‘Whiplash’ Turns 10: Damien Chazelle, Miles Teller, and J.K. Simmons on the Oscar-Winning Sensation That Changed Their Lives

A psychological thriller about a young jazz musician, helmed by a 28-year-old unknown director and shot for under $4 million, might not sound like the recipe for a Hollywood smash. But from the moment it premiered to raves at the Sundance Film Festival, Whiplash defied the odds. Damien Chazelle’s thrilling, agonizing, technically immaculate portrait of the toxic dynamic between an ambitious drummer named Andrew Neiman (Miles Teller, then best known for The Spectacular Now) and his abusive instructor, Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons of the Spider-Man movies), won over Hollywood, then moviegoers around the world. It marked the arrival of a major American filmmaker on the scene, cemented the promise of a rising star, and provided the crowning role to a character actor who’d been working for decades on screen and stage.

Even more impressively, Whiplash has held up. The movie regularly ranks on lists of the greatest films of the century, and even of all time. Its portrait of artistic relentlessness has spawned a whole category of memes. Above all, it’s a shining example of what a talented director can do before the world catches on, taking a deeply personal story—Chazelle has said he drew on the “dread” he experienced in high school band—to make something specific and fresh. The 2014 film received five Oscar nominations, including for best picture, and won three awards—with Simmons taking home the best-supporting-actor trophy. Chazelle has since won the best-director Oscar for La La Land, with his most recent movie being Babylon (and, he tells us, something new on the way). Teller is coming off of the box-office sensation of Top Gun: Maverick.

Sony Pictures Classics is now giving Whiplash the kind of treatment reserved for movies of its enduring stature: a full-on rerelease. In honor of the 10th anniversary, the distributor will put the film back in theaters nationwide starting September 20. Kicking off the reunion tour, Whiplash will also screen as part of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.

Ahead of celebrating the milestone, Chazelle, Teller, and Simmons joined Vanity Fair to reflect on the movie for the first time this year—and assess how it changed their lives.

The Short

After falling hard for the Whiplash feature script, Helen Estabrook sent it to her then producing partner, Jason Reitman, who then convinced Chazelle to make a short film version as a kind of proof of concept. The short, which earned acclaim in its own right, starred Johnny Simmons as Neiman, before Teller took over the role in the feature, while J.K. Simmons originated the role of Fletcher.

Damien Chazelle: Even though it was this 15-minute short, that was my first time ever doing something with a professional crew and with things like an AD and a script supervisor, and all these roles. Before that, I’d just been making basic student films—camera on my shoulder, me and a few friends, going out on the streets and shooting on weekends. That was my conception of filmmaking.

J.K. Simmons: Jason [Reitman] said, “Check this out.” I read the feature, and it was one of those life-altering experiences of just encountering not only sheer brilliance on the page, but a character that every single move he made, every word out of his mouth, was just like I was assimilating organically. It’s hard not to sound narcissistic and egomaniacal—which I am, because I’m an actor. It was just one of those rare parts. I thought, I’m the guy for this part. I am the guy for this part. I understand everything. I’m dying to do this. They said, “Well, we’d like you to meet with Damien.”

Chazelle: It was always clear in my head that whatever the resources we might have or not have to make it, it had to feel very metronomically precise. It had to feel like the movie that one of those characters would’ve made. It had to reflect their mindset, for lack of a better expression. March to their rhythm. I knew it had to be shot that way, but I had to learn how to shoot that way. I learned the hard way. I flailed around for the first day or two, and really thought I didn’t know what I was doing and I wasn’t cut out for this kind of filmmaking. And then by the end of the short I was like, Okay, I still don’t feel comfortable with this, but I’m not going to quit just yet.

Simmons: I see a genius script by somebody who clearly understands jazz, the quintessential American musical art form—and a largely African American art form. The guy’s name is Damien Chazelle. I’m picturing Antoine Fuqua. I’m going into this meeting thinking it’s going to be some tall, elegant-looking Black guy with a beret.

We go to meet at this restaurant, and of course he’s there a few minutes early because he’s a young guy. I get there right on time, as is my wont, and I’m literally looking around the restaurant, which is not very crowded—I’m looking right past or through Damien, who finally stands up and waves at me. I’m like, Who’s this little curly-haired kid from New Jersey?

Chazelle: When we first started doing Whiplash, I mainly thought of [J.K.] as the dad in Juno. He had this wholesome, decent, all-American vibe to him in a lovably, gruff, comic way. So my big concern was, Can you get to a place where we don’t just think you’re kidding around all the time, we’re actually genuinely scared of you?

