm a dried-up old character actor.
Part of the reason he left it there.
But all these guys, man. Look at these shots of these guys.
We cast you out of pity. Those guys are musicians, man.
No, that's so true. No, no, no. Exactly, those faces are--
We had so many faces like that, and they were beautifully shot in--
Sharone shot them in these wider angles. When you have these kind--
When you have wide lens close-ups of faces,
to me, it just reminds me of like--
It feels like kind of monumental. It feels like, you know--
If you look at old Soviet movies, Eisenstein movies,
they're all close-ups and wide lenses of faces.
And it makes people feel larger than life.
And... There's an example right there.
And there's Miles, and...
This was actually very, you know, taken from personal experience
in the sense that I remember this conductor scaring me, scaring me,
but every once in a while--
I remember once he gave a speech about a piece of music.
It was not even jazz, it was classical music.
He had started in classical, and he got so emotional.
I remember he talked about someone who--
Whom he had lost, and, again, also it got very emotional.
It'd be these quite emotional moments where you'd see this human being
and you'd feel for them and--
This would be a person you were terrified of the second before
and would become terrified of a second later.
But seeing that kind of dichotomy,
I remember, as a young musician, being so fascinating and weird
and both unsettling and moving.
Yeah, yeah. And both aspects of it can be sort of unsettling, you know.
And, you know, people-- You know, people--
One of the questions people ask actors is, you know, "How do you--?"
"Where does the emotion come from?
How do you cry? How do you scream? How do you laugh?"
You know, and...
And again, I always go back to--
If the writing's really good on the page, acting almost any kind of emotion
is easy for me, for, you know--
Because it's just channeling into what a good writer wrote.
Playing bad writing is what's really, really, really hard. Ha-ha-ha.
And now here, we're see--
This is a shot of guys getting their music out of their folders
but you see on their faces what they've just experienced.
You know, the-- A moment that--
Maybe the one moment they will ever experience like that with the character.
That shot we just saw of Miles is my favorite Miles moment in the movie
in the sense that it tells where this character is.
J.K. has given this long, heartfelt speech about a student dying.
And as soon as he says, "Oh, Connelly, not quite right--"
He doesn't even say Miles.
When he says, "Connelly, not right," you see this smile on Miles' face.
It's not overdone, but it's just enough.
And I remember when Tom and I were editing it, we found that moment.
We hinged this part of the scene on that.
We knew that's what this scene is about.
FLETCHER: Motherfucker!
COMMENTARY: And what's interesting also about this now is you see--
You see these musicians scared. The one person who, to my mind,
is not scared and does not look scared at all right now is Miles.
This is the total-- It's a 180 in a sense from the initial studio band scene
where Miles gets the chair thrown at him, where there's fear and agony.
At this point, I see more anger on his face
and more drive on his face than fear.
And so you see, J.K.--
At this point we've developed Miles into a worthy adversary to you.
Because you see that's not fear. Yeah. Yeah.
FLETCHER: Sorry, guys. Hate to put you through this.
COMMENTARY: You look at the other musicians.
I got to get in my dig about drummers here.
Oh, yeah, which you added, of course. I would never write that.
That's Adrian Baker right there, who just gives a perfect look of:
"Oh, my God. I'm so glad I'm not them."
FLETCHER: Seriously, take 10, 20, a fucking hour.
You hear me, cocksuckers?
COMMENTARY: We have this very sort of subtle drone kind of building up
that Justin composed for this scene.
And I remember scoring this scene was tricky
because, you know, it starts off as not audible at all.
You realize it's building as it builds. It builds into this sort of piano chord
that's repeated over and over as Andrew is drumming.
Which we basically ripped from--
From Don Giovanni, of all things.
Don Giovanni, a little Mozart. Yeah.
You know, also dealing with-- There's a little full circle.
I did Leporello's "Catalog Aria" on my senior recital, from Don Giovanni.
That's actually-- I knew that. Yeah.
It was a little bit of... Ha-ha-ha.
But, like, finding the right kind of-- Oh, and here's my homophobic rant
when I finally get to go in to my:
"I'm gonna, you know, play a prissy homo on this."
Because I got to insult pretty much everything.
You know, I got to be gender biased, anti-Semitic, racist, homophobic--
Anti-Irish. Yeah, anti-everything.
Anti-everything that wasn't Terence Fletcher.
Yeah.
No, he's a man full of hatred.
But it's all about dehumanizing people, and to me it's--
That's-- That's a great image.
Yeah, great shot of Nate. Nate just--
Barely even drumming anymore. It's just becoming machine-like.
FLETCHER: What are you looking for? There's no gold down there.
COMMENTARY: "Pot of gold," that was-- The seat height was you.
[COMMENTATOR CHUCKLES]
FLETCHER: So now you have it, right?
Go.
COMMENTARY: You're not supposed to laugh at your own joke, J.K.
God. I apologize. It's just you and me hanging out.
FLETCHER: Bullshit! Fuck you!
COMMENTARY: So we've got the score slowly building up here
and we've got Miles sort of going off and on and off and on.
But that resolve is just building itself.
All that's really standing in his way now is physical limitations
and he's finally gonna break through those here.
This is sort of the final forging I guess
at which point, I think by the end of this scene, he is...
He is totally on the dark side.
And to-- You know, to kind of achieve the--
Just these incredible faces that Miles makes
that are not really acted, it's really him drumming that fast.
You know what I love too? He's in the black T-shirt.
Or the-- Dark. We talked about--
It's Star Wars that we ripped off.
I remember the-- When I was young watching Star Wars...
