Damien Chazelle: The Youngest Best Director in Oscar History

Damien Chazelle celebrates his birthday today, officially entering his forties. Born in Providence on January 19, 1985, to two academics—a Princeton computer science professor and a history professor—Chazelle exhibited a magnetic attraction to cinema from a very young age, claiming he decided to become a director when he was only three years old. However, his path was not a straight line; it included a period of profound dedication to jazz music that would indelibly mark his cinematic aesthetic. During his high school years in Princeton, he pushed himself to the brink of exhaustion to become a professional jazz drummer, clashing with the iron discipline of a teacher who would later serve as the direct inspiration for the brutal character of Terence Fletcher in Whiplash. Despite the countless hours of practice, Chazelle realized he lacked the innate talent required to excel at the highest level of music and decided to return to his first love, enrolling in Harvard University’s Visual and Environmental Studies department.

It was at Harvard that Chazelle had a pivotal encounter with his roommate, Justin Hurwitz, the future composer of all his film scores. Together, they began collaborating on a project that served as Chazelle’s senior thesis: a black-and-white musical titled Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench. Filmed on a shoestring budget, the movie won the Jury Prize at the 2009 Torino Film Festival and marked the official start of his career. After graduation, he moved to Los Angeles with the ambitious goal of making La La Land, but the Hollywood industry initially rejected the project, viewing jazz musicals as too expensive and lacking a guaranteed market. To make ends meet, Chazelle worked as a "writer-for-hire," penning scripts for horror and thriller films such as The Last Exorcism Part II and Grand Piano.

The frustration of constant rejections for La La Land drove him to write Whiplash. To secure the necessary funding, he decided to first film a short based on one of the script’s most intense scenes. He premiered it at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, where its success was so overwhelming that it unlocked production for the feature film. The movie went on to win three Academy Awards, including Best Supporting Actor for J.K. Simmons, providing Chazelle with the industry credibility he needed to revisit his passion project. In 2017, by winning the Oscar for Best Director for La La Land, Chazelle set a historic milestone: at 32 years and 38 days old, he became the youngest director ever to receive the statuette, breaking a record that had stood since 1931.

Behind-the-scenes trivia from his productions reveals a relentless perfectionism. For La La Land, Emma Watson turned down the role of Mia because she was already committed to Beauty and the Beast, while Ryan Gosling paradoxically turned down the role of the Beast specifically to work with Chazelle. Gosling spent three months practicing the piano for two hours a day, eventually performing all his scenes without the use of a hand double. With First Man, Chazelle moved away from musical themes for the first time to narrate the life of Neil Armstrong, again starring Gosling. The film opened the Venice Film Festival in 2018, consolidating the director's bond with Italy. His most recent work, Babylon, is a sprawling, riotous tribute to 1920s Hollywood. For this project, Chazelle drew inspiration from classics like Intolerance and demanded significant physical effort from his actors, including managing extremely complex ensemble scenes choreographed to the second.

In his personal life, Chazelle was married from 2010 to 2014 to producer Jasmine McGlade, whom he met at Harvard. In 2018, he married actress Olivia Hamilton, who has appeared in small roles in several of his films and with whom he had a son in 2019. Despite his early success, the director has often stated in interviews that he feels a constant pressure to prove his worth, viewing the film set as a place of continuous identity-seeking.

As for the future, Damien Chazelle is currently in pre-production for a new feature film with Paramount Pictures, expected to be released between late 2026 and early 2027. Following the postponement of an Evel Knievel biopic that was rumored to involve Leonardo DiCaprio, the director has decided to prioritize a 1970s prison drama. Filming for the movie, which does not yet have an official title, is scheduled to begin in March 2026 in Greece and the United States. The confirmed cast includes high-profile names such as Cillian Murphy, Daniel Craig, and Michelle Williams, with Justin Hurwitz already working on the score. Alongside his film work, Chazelle is overseeing the development of a stage musical adaptation of La La Land, involving the film’s original lyricists.