Screenwriting 101: Damien Chazelle

“I feel like you can tell when movies start from a theme or intellectual question, and they’re not that interesting. I want to start from a sensory experience, an emotional experience. What I want something to sound like or look like, or what kind of motion I wanted to create. Films are not essays, they’re not pieces of writing. They’re things that move and flicker and make noise. I start with the emotion I want to create in an audience. From there, you can extrapolate the thematics or the moral questions you want to grapple with. But those things should emerge organically from the images and the sound. That’s what movies are.”

— Damien Chazelle

From Go Into The Story interview, October 18, 2014

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