Probably the first kind of thing of symbolism I ever noticed in movies
was that Luke Skywalker starts off wearing white
and then starts wearing gray and darker shades
in Empire Strikes Back.
And then by the end he is wearing black, and he becomes Darth Vader.
So this was me doing a lower-budget version of Star Wars
and you're Darth Vader. But the-- I thought I was Yoda.
Well, that too. You look quite a bit like Yoda.
I met Yoda. Did you meet Yoda?
Yeah, I met Yoda at Toronto. That was awesome.
The guy Yoda was sort of modeled after.
So here you're hearing those Don Giovanni chords going
and it's becoming this whole sort of pitch.
I remember the score was too loud, then there wasn't enough.
We had to find balance.
Finding balance that's subliminal underneath the wall of sound.
But also just shooting it--
We shot take after take after take of this in long continuous takes
and we wouldn't-- We would barely cut.
We'd go, I'd yell "reset," go again, I'd yell "reset."
Miles is legitimately exhausted at this point
and so are the other drummers. And so when I was referring to a--
When I was referring to a "fuck you," I think they all hated me at the end.
This was the scene where you told Miles, "You should hold on a bit.
We're gonna do a lot of takes of this." Yeah.
Conserve. It's a marathon. Conserve. This was a marathon scene.
A 19-day marathon. And this was--
This was pretty late at night this shot, as I recall.
Yep. Yep.
I think, again, helps act the fatigue. This is--
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. This is straight out of--
I love how you're still-- Have this fashion sense.
They come out like zombies and you're doing your scarf.
It was cold, man. We were--
I love this shot. This is like-- This is straight out of whatever.
I mean, he looks like he's just gone 15 rounds.
It makes me happy Miles is playing a boxer in his next movie
because certainly this--
He looks like a boxer.
His nose, the scars on his face is just--
Again, there's something so brutally physical about his face, and...
And this is not the same kid. It's just a brutal face.
It's brutal. It's brutal to look at. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's brutal.
Brutal to remember.
So, I mean, you've--
Here's really one of my favorite shots too coming up here.
Wait a minute. Am I wrong?
You must be wrong. Which one? Yeah. That. That.
He's like, "What the fuck is going on there?"
You know, he's got his headset in and he's in the zone, you know.
I remember getting looks when I was on buses trying to learn stuff.
The whole model for this--
Basically, from the bus all the way to the end of this whole sequence,
you know, after he tackles you, was...
It was like a drug sequence to Tom and I.
Cutting it was just, you know-- It's-- In terms of scoring it as well, it's just--
"Build up the pitch inside this guy's head so that it becomes unbearable,
then let's keep going once it's unbearable."
Scenes where you're like, "Okay, it can't get worse.
No, it can get-- Okay, now it's over. Now the movie's over.
Oh, no, the scene is still going."
And there's...
You know, so we ripped off the--
Certainly, the famous, you know, stirring the sauce, getting the coke--
I'm sorry to interrupt, but that shot there of the stick bag on the chair
gets an audible gasp oftentimes. Does it?
I've been to a screening where it did. Yeah.
That's always nice. You always hope that.
You wanna have stuff be as quick as possible for people
so that you don't feel like you're--
You don't wanna sell it too hard, yet you want it to be there so people notice
so there's always a worry in my mind the stick bag is almost not long enough.
Some serious acceleration on that speedometer there.
I mean, for a cheesy rental car. If you're looking out--
If you actually go and see how fast it goes, it's actually impossible.
But again, this whole--
This is where I wanted the movie to tip into fever dream
and sort of become that kind of coke addict
sort of on a bender kind of thing. Yeah.
In many ways, I think this is a drug movie.
It's just the drug is drums.
FLETCHER: I'm warming up the band now.
COMMENTARY: And this was the last scene we shot.
This was our martini scene of the whole shoot, 6 a.m.
And it was Miles, you know, at his height of
like going toe-to-toe with Fletcher for the first time.
Yup.
We shot this entire scene in half an hour.
I remember we had-- It was quick.
We had to get out at 6 a.m. and it was 5:30
or 5:40 when we started shooting.
And we just took the camera, got the two angles.
It was hand-held so it sort of sped us up a bit.
We had to get a few of these angles.
We did a couple takes and that was it.
And that was a wrap on our shooting.
FLETCHER: Try me, you fucking weasel.
COMMENTARY: That felt so good to be done with shooting, jeez.
It felt so good to just scream at Miles.
[COMMENTATORS CHUCKLE]
This felt like a good scene to end on, in a way.
Just kind of, you guys get to just yell at each other
full volume for once.
The one scene where you are yelling at each other.
FLETCHER: --or fucking drop out.
COMMENTARY: Just, again, the dead eyes in Miles, and the sort of--
This resolve in him is just--
FLETCHER: Or we can let Johnny Utah play the part.
COMMENTARY: You know, in a sense, Fletcher is a sort of immovable object.
There's not that much of an arc for Fletcher.
We're learning different shades. Stick with this.
He's like an onion that's unpeeling but he, as a character, is in one spot,
and Miles kind of goes from A to Z.
And if anything, the arc for Fletcher all takes place in the last 10 minutes.
Yes. Yep. Yeah.
How did it feel to only have to act in the last 10 minutes of the movie?
With no words.
This is a brilliant thing that Justin as the composer did too.
Right before the truck comes, he introduces the music
from the date with Nicole, which probably maybe no one recognizes
but it sort of subliminally puts in the opposite emotion
when things were nice, but he turns it into this hellish section.
Well, in that shot, you know, I mean, for, you know,
a movie that's obviously not like an action movie,
but that shot which was, you know,
maybe the only stunt sequence in the film
and, actually, I have no idea how you shot the crash itself.