Simmons: He said, “We’re going to have a technical adviser there for you at all times. We’ll have a body double who can do a lot of the actual conducting.” He goes on and on trying to put me at ease, and I’m just staring at him with this odd look on my face. He says, “What’s on your mind?” I go, “Well, did Jason not tell you that I have a degree in music? I was going to be a conductor. I thought that was part of why you came to me, because I can do that.” He was utterly blown away.

Chazelle: I go onto set and I’m just waiting to see initially what he’s going to do with the role and how much I’m going to want to adjust. What he did with the role during that shoot on the short was what he did on the feature—I did not wind up needing to adjust much because he instantly was that guy…. I’d written it thinking about a variety of people, but the jazz orchestra conductor that I played under was very different physically, temperamentally, from J.K. Simmons. A different creature. Yet within five minutes of shooting the short, just seeing J.K. doing the first take on whatever piece of dialogue we began with—that preconceived notion of the character in my head went out the window. J.K. became that character, the character became J.K., and it became unthinkable to play the character any other way.

The Feature

On a budget under $4 million, Whiplash was shot in just 20 days—and with a clear target of premiering at Sundance, the post-production window wasn’t exactly comfortable either.

Chazelle: The feature of course was, in a weird way, like doing the short again. Just a longer script and more time. But it was a similar modus operandi. And looking back, I thank God that I had done the short as a little mini film school before.

Miles Teller: I got really lucky that I was handed such a beautiful script without having to audition for it. Damien told me he wrote it with me in mind.

Chazelle: It was the first time I really had to confront the limitation of time. It just had to be a very tight shooting schedule for various reasons. I had 20 days to shoot it. I’d storyboarded the thing out. There were lots of shots and angles that I knew I had to get in order to tell the story. There was a volume of material field that I had to collect in those 20 days. It was this almost military operation of running and gunning and just, We’ve got to get this, got to get that. You only have time for a couple things at most, and you’re constantly fighting the clock.

Teller: I couldn’t grasp anything other than I was just trying to stay afloat. I feel like I was just treading water the whole time because we were moving so fast.

Chazelle: It felt like trying to paint the painting while someone points a gun to your head with a stopwatch going, “Go, go!” In a weird way it’s so antithetical to what you naively imagined that the creative process would be. All that sounds like a negative. And yet, there was a certain adrenaline and energy that really fit the movie.

Teller: I remember a dinner scene, where me and the family are going back and forth. When we shot that scene, because it was a couple of pages, I’m sure we did a master [shot] or two—but honestly, what I remember is that Damien would set up the camera and he would say, “Okay, guys, we’re just going from this line to this line.” Maybe three eighths of a page or five eighths of a page. We would do a take or two, and then he would say, “Okay, got it. Moving on.” I just remember thinking, Either this guy is a wunderkind and really knows what he’s doing, or we’re not going to have the footage.”

Simmons: The camera wasn’t in our way. It was never in our way, which is so rare. To be able to get to play all those intense scenes with just us, or just us and the band, or just the elements that are in the story there, and to be able to literally not pull punches? There was a level of, just, comfort—well, and exhaustion, by the end of the shoot. Because it was a crazy, crazy, crazy fast shoot. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Teller: I was still very new, but I’d never worked at that kind of pace before. I’ve still never worked like that, where the director just knew, “I’m only going to be in this angle. I’m only going to be on this shot for this line with this line. I’m never going to use anything else.” He had the whole movie in his head.

All the musicians in the film were real musicians—which is highly unusual—and they’re all playing live the whole time. I remember them thinking, “Okay, can this dude actually drum?” There were a lot of moments in there where I was really drumming. Getting to jam with the musicians, man, that was so fun.

The other thing I remember from filming was the lighting on JK’s face. I was so close to JK’s face for so much of that movie. Every line in his face was embedded, tattooed into my mind, going to bed.

Simmons: I mean, I slapped the shit out of him, and Miles was like, “Don’t pull it. Fuckin’ slap me!” I wasn’t using any kind of proper vocal technique that I had learned to scream like that. I was just balls-out screaming, and Damien scheduled it so that I didn’t have to do that two days in a row and I could sort of vocally rest a little bit in between.

