WAMG At The WHIPLASH Press Day

Do you think artists actually want this kind of pressure that Fletcher delivers?

MILES TELLER : I do think that for me the greatest success that I’ve had on a particular project or in exploring a role does come through collaboration. I wouldn’t want to do a movie where everything I do the director just says, “Good job,” and then I am under-directed. At the same time, I’ve done movies where I felt like I was kind of over-handled and over-directed and I didn’t feel like I was able to do some stuff that I wanted to. So I think it’s a fine line but at the end of the day you do, at least I do, need somebody to kind of see what I’m doing because, especially in film, even though I’m feeling it right here, it’s not playing that way in the camera. So for sure, for me, I do like directors that really will kind of inspire me with ideas and give me something to kind of chew on during the scene and something to get a better performance.

J.K. SIMMONS : God, I hope not. I mean, masochists do. I completely agree with feeling the need or the benefits of being pushed and of being directed on a project and collaborating. The kind of manipulation and abuse, I think, has no place in life.

Can you talk about putting your blood, sweat and tears into this film? And was what we heard in the film all you or was it sweetened?

MILES TELLER : I guess Damien could talk to you a little bit about that because I was not in the editing room for all of it. I hope it was sweetened a little bit because at the end of the day Andrew becomes a much better drummer than Miles was, although I have a pretty good skill set with it and it’s something that absolutely through hours of practice I got to a pretty good place with it. I started getting blisters. It’s funny because when I read the script there’s all this talk of, “And the blood splatters on the cymbals,” and all this stuff. I would come onto set sometimes and I would look at the drum kit and there’s all this blood there. And I literally to Damien would be like, “That’s too much. No way. Let’s get that off. It’s too much blood.” And he goes, “No, man. When I was playing, all my drumsticks were covered in blood. This is real. This is truthful.” So yeah, I started getting some bloody blisters and I was bandaging them up and stuff. Just the nature of filming a movie like this in 19 days with very intense drumming sequences, a lot of that sweat is real and that’s great because you don’t have to act when you’re actually kind of playing to exhaustion. I remember J.K. told me to hold back a little bit. He’s like, “Man, we’re going to have a couple takes of this. You should save some.” And then I was like, “Yeah, you’re right.” “Damien, what are you doing, man? I need to save some.” So a lot of it was kind of life imitating art which was nice. As far as the sound goes…

DAMIEN CHAZELLE : I think Miles said everything. Certainly we did a lot of work in the editing room. So a lot of it is just sort of raw stuff from on set and a lot of it is from pre-records. But everything that you see in the movie pretty much with the exception of a few shots is this guy.

How much rehearsal prep was there for the acting scenes and how many takes did you do?

DAMIEN CHAZELLE : [Laughs] They like to joke about… Certainly when you have this kind of schedule we didn’t have that many takes at our disposal. We didn’t have time to rehearse. So the first time Miles and Melissa ever met was the first day of shooting. First time Miles and J.K. met was… I think we did one read-through, we were able to do of the script.

MILES TELLER : J.K. didn’t even remember I was there. Or did you not remember doing it?

J.K. SIMMONS : Was I there?

MILES TELLER : [Laughs] You don’t remember doing it?

DAMIEN CHAZELLE : This is how much my actors really care about these things. So certainly everything was kind of short-changed and you worry about that in the moment. But when you have people like the people at this table, they just sort of brought it every day. There’s a lot of stuff in the movie that we knew we had to get in one or two takes in order to allow for the things that we just knew we’d have to do many takes of. For example, referring to the scene where J.K. is circling through the three drummers was done mainly kind of as a single take that was done over and over and over again without cutting. We sort of set it up so that we would just roll the camera and the camera would just roam around it — two cameras, actually, roaming around — and we did probably 12 or 15 takes of that and it’s like a five-minute scene. So by the end, I think you were pretty pissed, Miles, by the end.

What about the drum solo, did you do it more than once?

DAMIEN CHAZELLE : Yeah, the big drum solo, we did one kind of master of it and then everything else is so fragmented. I had storyboarded everything out and done an animatic to it and everything so I knew kind of, “Okay, Miles, we’re going to do measures 16 to 18 right now.” “Okay, cut. Now, we’re going to go to the cymbal and do the coda of the song.” “Okay, now we’re going to do the bridge twice through from this lower angle.” So we kind of played it out that way. But I remember the real trick with the solo for J.K. and for Miles was continuity because we only had extras as audience members in the theater for six hours so everything pointing in that direction had to be done at once. And then you kind of flip around. These band members we wanted to let go and then we wanted to let Miles go and do the band members and let J.K. go. So you wind up scheduling everything…

MILES TELLER : I’m so glad I didn’t have to think about all that crap that you have to think about when we were doing that [laughs]. Oh my God. It’s stressing me out just hearing you talk about it.