But it's so effective. I will tell you.
How did you shoot this? How did we shoot it?
It was our second day of shooting.
I actually dropped by this day, just to-- Yes.
When we were doing this is when you dropped by
because you saw Miles all bloodied up.
It's three shots stitched together, but the idea was to make it like one
so you're seeing Miles drive in his car and then we pan down--
We whip pan down to his phone as he puts it down.
There's a hidden cut as we whip pan back up.
We are against green screen
and the truck you're seeing come in a green screen
and then Miles had to kind of--
Doing the green screen part was a little funny.
It was just sort yelling "truck," and Miles just sort of would fling back.
As he flings back towards the camera, there's another hidden cut
thanks to the black of his back
and there we cut to an actual stunt double.
This guy named Brady who was put in a car
that was tilted at sort of 90 degrees and then dropped
and so the last part of that is all real, but it's not Miles.
So-- But it was all about hidden cuts, and also doing it quick enough
and fast enough, and also making sure that the audience is--
The fun of it is that the audience thinks:
"Oh, my God. He's gonna be late."
The truck coming at you is probably not the first thing
that's on your mind when you're watching it.
So you don't have time to really observe the truck
and see whether you think it's realistic or not.
Here we kept going back and forth on how bloodied up can Miles be.
At the end of the day, it was--
Obviously, if I'm looking at him, I'm like, "Wow, this is messed up."
But, you know, I mean, the way Damien puts it together, it's--
You know, it's the moment.
And if I wanna win this competition--
And I always wanna win these competitions, you know.
--I have no choice but to give a downbeat and see what happens.
It is funny, that sort of-- The moment on your face
before you actually kind of give the band the cue.
It shows just how fucked up Fletcher really is because you're--
There's not many people in the audience, we'll see later.
As these competitions are, the audience is basically empty,
and they're somewhat far away, so--
But you can get a full close look at what Miles looks like.
And you can tell he's been through something.
And yet that doesn't stop you. You asshole.
Miles' favorite moment in the film is coming up here,
the moment where he broke two of my ribs
tackling me after I got to slap him around.
He likes to brag about that in interviews and everything.
It's a beauty-- He's such a little brat.
[COMMENTATORS CHUCKLE]
It was fun also using "Caravan" at this point.
You see how sparse the audience is there.
Just a few judges. Very few people.
Maybe one kid's mom and dad who live in Dunellen.
Oh, those poor parents.
We've gone to adjudications like this
for our kids' middle school and high school music groups.
We're always the only parents there, it's a great place to hear your kids play.
It's true, and it's funny how few parents actually go.
I remember the competitions I would go to were not very heavily attended.
Here we go. He's had enough. Miles is so happy.
No!
You could just see the glee in Miles' face, finally.
FLETCHER: Get the fuck off me. ANDREW: Get off me.
COMMENTARY: This was either the last day of shooting or the second to last day of shooting
when we're doing competition stuff, so we got to build up to this moment.
A little blood on my coat there. Not my own.
ANDREW: Piece of shit! Fuck you!
[DOOR OPENS THEN CLOSES]
COMMENTARY: Again, a lot of boxing analogies, and that was all very--
You know, it's very kind of-- Very intentional.
But I love-- Sorry.
I love when we cut to this. I mean, what the--?
Where the hell are we? What--? You know.
There used to be stuff in the script that segued into this a little more.
And I love the abruptness of it. Yeah. No, it just works much better.
And even in the cutting, we played with the rhythms a bit.
Like, his first line is, "How long have you been talking to her?"
It's almost like it's his dad's new girlfriend or something.
And then we find out, no, it's not exactly the case.
Um...
And this actress, April Grace, I saw in Magnolia
where she plays a--
She plays the interviewer who gets under Tom Cruise's skin.
And it's this incredible sort of extended sequence between them.
So in a weird way, this character was sort of somewhat molded
after that interviewer.
There's a way that she has of being extremely gentle and kind
and almost maternal to Miles and yet, she's saying things
that are just as painful to him as anything Fletcher says.
Uh-huh.
What is this?
What a great shot of Captain Fabulous there.
Fantastic. It's Mr. Fantastic. Whatever. He--
It's interesting-- That's a cool shot too.
Who's the kid? The kid not playing the paradiddle?
Not playing a paradiddle. That's Sam.
And we actually shot that.
Paul Reiser shot that footage on our first day.
As we were done with the dinner table scene
we gave Paul Reiser a little video camera
and had Sam get his drum kit out
and Paul Reiser started shooting it. And Paul Reiser was so sweet.
I mean, you hear the stuff off-screen, he's going, "Yeah!"
He's just having such a blast.
And, I mean, I remember--
I remember my dad buying me my first drum kit and everything.
There's something-- It's all the great memories you have as a drummer.
Well, just as a kid too. Yeah, as a kid.
And as something that then becomes such a source of dread for you.
I remember when I was in the thick of competitions.
Just thinking back to my early days as a drummer
and thinking, "Man, it was so innocent. It used to be fun."
I love the way you cut back and forth here too because, you know, I mean,
it feels like it's, you know, it's a linear story, and then we--
The first time we cut away to Miles, I think--
It's like this scene is over.
Right. And then we come back to it
and, you know, let it develop and let the whole thing sink in
like it's sinking into him right now, and then making the decision.
And Miles talked to me about--
You know, when we were doing this scene, his take on this is just--
He's coming into this room after going through this experience
and it's like going into the room and realizing, "Jeez, how crazy was I?"
And yet he's sad to not be that crazy anymore.
That it's like the scene of someone getting better.
