February 9, 2015

In an excruciating sequence in writer-director Damien Chazelle’s “Whiplash,” 19-year-old Andrew Neyman (Miles Teller), an ambitious young drummer, frenetically performs for his sadistically abusive teacher. Andrew’s hands are bleeding, his sweat flying from every pore, as the instructor, Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons) throws pieces of the drum kit across the room and screams into Andrew’s face:  “You cocks—-r! … You worthless Hymie f–k!”

Fletcher’s method is to ferociously berate his musicians in the hope that at least one of them might be pushed to achieve greatness under the pressure — no matter the collateral damage that ensues as the vast majority of his young charges are spiritually destroyed along the way. His arsenal includes insults that are homophobic, misogynistic, ethnic, and, in Andrew’s case, anti-Semitic, even though no other mention of the drummer’s heritage occurs throughout the film (one hint is that his father is portrayed by the recognizably Jewish actor Paul Reiser). Chazelle said he made the character nominally Jewish in honor of the many Jewish jazz legends, such as bandleader Benny Goodman and drummer Buddy Rich.

“But I wanted to keep Andrew’s Jewishness very subtle, so that the only person who would remark on it would be Fletcher,” Chazelle, 30, said recently during an interview at a coffee bar near his home in Venice. “Fletcher is operating from a playbook of hatred to essentially break down the players in his band room.  And, beyond that, I wanted to make it clear that he is an equal-opportunity offender. The only demographic he does not explicitly go after is the demographic he owes his music to, which would be African-American.”

“Whiplash” is Chazelle’s second feature film, adapted from a short of the same name that won the 2013 award in its category at the Sundance Film Festival. The full-length version went on to win the grand jury prize at Sundance the following year, and now the drama has been nominated for five Academy Awards, including best picture and an adapted screenplay nod for Chazelle. The writer-director’s Hollywood dance card also is now full, with new projects in the works including an MGM-style musical, “La La Land,” starring Teller and Emma Watson.

Despite his wunderkind status, Chazelle in person is preternaturally boyish, adorably awkward and slightly self-deprecating, wearing jeans and a T-shirt and sporting bitten fingernails. 

He laughed as he described what he called “my very weird religious upbringing” in Princeton, N.J. Both of Chazelle’s parents are Catholic, however when they grew dissatisfied with his education at a conservative church Sunday school, they enrolled him in Hebrew school at a liberal synagogue instead.  Over the next four years, Chazelle said, “I had that period of my life where I was very, very into Hebrew and the Old Testament, and then I went with my class to Israel when we were in the sixth grade. I don’t think they even knew I wasn’t Jewish; I was, like, ‘passing,’ ” he added with another laugh. And then Chazelle promptly launched into the first stanza of a Hebrew prayer to demonstrate his prowess with the language, apologizing when he forgot the rest of the words.

It was the filmmaker’s own traumatic experience as a drummer in the award-winning, competitive Princeton High School jazz band that inspired “Whiplash,” he said. “My overall emotion during those years was just fear,” he recalled.  “My teacher scared the hell out of me. He would scream and curse and insult people, or would kick musicians out of the band. Even the looks he would give us, and the constant starting and stopping or searching out people who were out of tune. I remember literally having to play just this one downbeat over and over again for about 20 minutes in front of the entire band. … And when I saw the [war movie] ‘Full Metal Jacket,’ I thought, ‘My God, someone put my band experience on film.’ ”

Desperate to earn his teacher’s approval, Chazelle would lock himself in his basement, practicing for six to eight hours a day. His hands constantly bled and blistered: “I’d have to run water over them and the blood would just stain my drumsticks,” Chazelle said. “I’d be wrapping Band-Aids over my hands and then Band-Aids over the Band-Aids.”

His anxiety was so acute that he lost sleep, suffered from nausea and was unable to eat before rehearsals. “I was utterly obsessed with jazz drumming for four years; it was both joy and agony, and I wanted to tap into that mindset for the film.”

Chazelle eventually quit music to take up film at Harvard University, and he didn’t start writing “Whiplash” until a decade after his fraught high school experience. He said his motivation was neither catharsis nor revenge — his teacher had died years before — but rather his vexation with another film project. That one was a complex, ambitious screenplay he thought he had “nailed,” but “people were telling me, ‘Yeah, this isn’t so great,’ ” he recalled.  “And I was so thrown for a loop, so unmoored and depressed that I thought, I’m just going to write something lean and mean, small and focused. I’m going to write about what happened to me — it’s going to be about a jazz drummer who wants to be great and his terrifying teacher. I banged out a rough first draft in 10 days, very much in the spirit of frustration.”

The character of Fletcher in “Whiplash” is far more extreme than Chazelle’s own late teacher: “I wanted there to be certain moral dilemmas in the script, but I didn’t want one of those dilemmas to be, ‘Is this guy abusive?’ I wanted to make it very clear from the beginning that he was,” Chazelle said. 

“The ethical question becomes:  Do Fletcher’s goals justify his means? And at what cost [is] greatness? I wanted the movie to be very blatant about what those costs are, so I deliberately made it a very cruel film.”

Chazelle’s only note to Simmons — who is nominated in the best supporting actor category — was, “When he screams and explodes, it had to be almost like he was physically transforming into a monster, a gargoyle, a beast or demon,” the filmmaker said. “I didn’t want to see a human being in those moments.”

For the fictional Andrew Neyman, the obsession with becoming one of the jazz greats leads him to becoming essentially another Fletcher, and behaving in a callous and unforgivably brutal manner with his father and would-be girlfriend.