DAMIEN CHAZELLE : You’d be like on Miles and be like, “Okay, now we’ve got to do the end of the solo right now, so Miles has to be dripping with sweat.” “Okay, now we’ve got to go back to like the very beginning of the song so Miles doesn’t have sweat yet.” I just have these wonderful images of an entire like posse of makeup people descending on Miles every time we’d re-set up.

J.K. SIMMONS : Just one dude with a hose. [Laughs]

What did you draw on for inspiration to create these characters? What was your reaction when you first read the script?

J.K. SIMMONS : There was no conscious role model or anything that I used. I read the script and it was all there on the page. It was all there. I just felt like I understood it and I would be able to be the guy to help lift it off the page. Then once we started shooting, Miles and I just really settled into a rhythm and had a good time in, as we’ve referred to, 19 days. It was pretty much bing, bang, boom. We just went and did it. Damien turned on a camera or whatever the hell he does [laughs].

MILES TELLER : For me, same thing. A lot of people have been asking me because this movie is pretty autobiographical for Damien, they say, “Well, did you ask him advice about the character?” and all this stuff. I said, “Not really.” I asked Damien absolutely some technical questions with drumming because he is a better jazz drummer than I am. So I was using him for that as much as I could. But for the character, it was all there on the page. It was very clear what Andrew Neiman was all about. It was probably the most clear for him as any character that I’ve ever done — a lot of characters, a lot of different things going on and this and that. But for Andrew, he wants to be the greatest drummer of all time and that’s really his sole desire. And then other than that, just dealing with this guy every day on set.

Your musical background… if you didn’t have rhythm on this movie would be a disaster. 

MILES TELLER : You would be really surprised because J.K. did a pretty good job.

Is there anybody, a coach, director, teacher that drove you in your career?

MILES TELLER : Yeah, my mom use to drive me everyday to school for a long time, and then I started driving, so I drove myself. [laughs] I started piano when I was like six and my two older sisters both played instruments. My sister Danielle was like 18 months older than me. Anything I would do she would do and vise versa. I mean she was the only girl playing in boys little league baseball and she played on my team, she was really good. She was just…she was better at piano than I was, she played the clarinet I played the saxophone, she was better at woodwind player than I was. Then I started moving away from that stuff into guitar and drumming and playing in some bands and stuff. Everywhere I went my drums went with me, I went to NYU, a very small dorm and I had my drum kit, and now in my house, three miles from here I have my drum kit. Yeah, I never really had a music teacher like that. There is a piano  teacher that tried to push me, but I was eleven and I say “Its not worth it,” so I quit, taking lessons and just started listening to music. And then with sports I had a baseball coach that yelled just for the sake of yelling, It seemed like, and that did nothing because we did not respect him because we just did not know where he was coming from. With J.K. you can understand where he is coming from he is not just a guy yelling you know,  kind of very funny vulgar statements at people all day, because nobody cares about that guy.

J.K. SIMMONS : You are talking about J.K. not…

MILES TELLER : Yeah, no I am just talking about J.K. off set [laughter] when they didn’t have [can’t make out] at craft services, or when they ran out…

J.K. SIMMONS : And I think it worked out, okay.

MILES TELLER : I had a driver ed teacher that had severe issues with anger, as if it was going to make us a better driver. I was like “Dude, we are like 15 we just trying to get our licence.” This guy was so pissed.

At the end of this movie was sort for remarkably poetic, how eager or maybe reluctant are you personally to romanticise the notion of being subjected to something that you not only survive, but you sort of transcend and reach another type of artistic or personal level?

J.K. SIMMONS : Damien that sounded like a smart guy question.

DAMIEN CHAZELLE : Okay. I mean yeah, I will jump in first. It is tough because the movie operates in teh screen differently than it did not the page for me, and I think that is because the music itself is not on the page. When writing it i think in my mind it was certainly more a tragic ending than a victorious ending, and really it ended in someone kind of gladly returning to an abusive relationship, and on the screen it is interesting, because on the screen you film a great drum solo to that kind of music and it does something. So I hope that there is still the question that is kind of you know, my hope through the scene it to give you a certain amount of a kinetic rush, but leave you with a question that maybe makes that rush a little more troubling. You know my hope is that that still kind of lingers in there.

J.K. SIMMONS : That was something that I know Damien had in mind from the beginning. as you just said that was one of the first things we talked about when we met and sat down, and thought that we were pitching ourselves to each other for the job, because I wanted to do it and he wanted me to do it.  We were like, anyway… It was the ambiguity, that his point was to inspire discussion and debate and not decide are we happy for Andrew, or are we lamenting his loss of humanity at the end of the film? And I think based on the reception and the discussions that we have been involved in so far, I think that is what we have achieved. Plus, it is just like, awesomely entertaining to end a film with a ten minute drum solo.