Taking the Buddy Rich photo down. I mean, you know--
Yeah, there's such-- There's something so sad about it, you know.
Throwing stuff in the trash.
Suddenly the practice room that used to be his life is now completely empty
and looks like the mental asylum cell that it probably always was.
Where's this? Where did you shoot this?
This was in the basement of the Palace Theatre, I believe.
Everything was at the Palace.
And that little piano tune
was the theme that Justin came up with for the score
which is actually the same melody you hear in the overture,
that big band piece at the end credits,
the same melody that you, J.K., play at the piano.
It's a melody that you hear reprised over and over again.
Pretty much everything is a riff on that melody.
When I first saw that, I thought this was--
I thought it was a cymbal bag over his shoulder
and I thought, wait, what the--? And then I realize it's laundry.
Laundry passing by our superimposed-- Normal, mundane. Right.
That JVC Jazz Festival, that's just a comp that we put in.
They're sitting here listening to--
They were originally watching Charade, which we couldn't get the rights to.
They're watching Easter Parade, Fred Astaire.
They're acting like they're watching Charade.
Yes, it was actually a huge problem.
Their facial expressions did not match at all.
Probably the least happy movie watching thing
I've ever seen in my life.
This is a beautiful little, you know, six-second scene there too,
you know, such a nice father-son dynamic, you know.
It's where you rely on good actors to be able to say a lot with a little.
Also, just the sadness of this apartment.
Used to have establishing stuff with this apartment,
that this was an apartment that, you know, Miles is no longer living.
He's kicked out of Schaffer so he's not living on campus.
He's not living at home with his dad.
His dad helped sort of find him a little kind of one bedroom in the city
but it's completely bare, it's white walls, it's just--
Going back to the drug metaphor,
this was very much about sort of-- It's the addict trying to--
The former addict-- You're always an addict.
But the recovering addict trying to-- Yellow cab.
Oh, my God, how did we get the--?
Yeah. No, no. We had a PA standing on the corner.
Waiting for the yellow cab? Shot in L.A.
And there were two things that sell that scene for New York City.
One is Damien starting out on the kid with the pickle barrels playing.
And the second one is that we actually got a yellow cab going--
I never noticed that cab. Amazing. Who directed this movie, man?
Oh, not me. Reitman. Good Lord.
Oh, yeah. He's good. Yeah.
Speaking of good, man. These three guys--
I mean, this was such a pleasure because I don't really--
I mean, I'm really playing the piano here, but I don't--
I'm not a piano player, I had to practice that--
This very simple, very beautiful Justin Hurwitz jazz ballad.
But I had to practice it a lot. And there were brief moments
where I settled with Foo Foo and these guys here.
Yeah, Foo Foo the drummer.
These guys-- Such a character. He's great.
Such a pleasure.
Again, they're as authentic as you get. These guys have played with everyone.
The guy in the foreground, the first time Miles walked in, was Cal
who winds up playing in the jazz-- In the pro band later.
He'll be our first saxophone.
Another funny thing about this jazz club is that we are actually outside.
This is the kind of outer arcade of the Palace Theatre.
And Melanie Jones, our production designer,
turned it into a jazz club.
You can see how much he loves me there.
That's just pure love. Love, you think so?
I think it's coming from Miles to J.K.
as much as from Andrew to Fletcher. It's definitely actor to actor, I think.
Or maybe he was looking in a mirror for that shot.
I remember I wrote this as basically saying
that he sees Fletcher playing like--
You know, handling the piano like a newborn baby
with just such, you know, just-- That there's just such a del--
This delicate touch that you have with the keys
that is so, so opposite to how you are with your players normally.
Yeah, the whole scene is such a--
You know, and even the astute observer will see
that this is the only scene in the movie
where I'm wearing something different
and just look a little more relaxed and human.
A little more like a normal guy.
FLETCHER: I don't know if you heard. Uh...
I'm not at Shaffer anymore.
COMMENTARY: And this, you know, as usual with the--
I mean, this is a really long scene where we learn a lot.
And, of course, it was longer on paper, you know.
There was a significant portion that was cut,
and some of which was my own bullshit rant that I went on.
You know, again, Damien, you know, we did what was written
and then we also, you know, had the freedom
to throw stuff in there too, so I was adding my own metaphors
about the, you know--
About the willingness of people to settle for mediocrity
and about how important I thought it was to battle against that.
And this is a philosophy, honestly, that I'm espousing here
that Fletcher is espousing here that I completely understand
and almost 100 percent agree with.
Obviously, it's the method
that is a little questionable.
What's questionable about the method?
Well, I thought Fletcher was the hero of the movie.
I did too, but I've been talking to Miles too much.
I guess, yeah, you're right.
No, don't talk to Miles, he's--
Talking to Miles is okay, it's listening to Miles where you get in trouble.
Just don't believe anything he says.
Thanks for the reminder. Yeah.
No, for sure.
I remember Helen Estabrook was one of the producers on this movie--
And she was the voice of all that is right and good on the set
and providing wisdom and-- Yes.
She was the Yoda of the movie, actually. She's young and lovely.
She provided some Yoda-like wisdom on this scene.
Because, I remember, she was there for every day of shooting.
There was one scene that she wasn't able to--
I think she had to put out a fire
and she, you know, gave me one sort of word of advice
in terms of Miles in this scene.
And it was just one sentence, it was, "Finally, someone gets it."
And that's Miles in the scene if you actually look at it.
And that's what's twisted and sad about it and everything
is that he's trying to adjust to, quote-unquote, "sober living"
and in that sense, J.K. is the last person that you wanna run into
but you were saying this--
You're saying all the things that he wishes his family would say.
