Any would-be filmmaker would sell their soul to the Devil to have been credited as the director of any one of the three movie titles: Whiplash or La La Land or First Man. To have been the director of all three movies... for the director, Damien Chazelle, it's just your typical Sunday!
Chazelle rules the roost of Hollywood as the youngest director to have ever won the Academy Award and the Golden Globe Award for his critically acclaimed 2016 musical romantic-drama movie, La La Land. But, his 2014 hit Whiplash and recent drama, First Man, are not something to sleep on either!
Both films have been widely regarded as filmmaking clinics, and as the genius behind all three movies, Damien Chazelle has cemented his place in the upper echelons of the Hollywood film fraternity.
Chazelle now sets his sights to the small screens with the upcoming Netflix musical-drama miniseries, The Eddy.
Here are seven facts you should know about Damien Chazelle:
Damien Chazelle is a French-American director, producer, and screenwriter whose triad of three movies, namely 2014's Whiplash, 2016's La La Land, and 2018's First Man, has made him into a bona fide movie-maker.
As the impetus behind the critically and commercially successful movies, Damien Chazelle is worth $10 million as of March 2020.
Apart from being an ace filmmaker, Chazelle has also written for The Last Exorcism Part II and Grand Piano. He also re-wrote a draft for 10 Cloverfield Lane and was set to direct, but got sidelined by Whiplash.
La La Land is arguably Damien Chazelle's magnum opus, which is saying a lot, considering every Chazelle feature is seemingly his magnum opus.
But the 2016 musical-romantic-drama has done for Chazelle something that had never before been done in history: it made him the youngest Academy and Golden Globe Award winner of all time.
Chazelle was 32 at the time he bagged the 2017 Academy Award for Best Director and the Best Director – Motion Picture and the Best Screenplay – Motion Picture award at the 2017 Golden Globe Awards, effectively setting the record for the youngest director to have achieved the feat.
To the wider public, Damien Chazelle may well be one of the finest directors, perhaps of all time. But to actress Olivia Hamilton, Chazelle is husband, first and foremost.
Olivia is an actress who has appeared in two Chazelle-features, namely La La Land and First Man. While each's career proliferated, their romance also bloomed.
They revealed their betrothal in October 2017 and were officially married in a ceremony in Malibu on September 22, 2018.
Prior to his marriage with Hamilton, Damien had been married to film producer, Jasmine McGlade. They married in 2010 but got divorced in 2014.
After achieving the pinnacle of filmmaking, Chazelle sets his sights on the green pastures of online streaming, namely Netflix. He steps in as the director in the upcoming musical-drama miniseries, The Eddy.
The 8-episode miniseries is set in Paris and stars André Holland, Joanna Kulig, Amandla Stenberg, Tahar Rahim, and Leïla Bekhti, that make up the main cast.
The topic of Damien Chazelle's age has been discussed, and re-discussed ad nauseam since his Academy Award and Golden Globe Award win in 2017 when he became the youngest filmmaker to have won the awards in a directing capacity for his movie, La La Land; he was 32 years old at the time.
Damien Chazelle was born on January 19, 1985, and as of March 2020, he is 35 years old.
Damien's father, Bernard Chazelle, is an esteemed computer scientist who, besides revolutionizing computational geometry, is the Eugene Higgins Computer Science Professor at Princeton University, New Jersey.
His mother, Celia Martin Chazelle, is no slouch either and teaches medieval history at The College of New Jersey, Ewing, New Jersey.
Damien hails from a lineage of highly educated and talented individuals. His parents are at the top of their respective fields. Damien himself is considered one of the best filmmakers of the generation.
It should be no surprise that Anna Chazelle turned out to be part of the film industry. Anna shares her brother's love for the cinema, as well as his preternatural abilities to perform for the camera.
She is an actress known for such movies as Actressing; Love, Lies, and Seeta; and If She Screams. She has also appeared in two of her brother's movies, namely La La Land and First Man.