One thing that I thought was really beautiful of Andrew’s was his determination… 

MELISSA BENOIST : I definitely think, for me the whole digital technical age is really overwhelming and kind of a terrifying thing, so I hope there is a way to remain an artist and to not have to publicise yourself on so many fronts, just let it speak for itself. I think that is what I think is so special about this movie, you know that it’s all Andrew is doing, and I don’t know.

DAMIEN CHAZELLE : I think it is also funny, certainly it was also very conscious in terms how I wrote Andrew and how Miles played him. Andrew is kind of an acronyism, I mean he is not really interested in contemporary drummers, and I wasn’t when I was growing up. I was interested in Jo Jones and Chick Webb and Buddy Rich and Sid Catlett.

MILES TELLER : Travis Barker…

DAMIEN CHAZELLE : Miles and I differ there. [laughter] And so it was important to me that this was a kid that the pictures on this wall were black and white; the music he was listening to was mostly from the 70’s or earlier; he held his sticks with traditional grip whereas almost all drummers today use matched grip; he angles his snare drum down, like the old military style whereas most modern drummers angle his snare drum up. So all these little things were important, he is a guy who lives with in this artistic bubble that almost has nothing to do with temporary life. Which means that every time he exits his bubble and goes to the dinner table, or goes to… he is met with indifference, or worse.

MILES TELLER : I think what’s tough for an actor, especially a young actor, is you just want to work. Very few actors, I think, are truly steering their career, because it is tough. If all you want to do was independent films, do they give you the most control over a character, and a lot of times do they have the most integrity? Yeah. You don’t make any kind of money really from that. I remember Joe Pantoliano came to my class when I was in college and people were asking his advice on how you do movies, and he said, ‘My advice for you guys is do three movies a year – do one for the money; do one for the art; do one for the location,’ and he said you’ll be happy. So, hopefully you can balance it out or can do some things – maybe you want to go on vacation, maybe you want to live in a bigger apartment – so you can hopefully do something to make yourself happy, but at the end of the day, we picked art as a job and as an income, so the line gets a little blurry there sometimes.

J.K. SIMMONS : Yeah, the art/commerce line definitely gets blurred. But as far as modern…I’m not on Facebook or Twitter or any of that just because I’m a dinosaur and I’m lazy.

MILES TELLER : But you have started DJ-ing. (Laughter)

J.K. SIMMONS : Oh, yeah, I’ve been doing that a lot. (Laughter) Me and my 15-year-old. Yeah.

MILES TELLER : Have you been pressured to get on Twitter and that stuff?

J.K. SIMMONS : Just by Twitter. (Laughter)

In drum corps world, instructors worse than Fletcher…how important was it to convey the pressure put upon students? 

DAMIEN CHAZELLE : It is interesting the different, even as a script, reactions the script would often get. People who hadn’t been drummers or hadn’t been to music school or hadn’t been in that kind of competitive world, the question was always, ‘They can’t…they can’t be like this.’ And I remember at the same time I was showing it to drummers, one who was a drummer at Lincoln Center and worked with Wynton Marsalis, and he had complained as well, but the complaint was exactly the opposite; it was, ‘It doesn’t go far enough,’ and, ‘It was worse for me.’ So, I think what’s fascinating is that there’s this whole side of the world that most people just don’t know about. A lot of music movies fit into a certain mold, but it was important to me that, if nothing else, this music movie was going to showcase things I hadn’t seen before in music movie – the blood, the physicality of it. We don’t think of instruments as physical – we think of dance as physical; we think of sports as musical; but music we don’t. Trumpeters screw their lips up, violinists screw their backs up, and drummers screw their hands up. So that was really important. And otherwise, I had a teacher like J.K., and it made me a better drummer. But I also, as a humanist, can’t condone what he does, and I wanted to make the character as monstrous as possible so that it’s as hard as possible to condone what he does. It’s undeniable that it’s a big part of jazz and music history, this kind of streak of tyranny leading to great musicianship.

J.K. SIMMONS : That kind of pisses me off actually that [other instructors] were worse than me. Especially after I met Miles, I wanted to go farther. (Laughter) I think Damien and I have very similar philosophies there, and again, that’s the debate; I love that this movie is inspiring that debate: How far is too far? How much is too much? Is it worth it? I’ve made the comparison before, this kind of relentless abuse might be necessary and appropriate if you’re training Navy SEALs; I don’t know if it’s appropriate in music school. But it’s there! And it can be productive. There’s no denying that. From my own perspective, I’d rather have a pretty girlfriend than go work with this guy and my hands bleed all the time. I would’ve made a different choice.

For More Info : http://sonyclassics.com/whiplash

WHIPLASH is playing in New York and Los Angeles now, with a wider release Friday