The flip side of the family dinner.
This is, finally, the person who actually completely sees eye-to-eye with him
and understands him. Right, all the stuff that he was trying
to live up to before and gave up on.
Or did he?
Well, yeah.
God, I'm a handsome man.
Oh, I could look at myself all day. Ha-ha-ha.
You know, Helen Estabrook-- Me too, J.K. In fact, Tom and I did.
Yes, I know. Grueling. Many days.
Helen was an assistant in my agent's office,
like, whatever, seven years ago or eight years ago. It's--
It's not even that long probably.
You know, her rise to prominence is pretty meteoric.
In fact, it's Andrew Neiman-like.
Well, maybe without the level of drive
but, certainly, with the level of-- Ha, ha. Bloody hands.
Just the level of talent and understanding and intellect, you know.
All right, enough. Helen's nice. We like Helen.
Okay, Helen, are you listening? You happy now?
That's it, we're done. Okay. Moving on.
Back to us, so...
FLETCHER: The truth is, Andrew...
I never really had a Charlie Parker.
COMMENTARY: I remember shooting this, you know, there's something also about--
I think you genuinely--
Looking back on the scene, there's a lot of manipulation going on
and that's part of the fun of it, I guess, is--
To what extent are you saying your mind
and to what extent are you luring the lamb back in?
Well, I don't think the two were mutually exclusive.
Oh, yeah, exactly. Exactly.
And I think you do genuinely wish that you had found your Charlie Parker.
And you do genuinely feel that you didn't. Maybe Sean Casey got close.
Maybe other people got close, but you never found your Charlie Parker.
And you still hold out hope. I mean, that's the thing.
From the very first moment Fletcher sees Andrew playing the kit
in the very first scene,
he is maybe already plotting out the end of the movie in his mind.
It takes a different road than he anticipated but, I think, you--
What makes Fletcher brilliant is that unlike anyone else in the world,
he's able to see Andrew play for a couple seconds
and see, A, he has the potential to go the distance
and, B, he has the resilience to go the distance.
That he might seem like the shy, kind of wimpy kid,
but deep down he's gonna take it.
I hope he has the resilience and if he doesn't, fuck it.
I'll chew him up and spit him out.
And if he does not have the resilience, I'll move on.
I mean-- Again, unconcerned with the human collateral damage.
Exactly. That's exactly your--
Your philosophy is that, you know-- You know what? If it takes--
If I have a room full of 10 kids--
It's why you don't care about discouraging people.
If I have 10 kids, I use my methods, they discourage nine out of 10 of them.
If they lead to one out of 10 of them becoming great, then it was worth it.
It's like the twisted version
of Rilke, The Letters to a Young Poet. Did you ever read that?
Did I read something you've never read?
Oh, I finally found something.
Rainer Maria Rilke, you know, the great poet who--
You know, very romantic 19th century.
And there was a young--
Struggling young man who wrote him letters
about his struggles with life and love and just his existential angst
and his, you know, wanting to express it and be a poet
and Rilke tries to discourage him, and says:
"You know, if there is anything else in life that you could possibly do
that you think makes you happy, do that.
And only if there truly is not, should you be a poet."
Mm-hm. I think Andrew would fall into that category.
I love this scene too because it's part of that anachronism
that you were establishing throughout the movie.
You know, this-- I mean, in real life, most kids now,
this is a text message, this is an e-mail or something
but the fact that he has this awkward phone call with her and the realization--
He probably wishes it were a text message
probably right about now. Ha-ha-ha.
This was actually all done, you know, raw, so to speak live.
This is Nicole actually-- Melissa actually on the phone.
A beautiful way to shoot these scenes.
And it's the second time in my life.
The first time actually was a movie with Brad Pitt called The Mexican.
You're such a name-dropper. God.
And I had phone conversations with him.
And the first-- The director called me at home, Gore Verbinski,
and asked me if I would--
They were shooting in Mexico, I was in New York.
Asked if I would get on the phone with Brad.
And it was some weird time of day, and I thought, "Absolutely."
So the first thing I did in that movie was actually being an offstage
phone voice for Brad for a scene where Brad's at the payphone
and we played the scene together.
And then, you know, six weeks later, or whatever it was,
I was doing my end of the phone call, we're shooting in--
I think we were down in Mexico still, maybe back up in L.A.
And sure enough, there's Brad in the next room, on a phone.
He didn't have to be there
but he showed up to do the other half of the phone call.
And it really makes a difference. It does.
People just so rarely take that extra step.
I love that shot of him looking, boom, Carnegie Hall.
Those who don't know, that's Carnegie Hall.
And Damien nicely framed out most of the--
There was scaffolding up at Carnegie Hall.
I actually-- I had told him when we were--
When we finally decided we had $75 to go to New York,
I told Damien, "I know we're doing all of these Carnegie Hall exteriors
but there's scaffolding up at Carnegie Hall
so you can't see that it says 'Carnegie Hall."'
And he was like, "Do you know if it's still up?"
I'd been in New York a month or two before.
And I called a friend of mine who lives at 59th and 7th, and I said--
And he literally looked out his window
and could see that the scaffolding was still up.
I remember being worried, but--
I forget that there's scaffolding on it now when I see those shots.
But we almost scrapped the Carnegie Hall shot.
When I first heard scaffolding,
I thought it was all the way up. All the way.
You guys are such overreactors.
We just didn't know what an artist you are.
This-- I remember this speech.
First time you saw a cut, the speech had been cut.
And, again, this is such a great example.
It's like the scene living on Melissa's face.
I mean, it's me going on: Blah, blah, blah.
