Where to watch Whiplash (2014)

Trivia & production notes

• Damien Chazelle drew inspiration for the film from his competitive high school band experience and based the abusive conductor character on a former band instructor who had died in 2003.
• Chazelle wrote the screenplay in frustration while attempting to develop his musical La La Land.
• An eighteen-minute short film version of Whiplash premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and won the short film jury award, which helped attract investors for the feature-length version.
• The feature film was made on a budget of $3.3 million by Bold Films after the short film's success at Sundance.
• Miles Teller took over the lead role from Johnny Simmons when the short film was expanded into a feature, while J.K. Simmons remained as Fletcher.
• Chazelle instructed J.K. Simmons to portray Fletcher as inhuman, telling him he wanted to see "a monster, a gargoyle, an animal" rather than a human being on screen.
• The entire film was shot in just nineteen days with fourteen-hour filming days.
• Director Damien Chazelle suffered a serious car accident during the third week of filming and was hospitalized with a possible concussion but returned the next day to finish on schedule.
• Miles Teller performed most of the drumming himself after teaching himself drums at age fifteen, with jazz drummer Nate Lang training him to change his grip from matched to traditional style.
• The soundtrack was composed by Justin Hurwitz and features jazz standards by composers like Stan Getz and Duke Ellington alongside original underscore for the film.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Whiplash (2014 film), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.