Teller: The last scene in the movie, there weren’t really cutaways, so we got to do that whole thing. That solo is so aggressive, and we filmed the crap out of that. Anytime Neiman goes off, whether it was with the practicing or just trying to keep the tempo or whatever it was, Damien would just—that was the one time where he would just roll camera and roll camera and not even yell cut, because he wanted this utter exhaustion. That was a part of the last couple days of filming, and those were 16-hour days and filming until five o’clock in the morning.

Simmons: Oh my God, Miles Teller in Whiplash. He’s so brilliant in it. People don’t consciously realize he’s in every scene in that movie. It’s all him.

Teller: People always ask me like, “Oh, so what was it really intense?” I was like, “No, I don’t know.” As soon as they yell “cut,” me and JK would make a joke, or me and JK were talking about baseball.

Chazelle: I learned stuff I definitely needed to learn, in terms of making any other movies at any kind of scale or scope where it’s not just you and your friends. I learned by doing, which I guess is the only real way to learn that kind of thing.

Simmons: We did shoot a few things of Fletcher alone at home, or alone pensive in the studio, that very quickly in the editing process, Tom and Damien said, “No, we don’t need that. We don’t want that. We don’t want to see glimpses into why he is the way he is.”

Chazelle: Because we had this dream of going to Sundance, we were really up against it in the edit. We finished shooting in the beginning of October; we had to submit a cut by mid-November and then unlock the movie in December. Tom Cross, the editor, and I had to treat this as a triage operation and just do the best we can within the time frame that we had. The sound mix also was something where we didn’t feel like we had any kind of margin for error.

The Legacy

Whiplash won three Oscars, including for Simmons’s performance, and contended for best picture. The movie launched Chazelle’s career as one of his generation’s most decorated filmmakers, and transformed the careers of both Teller and Simmons.

Teller: I do remember that, from Whiplash, I pretty much went straight into Fantastic Four. I don’t even know if Whiplash had come out yet, but I remember Damien being like, “I turned you into a superhero.” That was pretty cool. I was like, “Yeah, thanks, man.”

Simmons: Believe me: Half the offers that came in in the months and years after Whiplash were to play the guy that screams at everybody. It was like when I played Schillinger on Oz. Everybody wanted me to be the Nazi of the Week on every TV show. It’s a typical Hollywood mindset. Fortunately I was in a position to financially not have to take everything that came my way.

Chazelle: When I need to, I keep going back to how we did Whiplash and worked with the constraints of time. The irony, I’ve learned, maybe the hard way, is: You never have all the time and money you want.

Teller: Whiplash is still the best script that I’ve ever read. There are so many actors that really have such a wide range and a set of skills and performances that we just don’t get to see because they’re not afforded that opportunity, or that script never gets to them. This certainly set the bar as far as what great writing is out there, and so now I’m just hopeful.

Chazelle: Ironically, I’d say the two movies where I felt the most challenged, the most up against the wall in timing, were Whiplash and Babylon. Comparatively, I’d say La La Land and First Man felt more comfortable. They felt more like we could take our time, reflect, think, experiment a bit. Whiplash and Babylon, even though definitely of vastly different scales, were movies where we had to make them look and feel a lot more expensive than they were. We had to trick people into thinking that we did have the time and the resources to really perfect and play around and experiment and try things, when in reality we didn’t.

On Babylon, whenever I’d feel like, Oh, this is impossible, I would try to think back on, Okay, well what did we do with Whiplash?

Teller: I’ve seen people with Whiplash tattoos. I’ve seen incredible fan art for the movie. Anytime you get a movie that’s rereleased—this is the first time in my career—it lets you know the legacy of it. We all make art, hopefully, so that it doesn’t just come and go in a couple of weekends, that it lasts meaningfully for a while. We’ve got the first decade under our belt.

Simmons: The thing that occurs to me now that we’re talking about it is: I haven’t seen the movie in 10 years! When it premiered, I did watch the full screenings at a lot of those Q&A-type things, much more often than I usually do. Usually I see a film once and I’m like, “That’s great.” I think I watched Whiplash beginning to end maybe a half a dozen times during that whirlwind, and it impacted me in subtle ways and in dramatic ways, every time I saw it. God, what a genius piece of work.

Chazelle: My mind is all still figuring itself out in terms of what’s next. I’ve definitely been working on this thing that I might be jumping into—but there’s another thing I might be jumping into. There’s two things that I’m toying with, so I need to commit to one lane or the other fast.

Teller: Damien and I have been talking a lot more, recently. We’re trying to find whatever that next thing is for us to do together.

Interviews for this story were edited and condensed for clarity.