Damien Chazelle is having a really good year. He won the jackpot with his last movie, La La Land, for which he won the 2017 Academy Award for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. He also won a few other awards in addition to the Oscar, and all of that was just this year. Although he’s been writing and directing films for a few years now, La La Land definitely put him on everyone’s radar. We’ve listed here five things you might not know about the talented director.
Get to know the guy because it seems he’ll be around for a while:
1. Chazelle tied the record for being the youngest director to ever win an Oscar.
He’s also the youngest director to have ever won a Golden Globe Award. At 32 years old and with only a few movies under his belt, he’s already collected 61 wins out of 112 nominations. That’s quite an impressive feat for a budding filmmaker. This guy’s definitely got the talent and dedication to get what he wants while satisfying moviegoers at the same time.
2. His film Whiplash was based on personal experience.
Aside from being a talented filmmaker, Chazelle also happens to be a musician. He used to play in a competitive jazz band, which probably sheds a little light on why majority of his movies have some type of musical quality to them, particularly jazz.
3. Chazelle is a Harvard graduate.
He graduated with a filmmaking degree in 2007, and two years later, he already released his directorial debut for the big screen, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench. The ivies run in the family, though, as Chazelle’s dad works as a professor at Princeton. He met his ex-wife at Harvard, and his current girlfriend is a Princeton graduate. It’s always good to surround yourself with smart people.
4. His other films were also big hits.
In addition to La La Land, Chazelle wrote and directed Whiplash and co-wrote the script for 10 Cloverfield Lane. He received 5 Oscar nominations for Whiplash alone. He also almost directed 10 Cloverfield Lane, but J.J. Abrams decided to just do it himself. He received a nomination for the Bram Stoker Awards for the screenplay but did not win. Despite of this, critics and fans both received the film really well.
5. Chazelle has projects lined up to the door.
The guy is staying busy. It’s smart for him to really keep the momentum going, especially since he’s still so young in the industry. It seems as if he’s got a lot of ideas he’s working on. His next project is literally taking him to space. The project will be a biopic of Neil Armstrong as adaptated from james Hansen’s First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong. This movie is set for an October 2018 release. He’s also got a mystery-thriller that will be shown next week. In addition, Chazelle will be directing a new Netflix musical drama called The Eddy. He’ll be working with Jack Thorne as the screenwriter and Glen Ballard as executive producer.
