Damien Chazelle’s first trip to the cinema and wanting to be Walt Disney
Back in 2017, Damien Chazelle made Academy Award history when he won the ‘Best Director’ prize for his 2016 film La La Land. He became the young person to earn such recognition at the age of just 32, while the film itself was adorned with a further five awards on the night of the ceremony.
Elsewhere, Chazelle’s other films include the critically admired Whiplash, which told of a young drummer in a prestigious music school being tutored under a brutal teacher. He also earned acclaim for the recent project Babylon, which charted the transition in Hollywood from silent films to the “talkies”.
When asked what his first memories of homelife were, having been raised in New Jersey, on This Cultural Life, Chazelle responded: “Homelife, I know it sounds almost trite, but it is pretty hard to separate from movies and the first experience of watching movies, first at home and then I vividly remember the first time I went to a movie theatre.”
Chazelle went on to explain about that first fateful trip to the cinema. “I don’t know what age I was; I just have this memory engraved in my mind of going there with my mom,” he said. “It was Peter Pan, I think, a reissue of some sort playing, and I just remember Captain Hook’s face looking bigger than anything I’d ever seen.”
He added, “You know, just this sort of giant face, overwhelming my field of vision, with his big nose and the moustache. I think I was both horrified and entranced at the same time, and then it sort of began. A lifelong love affair.”
That’s when Chazelle fell in love with watching films, but how about the moment he knew he wanted to make them? “I don’t remember ever not wanting to make movies,” the director admitted, “It’s been a mono-maniacal existence. From day one, I wanted to be Walt Disney. That was the first name I became familiar with. I don’t know what he did, how he did it, but that’s what I wanted to do.”
Chazelle then noted the kind of activities he would get up to as a kid in preparation for his future career in the film industry. “I would try to draw my own versions and steal old VHS bindings, the packages for VHS tapes off the rack, and you could pull out the paper,” he said. “I would draw my own movie covers. ‘Damien Chazelle presents’. I already had a very high opinion of myself, I guess. I would write my own critic pull quotes, ‘The greatest thing ever’. ‘Another masterpiece by Damien Chazelle’.”