The important thing in that moment It's Miles.
is the impact that it's having on Andrew,
and his mindset going into this. Yup.
And then my second favorite shot is we're about to go by here with--
And as I've said, established.
I don't remember anybody's name.
It's Fletcher having his jacket put on. That's one of our wardrobe assistants.
It, to me, is maybe the single funniest shot in the movie.
You were trying to make some actual point there.
An actual point, not just--
We got 10 minutes to talk now.
We're about to have a drum solo for 10 minutes
so we could give our biographies.
Yeah. Drum solos, as boring as you get.
That speech you were giving,
I remember you recommended that we put it back in.
Normally, when an actor recommends you put back in an actor's speech,
normally, you nod, politely say "yes," and then do the opposite.
But, in that case it actually--
It's all about setting the stage for this.
Yeah, I thought it really-- No, you absolutely need it.
And then you lead up to this moment, which is sort of--
Which was kind of really fun to shoot.
If you recall that shot of you, we shot without cutting about 10 times
you coming up to Miles saying different iterations of--
I thought there were a couple that were better. I'd like to talk about that.
Okay, yeah. Well, talk to Reitman. Ha-ha-ha.
FLETCHER: We're very excited to be here kicking off the JVC Festival...
COMMENTARY: That's such a great shot.
Oh, shit. Poor Miles. I love that guy too.
It's-- Again, the athlete comp-- Some of these trumpeter--
As soon as we hear J.K., you see that trumpeter kind of tilt his head back.
As a guy about to go into boxing, and Miles is looking. It's like--
It's like...
Looking at the guys who are about to pummel him to the ground.
All this stuff was shot in the Orpheum Theatre
in downtown L.A.-- Doubling for Carnegie.
And, you know, it's tough.
We had extras to go into these seats
for only six hours.
So we had to shoot everything in that direction
that would actually see extras, in six hours.
And we didn't have enough extras to fill the space
so we used a lot of smoke
which is stuff I wanted to use, anyway.
I just love what smoke does. Helps soften the sharp edges of digital.
Also for something like this, gives it that kind of--
That boxing, sort of, you know, trial by fire, kind of violent sort of feel.
Especially if it's subtle enough to find that level.
There was a guy on--
An F/X guy on Terminator that had a T-shirt on the back that said
in increasingly large print, "more smoke."
"More smoke. More smoke. More smoke.
Too much smoke."
That is pretty much the arc.
There were some shots where some of the producers
would be behind the monitor going, "What is with all the smoke?
Who allowed this?"
But I also, you know, tried out the age-old, kind of...
The age-old reasoning that it doesn't, you know--
That at a certain point, that kind of realism, you have to--
It's more about emotional than physical realism.
And that this is what it feels like to Andrew.
And that's the Tim Simonec tune, by the way, "Upswinging," which I did...
One of the things Damien did not cut was me giving Tim a little shout-out.
We didn't get Justin Hurwitz' name into the movie
but Tim Simonec is a better jazz name than Justin Hurwitz.
Justin Hurwitz is in the movie. His name's Jackie Hill.
Because when Andrew says:
"This is 'When I Wake' by Jackie Hill, 1938 at the--
We intentionally did that to J.H.
You also cut my friend Paul Lange's name from the movie, you bastard.
He was the guy that I wrote on the record label.
Believe me, I remember.
Paul, this is for you. We'll talk later. Is this really the time for this?
Yeah. And what was the name of the song?
The song that ends up being the recur--
You know, the thing that I play in the jazz club.
Paul Lange-- "It Was You." "It Was You."
I was allowed to both name the song
and the artist who recorded it in 1930. Whatever.
"It Was You." It was perfect given that that's your little refrain at the end.
Oh, there are levels, baby. I'm--
I'm a serious onion.
A serious onion. A lot going on.
And this is another scene that was--
There was an extended sequence here
of Paul fighting through security to get backstage
and all sorts of, like, realistic stuff, and a significant amount of dialogue.
There's a lot of cheating going on in the cutting here
because it used to be, right here, security guards come in now.
Miles looks at the security guards. That's who he was looking at there.
Security guards grab him, ask Miles, "Know this person?" Miles says, "No."
It was a whole two-page long dialogue
where Miles, Andrew, actually, you know, verbally denies his father.
And it was just over the top.
It didn't work in the context, though everyone did a wonderful job.
Ends up being totally enough that he leaves him there.
Right. Yep. And...
You know, again, less is more in that case.
And, again, my best side there we just saw.
Also him interrupting you was also not originally planned that way.
It used to be that you finished giving--
Introducing a song, and then Andrew--
Once you finished, Andrew started playing as background and you turned.
That was actually Couper's idea--
Couper Samuelson's, a producer's idea to heighten the stakes
by having Andrew literally interrupt you mid-sentence
which is so much better.
And the song that I'm introducing is "Caravan."
And it actually does begin with a brief drum solo
and then brings in the bass and the piano, you know.
So, you know, he did interrupt me
but it's not like he's going totally off the reservation.
I mean, he's playing the tune that's next up.
He just disrespected me by jumping in there.
That's how you think it is. Right? Wrong?
That was part of the change we made, you're introducing like:
"Now we're gonna slow down a little bit." In the script, it was different.
I'm introducing "Caravan." I'm introducing Duke Ellington.
If he hadn't cut me, I was about to say:
"Most of you all have heard of a cat named Duke Ellington."
That's what was in the script.
In ADR, we added in like: "We're gonna slow it down a little bit."
Get rid of the Duke Ellington part, suggest you are about to queue off.
We don't know, maybe you are about to queue off a ballad.
And so that he's truly--
You manipulative mother-- Just truly an asshole.
