Damien Chazelle

What's great about musicals is their energy and go-for-brokeness - stopping the story to sing and dance. How can you not love that?

If you look at 'West Side Story,' a lot of those numbers are actually pretty cutty, but the cuts are always musically motivated.

Mozart was born Mozart. Charlie Parker was born Charlie Parker.

It's easy to have faith in yourself and have discipline when you're a winner, when you're number one. What you got to have is faith and discipline when you're not a winner.

I'm a big action junkie. I grew up on the '80s action movies - the bad ones and the good ones.

Recently, I was in Bernalda, my dad's ancestral home town in Italy. He has just refurbished a palazzo and turned it into a hotel, so we had my sister's wedding there. It was beautiful.