“I’ve always felt that the movie’s ending is the saddest ‘happy’ ending ever,” Chazelle said. “You’ve got this seeming victory in terms of Andrew’s triumphant jazz solo at [Carnegie Hall], but really you are witnessing the death of a soul, someone truly going to the dark side. He’s a person who might eventually leave an impact [musically], but whom I imagine might die at 34 of a drug overdose.

During the ultimately tortuously complex solo drum performance, the character grimaces as all his veins appear to pop; essentially he looks like he is on the verge of a heart attack. “I was really trying to push it to that ‘Red Shoes’ kind of place, where you worry he is going to physically die,” Chazelle said. “And I think a part of him does die in that solo.”

While Chazelle said he absolutely does not condone Fletcher’s teaching tactics, his feelings for his own band instructor are far more complex. Even though the filmmaker still has nightmares that put him “back in the same old high school dread,” he said, he “burst into tears” upon learning that his teacher had died of cancer when he was a freshman at Harvard.

“When I look back I don’t feel entirely negative about my band experience,” he explained. “While a lot of it was really unpleasant, it did prove to be the most creatively informative few years of my life — and as an artist in general. It gave me a sense of discipline and perseverance that I apply to my work today.”

It also made Chazelle hyper sensitive about not screaming at his cast and crew on the set. “I feel that the best work comes from when people feel free to explore,” he said. “It’s when they feel comfortable and safe.”  

In 2013, veteran film editor William Goldenberg said, he was “humbled and thrilled” when he took the stage at the Dolby Theatre to accept his first Academy Award for cutting Ben Affleck’s Iran thriller, “Argo.” It had been a race in which he had the distinction of competing against himself: That year, Goldenberg also received an Oscar nod for editing the hunt-for-bin Laden movie “Zero Dark Thirty,” alongside Dylan Tichenor. 

Now, the 55-year-old editor is back in the running with a nomination for his work on yet another taut drama based on a true story: Morten Tyldum’s “The Imitation Game,” which spotlights the brilliant, if insufferable, mathematician Alan Turing (played by Benedict Cumberbatch, an Oscar nominee for lead actor), who cracked the said-to-be-impossible Nazi Enigma communications code during World War II.  Turing’s work saved an estimated 14 million lives by effectively shortening the war by two years, but in the early 1950s he was persecuted and prosecuted for his homosexuality, eventually committing suicide in 1954 at age 41.

“Like ‘Argo’ and ‘Zero Dark Thirty,’ I’m really drawn to small stories on a world canvas that few people have ever heard of,” Goldenberg said. “I had heard of Alan Turing and the Enigma code, but I didn’t know that he broke it, or the terrible things that happened to him after the war. It was just such a tragic story.”

Over the course of nine months in 2013 and 2014, Goldenberg cut “The Imitation Game” from approximately 200 hours of production footage on an Avid Media Composer 5.5 at EPS-Cineworks in Santa Monica. One of his primary challenges was to create a sense of urgency even in sequences involving code-breakers doing painstaking work at their hideaway at the British estate Bletchley Park.    

“I always wanted to create the feel that there was a great deal of pressure on Turing and his team — a sense of the ticking clock — because the Allies at the time were losing the war,” said Goldenberg, who also edited Angelina Jolie’s “Unbroken” with Tim Squyres this past year. “It was a matter of life or death for thousands of people every day they didn’t crack the Enigma machine, which had 159 million million million possible settings. In the editing, that translated into pushing the pace — not in a way that was very overt, but hopefully would give viewers a churning feeling in their gut. It was cutting out of some shots at the height of the tension — a slightly rushed feeling — to remind us that these characters are in a hurry.”

To up the ante, Goldenberg intercut stock and computer-generated footage, including marching Nazi troops and tanks, within scenes of Turing working on his code-breaking machine, which he named Christopher, after his chaste first boyhood love. “It was the German machinery of war juxtaposed with the machinery of ‘Christopher,’ which was Turing’s weapon,” Goldenberg said. 

For the tense scene in which Turing’s machine finally cracks the code, Goldenberg created a breathless montage of the scientists working through the night, calling out decoded messages as they thrust pins into a map indicating the positions of German submarines in the Atlantic. 

As Goldenberg approached every sequence, he had multiple conversations with Tyldum about what was going through the prickly Turing’s mind: “It was, ‘How self-aware was he; does he have Asperger’s, and what was he about, inside and out?’” the editor recalled. “There’s one scene in which Turing goes for his job interview at Bletchley, where we had a huge amount of footage, and Benedict gave us a lot of different choices about the way Turing could be — whether he was being intentionally biting about his comments, or abrasive for the sake of abrasiveness. What we decided was that he was indeed self-aware, but he wasn’t intentionally off-putting. It was just Turing being Turing, and completely honest in every situation, so we selected performances based on that.”

All the while, Goldenberg had to seamlessly interweave the film’s complex, intersecting story lines, which jump back and forth between three time periods:  Turing’s youthful years at boarding school in the 1920s, his top-secret war efforts and his maltreatment for being homosexual, in the 1950s. Questions arose about the placement of one crucial sequence, in which he learns that his beloved Christopher has died of tuberculosis. In the script, the scene takes place earlier in the film, but Goldenberg moved it to about 15 minutes later, toward the end of the movie, cutting from a close-up of the young Alan’s bereaved face to an image of the older, persecuted Turing sitting, broken, in front of his computer. “It was like the last piece of the puzzle leading up to his suicide,” Goldenberg said.

But the filmmakers ultimately opted to eliminate a sequence in which a detective discovers Turing lying lifeless in his bed. “We decided it was more elegant and emotional to end with Turing essentially saying goodnight to ‘Christopher,’ turning off the light and disappearing into a darkened room,” Goldenberg said. “That just emphasized the tragedy of this story that needed to be told.