But I like that you think you had even more control.
Ha-ha-ha. I have no illusion, I'm an actor.
I have no illusion of any control over anything.
We do our thing and then you bastards cut it to shreds.
Just show some gratitude, J.K., please.
Cal with the glasses. Love that look. Yes, Cal.
Again, all these guys. There's Marcus Henderson on the bass.
Just all these guys are real and just great.
I mean, shooting this was both very stressful and a lot of fun.
We were on the stage for three days.
That included the "Upswinging" stuff
this, the solo, the stuff from the green room.
So it included a lot of stuff, so we had to kind of really run like mad.
But I remember when Tom--
What was this guy's name? Remember names?
I don't know. This guy was great, the trombone player.
Oh, the trom-- Yeah. That was great.
Again, another pro player. Yeah, yeah.
I mean, he could play the-- Sweetened, I assume, in the final mix
but this guy could play this whole solo.
I mean, this-- Yeah.
These guys could play this stuff.
Most of what you're hearing was pre-recorded
at the Firehouse, this great recording studio in Pasadena.
Which you came and visited. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
To sort of see what we were putting on the mic.
I was already worried about my little ditty in the club too.
I wanted to be a part of recording that, make sure the piano--
We didn't make it too hard? Sweetening wasn't too sweet.
[COMMENTATORS CHUCKLE]
And here is Fletcher's arc.
Of course there's all this ambiguity, to a sense of
to what extent did Fletcher plan for Andrew to take the reins?
Yeah, again, to me, it felt like--
This is a question that comes up often in, like, Q&As.
Was it manipulation? Was it this? Was it that?
To me, it was a win-win, you know.
I either humiliate this kid Yup.
and beat him into the ground, never to rise again
and that's fine, that's revenge, and that's satisfying, and that's okay.
But, you know, if he is able to actually get up off the mat,
then maybe I finally got my Charlie Parker.
Love this guy-- The looks of all these guys.
You know, I mean, the looks and the fact that--
That's the guy that was at the screening.
Oh, really? Yeah.
Miles loves to make fun of you here. All these guys-- Yeah.
Well, this is like the most animated and goofy we actually see Fletcher
in the movie, just digging this tune.
And, you know, the whip pans.
Yeah, Elan, the gaffer--
One of the gaffers took a little behind-the-scenes shot of me.
I was behind the camera operator
tapping his shoulder to queue him when to whip pan.
Yeah. I remember that. One of the few names I remember.
Because it was so frequent, they decided it looked like I was a--
Like, what do you call it, like a rattlesnake.
Like a snake going in for the--
You're like a pestering 4-year-old. I guess my-- Or like a pestering--
Yeah, just kind of going: Eh, eh, eh, eh.
Then the camera would just whip back and forth.
It's funny to look at from the behind-the-scenes vantage point.
And then...
Maybe that will be on the extras too. Yeah.
One can only hope.
That's-- I love the whole--
"Kinetic" is a word that people often use,
you know, regarding the whole movie, really.
And it begins with that opening-- The opening sequence--
Not the very opening, but the scenes of Miles on the streets of New York
and the way that's cut.
But it really culminates here in the solo and shots like those.
The quick shot of the three different drum heads cutting back to Miles.
Again, I just have to sort of give the credit again to Sharone, the DP,
and Tom Cross, the editor, certainly cutting this whole sequence.
Tom and I, we just cut the sequence during a course of sleepless nights.
Kind of working into--
Working into 6 a.m. and to 7 a.m.
Yeah, not only was this film shot in 19 days
but Damien and Tom had less than 10 weeks
to completely cut it together
so that they could get under the wire for Sundance.
I remember one of the-- So we could go win a bunch of awards.
One of the first notes we got on the scene--
You'll like this, J.K.
It's a very Fletcher note.
--was...
Was:
"He's good at drums, we get it."
[COMMENTATOR CHUCKLES]
Sort of, "Cut the scene by half."
To be fair, the scene was a little longer.
We did make some music edits.
But it is one of those scenes where-- It's one of the arguments early on
where you kind of--
I say "less is more" a lot. In this scene, I think more is more.
I think this is one of those scenes where you have to go past the point
where a normal movie showing a good solo would go.
This is one of those scenes where you understand
why people were not throwing millions of dollars to make this movie.
"The movie ends with a 10-minute drum solo?
Yeah, okay. Next."
Love this shot. Love this shot of Paul.
So beautiful. God, it just makes you cry.
Yeah, that's Paul. Such a beautiful dad moment there.
Watching his son, you know, the monster that has been created
and all the levels that that makes him feel.
That was cool too. And here's the replacement dad.
Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He comes in and
picks Miles up when he falls.
Right. Miles hits the ride so hard, that I have to go there and readjust it.
Is that the ride or the crash? That was a crash.
I'm glad you learned nothing. I don't have to play the fucking drums.
And here, one other funny kind of film nerd thing that I liked doing here
was we wind up ending the movie
with exactly the same audio that we begin it with.
The single-stroke roll, building into a-- Which is about to start now.
Building into a sustained buzz. It's a very Buddy Rich trick.
Buddy Rich used it to end a lot of his solos.
And as an aspiring drummer and Buddy Rich worshipper myself,
I tried it many times, and it's really hard.
It's not a double-stroke roll, it's a single-stroke roll
which is harder to achieve that buzz with
and very few people can actually do it the way Buddy did.
It's a drummers' pissing contest, how well you can do that kind of roll.
So it's your film nerd and your music nerd.
And my drum nerd. Drum nerd.
It's me geeking out in all ways in one.
Look at that little flicker you do with your hand, so kind of
somewhat sexual.
