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Gill Mattern
Dec 11, 20195 min read

Technical Analysis of Whiplash (2014)

Updated: Feb 23, 2021



It’s not a secret that young writer and director Damien Chazelle is ambitiously ahead of his time as a filmmaker. A look inside the process of creating his infamous film, Whiplash (2014), will leave movie-lovers impressed and satisfied. With incredibly limited time and countless obstacles, Chazelle succeeded expectations at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival with the premier of Whiplash. Despite his hardships, Chazelle managed to stylistically create a psychologically engaging film highlighted by its intense narrative form and dense musical sound.


The alchemy of the film’s narrative is credited to Chazelle’s real-life events, most of which occurred during his musically consumed adolescence. In the film, the protagonist Andrew Neiman (Miles Teller) joins a cut-throat music conservatory where he learns under an abusive, sadistic instructor who, despite his raw talent, forces Neiman to reevaluate his capabilities as a jazz drummer. “I wanted to make a movie about a different side of music, about the fear and anguish of it,” says Chazelle, according to Rebecca Ford of the Hollywood Reporter. Without hesitation, Chazelle accomplished just that by revealing the physical and psychological trauma endured by Teller’s character. Not to mention, Neiman’s instructor Terrence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons), is nothing short of the tyrannical teacher who taught Chazelle when he was in high school. Chazelle even implemented the same phrases which were used by his past instructor, such as, “You’re rushing,” “You’re dragging,” “Not my tempo!” to illustrate his insulting demeanor.


A year after Chazelle wrote his first draft of the script, he spent six months trying to sell it to producers. It caught the attention of producer Jason Reitman, who fell in love with Chazelle’s work and quickly joined the project. After the film received a $3.3 million production budget, Chazelle immediately contacted Teller and Simmons. This is where he encountered his first obstacle within the filmmaking process. During the time that he reached out to Miles Teller, he had already been filming for a different movie. After a second try, Teller agreed to do the film but wasn’t available for shooting until about two months before the Sundance submission deadline (Ford). This gave Chazelle exactly 19 days to film and roughly one month for post-production. Without hesitation, he created 150 hand-drawn storyboards and jumpstarted the filming process.


As a result of the filmmaker’s extremely tight timeline, the crew worked 18-hour days and shot as many as 100 setups each day. On the other hand, Chazelle also had to compensate for the fact that Teller did not have jazz drumming experience, so he lent Teller his drum set and personally taught him how to play while production was underway (Ford). As if this wasn’t hard enough, Chazelle suffered from a car accident during the third week of production but showed up on set the very next morning. He left absolutely no room for error because he knew he couldn’t afford it.


After the Sundance premiere in January 2014, Sony bought the film’s distribution rights for $3 million. Following its box office release, the film acquired several admirations and accolades, more specifically a 2015 Academy Award for best Sound Mixing, in addition to earning Best Writing and Adapted Screenplay (IMDb.com). These awards speak to Chazelle’s capabilities as a filmmaker but more importantly, emphasize his individual film style as it relates to narrative form and sound, which in this case, is almost purely musical.


Since the sound recording and mixing were vital parts of the film’s production and editing, Chazelle made certain he would achieve the inescapable tension that fumed between Teller and Simmons’s characters. According to IndieWire.com, Chazelle wanted the music scenes to be like fight scenes: brutal, violent and ferocious. This meant creating a dense musical texture by layering several tracks atop one another. “In modern filmmaking, a dozen or more separate tracks may be layered at any moment. The mix can be quite dense” (Bordwell, 276). In this case, live drumming, pre-recorded drumming, and drumming ADR (automated dialogue replacement) significantly contributed to the coarse musical texture of the final drum solo scene in Whiplash. Chazelle elaborates on how he made this possible, “The drum solo [in the final scene] is so frenzied that we layered several tracks on top of one another to get the right effect so what you’re hearing is physically impossible” (Desowitz). This auditory overlap creates an overwhelming but pleasurable sound that adds to the chaos in the scene. “Perhaps Chazelle’s most remarkable achievement is the fact that he manages to turn an impromptu drum solo – that most unforgivably indulgent of musical breaks – into a tense and engrossing dramatic set piece that sets the heart racing” (Kermode). Chazelle’s sound editors were able to seamlessly blend each track not only to achieve visual synchronization, but to provide a dense musical texture that gifts viewers with a sense of tension, suspense, and catharsis, which are central to the narrative of the film and the pernicious relationship between Neiman and Fletcher.


Additionally, it isn’t just the sound mixing in Whiplash that contributes to Chazelle’s filmmaking success. His narrative form, specifically cause and effect, creates a powerful and gruesome dynamic between Neiman and Fletcher. “By triggering events and reacting to them, characters play a causal role within the film’s narrative form” (Bordwell, 77). Without this crucial approach to the narrative, the characters’ relationship would be seemingly functionless. Fletcher is the primary mover of action in this film, as he pushes Neiman to the edge of his musical, physical and psychological capabilities. As a result, Neiman’s drumming suffers, and he nearly shatters under his instructor’s pressure.


Not to mention, Chazelle purposefully created a goal-oriented plot for Whiplash to achieve a perfect cinematic cadence that does more than just illustrate his early-aged hardships as a musician. Chazelle mentioned in an interview that he thought the overall plot of Whiplash mimicked the arc of a sports film. “The comparison is apt: The hero is brought low and then surges back in the grand finale, winning a great victory at an undeniable physical cost” (Sims). Neiman’s persistence to prove Fletcher wrong further propels the narrative and engages viewers with the resilience of Neiman’s character, despite his endurance of Fletcher’s ongoing abuse. Not only did Neiman get into a car accident just moments before his pivotal performance, but he proceeded and made his way to the venue, nevertheless. When he arrived covered in blood, all he felt he needed to do was squash Fletcher’s condescending inhibitions about his tempo, and prove to him he wasn’t rushing, nor dragging. In this scene, Neiman’s hands are visibly injured, and he is writhed with pain. This unsuspected turn left Neiman with physical repercussions that significantly outweighed those of being forced to drum until his hands bled.


When both sound mixing and narrative form are taken into account, Chazelle’s Whiplash becomes a perfect example of a film with monumental intensity of effect. “If an artwork is vivid, striking, and emotionally engaging, it may be considered more valuable” (Bordwell, 61). Between the overlap of drum tracks which clearly emphasize Neiman’s musical talent, and the goal-oriented, cause-and-effect narrative form that accentuates the toxicity of Fletcher and Neiman’s relationship, viewers inevitably become emotionally wrapped up in Neiman’s tumultuous journey. Take all of that and squish it into 19 days of filming and one month of post-production and out comes an award-winning, autobiographical picture that organically showcases the true fear and anguish of music.

 

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