Miles Teller and J.K. Simmons Talk 'Whiplash'

Next to "Boyhood," Whiplash, the first feature film from writer/director Damien Chazelle, was the most acclaimed indie film released this past year. After opening the Sundance Film Festival in January a year ago, it went on to win both the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award at the Festival. When it opened in October, it became a critical favorite with an aggregate score of 95% on Rotten Tomatoes.

The film was released this week on DVD and on VOD.

Recently it even topped "Boyhood" at the Oscars, winning three: Best Film Editing, Best Sound Mixing and Best Supporting Actor for J.K. Simmons, who plays Terrence Fletcher, a jazz legend and music professor with exacting standards and a startlingly abusive teaching manner.

The collaborative process

The film follows his relationship with Andrew Neiman (Miles Teller), a college drum student who gets accepted into his program at a Manhattan music school. The pair battle ferociously throughout the film, which leads to a thrilling face-off that ends the film. For Teller's character, it presents a harrowing learning experience; but begs the question: do artists thrive in this kind of aggressive atmosphere?

"I do think that for me, the greatest success that I've had on a particular project or in exploring a role does come through collaboration," Teller said. "I wouldn't want to do a movie where everything I do, the director just says, 'Good job' and that I'm under directed.

"At the same time, I've done movies where I felt like I was over-handled and over-directed and I didn't feel like I was able to do some stuff that I wanted to. So I think it's a fine line, but at the end of the day, at least I need somebody to see what I'm doing. Especially in film, even though I'm feeling it right here, maybe it's not playing that way in the camera. For sure, for me I do like directors that really inspire me with ideas and give me something to chew on during the scene and something to get a better performance."

Being pushed

Directors can have reputations for being tyrants on the set too. James Cameron and Michael Bay are known screamers, and Stanley Kubrick famously drove Shelly Duvall to real tears on the set of "The Shining." Simmons feels there are limits in artistic pursuits.

"I completely agree with feeling the need for or the benefits of being pushed and being directed on a project, and collaborating," Simmons said. "The kind of manipulation and abuse I think has no place in, well, life. I love that this movie is inspiring that debate. How far is too far? How much is too much? Is it worth it? I've made the comparison before, this kind of relentless abuse might be necessary and appropriate if you're training Navy SEALs. I don't know if it's appropriate in music school, but it's there and it can be productive. There's no denying that."

Teller plays piano and saxophone as a child, and ultimately took up drums as a teenager. He never had a music teacher like Fletcher, but has seen examples of Fletcher behavior in other fields.

"There was a piano teacher that tried to push me but I was 11 and I said it's not worth it, so I quit taking lessons and started listening to music," Teller said. "With sports I had a baseball coach that used to yell just for the sake of yelling, and that did nothing because we didn't respect him because we just didn't know where he was coming from. With [Fletcher], you can understand where he's coming from. He's not just a guy yelling very funny, vulgar statements at people all day. Nobody cares about that guy. I had a driver's ed teacher that had severe issues with anger, but it didn't push me to be a better driver. We were 15, we just wanted to get our licenses. Out of nowhere this guy was getting so pissed."

The intensity of jazz drumming is evident on screen in "Whiplash" as Andrew literally bleeds for his art. Based on Chazelle's own experiences as a drummer, blood sprays across the drums as Andrew pumps his fingers to the bone.

"At the end of the day, Andrew becomes a much better drummer than Miles was," Teller said. "Although, I have a pretty good skill set, within three hours of practice I got to a pretty good place with it. I started getting blisters. I would come onto set sometimes, I would look at the drum kit, there's all this blood there. I literally would be like, 'Damien, that's too much. No way. That's just too much blood.' And he goes, 'No man, when I was playing, all my drumsticks were covered in blood. This is real, this is truthful.' I started getting some bloody blisters and was bandaging them up."

To bring the rigid world of Terrence Fletcher to life, Chazelle created the opposite environment on the set. Both Simmons and Teller marveled at how collaborative it was making "Whiplash," working together to create the rhythm of the scenes.

"We didn't really prepare in terms of working on the scenes together at all," Simmons said. "There just wasn't time for that and I actually prefer to work that way. He had to prepare a lot with the drumming and this and that. Whatever the role is, if you're working on an accent or a dialect or specific skill set that your character has that you don't necessarily, like playing the piano, then that's the kind of preparation that I find absolutely necessary."

"The rest of it, for me, if the words are good on the page, the rest of it just comes from spending some time with the script and not learning lines, but absorbing what the script has to offer. Then, especially with a young writer/director, to be allowed the freedom to occasionally depart from the page a little bit and just throw the ball back and forth, and throw each other a curveball was an added part of the fun too. Collaborative is my favorite word in moviemaking."

"Whiplash" shot for only 19 days, with three weeks of drum rehearsals for Teller. A Hollywood production would give him months of drum training and shoot for at least two months.

"Preparation obviously is an actor's greatest tool and then once you get there, you just have to respond because it's not theater where you get to rehearse with these people and really feel out beats for weeks and weeks and months and months," Teller said. "For this, I had kind of an idea of what J.K. was going to do, but this movie only works if we're in that same scene together, because it's kind of showy roles for both of us but if we're not responding to each other, then you lose so much of what really is happening."

Teller has quickly developed a major career since his feature film debut in 2010's "Rabbit Hole." He's diversified with teen comedies and franchises like "Divergent" and the upcoming "Fantastic Four." Prior to Whiplash he earned the most acclaim for playing an alcoholic teen in the romance "The Spectacular Now." "Whiplash" is his ideal role.

"When I read this script, I was very thankful for this opportunity," Teller said. "I had not read a script that demanded so much of a character my age, let alone one I would get to play the drums in. Yeah, there's vulnerability, but it's really a movie about drive and grit. It's almost shot like a boxing movie. There's just two guys going head to head with each other. I thought it was cool, man. It's got everything in a movie that I'd want to be a part of."

"When I was in college, this would've been a movie that I said I hope to do. It's a movie with integrity. It's a movie that's unapologetic. It's a movie that is kind of pushing the boundaries and is a movie that should leave you really talking about it and creating a discourse and having people excited to explore some of the themes in it. This is everything that I could have asked for in a project at that point in my career."

Simmons is known for a variety of roles like Peter Parker's newspaper editor in the "Spider-Man" trilogy and "Juno's" loving father. Now he's on TV every day in commercials for Farmer's Insurance. Diversity is the hallmark of his career, he says.

"If somebody asked me to play a Terrence Fletcher-esque character next week, I would be reticent to do so," Simmons said. "Part of the joy of doing what we all are fortunate enough to do here is you get to do something different every time out. I learned that at the very beginning. I'd been doing theater for 20 years but when I first started doing camera acting, really 'Oz' was my first big thing that a lot of people saw. I knew going into that that it was a potential trap, that I could be playing the Nazi of the week on TV for the rest of my life."

From nowhere, all of a sudden 'Law & Order' called and said, "Hey would you like to play the shrink on 'Law & Order?' It was this perfect yin yang thing that I had at the very beginning so that I was perceived as a guy who could do a variety of things. That's what we all want to do. We all want to not repeat ourselves constantly and explore the limits of our capabilities. I just want to do something different than whatever I just got done doing."

Whiplash is available on DVD and VOD.