Yeah, there was-- You know, people occasionally comment on the whole:
Is there an undercurrent of homoeroticism here or, you know--?
Going along with the homophobia, you know, is that what that's all about?
And, again, it was never-- It was never conscious on my part
but it's totally legitimate, yeah, as the way people perceive it.
This is--
I remember my conductor--
You know, certainly it is not usual
for conductors to conduct drum solos, but that's part of what's fun about this.
My conductor helped me construct some of my drum solos.
He would tell me when to go to cymbals.
He would do basically the same kind of hand motions that you do, and--
So I remember the moments of joy I had as a drummer were during drum solos.
I'd feel fear all the time, but I was actually good
at some of these climactic drum solos and the wall of cymbals sort of tricks.
You're gonna end this talking about what a good drummer you are? Really?
Well, no. I mean, yes. Yes, actually. Can we talk more about that?
Let's talk more about Miles.
Look at this. Here's my smile. You can see it in my eyes.
Yeah, bitch.
We don't even need your lips to know you're smiling.
That's how ridiculous your face is.
We always knew the movie would end with this shot.
So it's kind of fun--
That's probably the one part of the initial cut of the movie
that did not change, was it ended with that shot.
And I mean, the movie ends with, you know--
How many movies really end with the climax?
It's such a beautiful ending.
Oh, Teller. Miles Teller gets top bill? What the--?
I'm out. I was not aware of that.
I was not aware. Okay. Sure.
Please, J.K., I was not aware. Ha, ha.
And actually we just talked about this in the short.
Jason came up with this analogy when we were cutting the short.
And Tom and I wound up using it as a refrain when cutting this
was that, you know how Chris Rock will finish a set with a mic drop
and then we just refer to it, like, mic drop.
We needed the film equivalent of a mic drop sort of moment.
And the whole idea behind that is you leave them wanting more.
There's this sort of foolish notion I think in a lot of films
that you have to have a dénouement,
Yeah. and you don't.
Most of the time you don't.
It's one of those things, you go to a studio, "Where's the dénouement?"
And you go, "There isn't one." And they go, "All right, next."
They've gone "next" when you told them it's about a drummer.
Yeah, if you managed to get that far. If you managed to get that far.
Have you seen Death Proof?
I haven't seen anything.
Okay. Were the Detroit Tigers involved?
No, Kurt Russell was involved. Oh, I like him. His dad played baseball.
Death Proof is one of my favorite Tarantino movies
that literally ends with--
It ends with, like, a 15-minute car chase that's just incredible.
And as soon as the car chase is over, boom, it cuts to the credits.
I remember seeing it in college.
And that's subconsciously probably where this ending came from.
Just wanting to end the movie with that kind of raw
sort of just, you know, smack-you-in-the-gut kind of volition.
You're giving away all the shit you stole.
People think you're a creative genius. It's just all stolen.
There's no such thing as originality.
You always-- You're always stealing.
Actually, I do think that. Think-- I think--
I try to just kind of put every movie I love into the stuff I do.
But I remember-- The fun thing about ending the movie this way,
ending the movie with a drum solo or with a jazz concert...
Tom and I would talk about, like, how, you know, it's--
You're trying to do the best version of whatever you're doing.
You're trying to make the definitive.
If you're gonna do a car chase,
good luck making the greatest car chase ever.
If you're gonna do a boxing match, good luck topping Raging Bull.
There's these sequences where it's like, "Well, you have fun with that.
Good luck topping that." And--
But, lucky for me,
there's not that many extended drum solos on film, in fiction film.
So-- Short of a Woodstock documentary.
That's what I do. I try to pick something where the standards are low.
Or non-existent. Or non-existent.
So it's really easy to just make the best one.
Wow, good call. Yup.
Nicely done. Yup. It's all very pragmatic.
I wanted to make a movie about a boxer
but I watched Raging Bull and decided, "It's gonna be too hard."
That's okay. Miles is doing it. Yeah.
And here we are--
The first time I saw the film was at Cannes, just to place drop a bit,
because I didn't get to go to Sundance where it premiered
because I was too busy working for a living.
But the audience at Cannes, they're just hitting their stride
as they applaud at this point in the credits.
And Damien and I are standing there, you know, and there's--
They got spotlights on us, and we're not up on stage.
We're just in the middle of the orchestra where we saw the film from.
It was incredibly awkward.
And we stood up and we took a bow and we sat down
and we stood up and we hugged each other
and we stood there and we acknowledged the applause
and we sat-- And I--
It was unlike anything I, certainly, have ever experienced.
And people who had been at Cannes for years and years said the same thing.
The audience at Cannes just went berserk
and the response was really, really something wonderful.
I love that we got the special thanks there to Hank Levy Jazz and the--
Oh, yeah. I should give a shout-out to the actual Hank Levy estate.
Stewart Levy who allowed us to use not only the music
but, you know, shit, call the movie Whiplash.
Yeah. That's all--
This was a chart I played in high school and that meant a lot.
That and "Caravan" were two licensed charts that we built the movie around.
We got to meet them in New York. They came to the screening.
Yeah, you met them there, right? The whole fam-- I had met Stewart earlier.
I'm always a bit ahead of the curve.
I know. You're way ahead of me. Yeah, yeah.
Miles is as well.
Miles who? Teller.
Huh. I'm unfamiliar with him. Yeah.
No, just focus on Miles Davis.
I assume that's who we were talking about.
Miles Teller, who is he again?
Miles Teller-- He was involved in the filming?
He's your sidekick in the film, do you remember?
Sort of mere-- Oh, my little bitch.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, he was all right.
Yup. We're out.