I remember moving out to L.A. straight after college and just starting to try to write scripts and trying to get stuff off the ground.

As a kid, I was just writing scripts and taking whatever film classes I could in college.

I remember starting out and covering songs.

Whiplash' was just a lucky kind of convergence of events in that I'd been trying to get a bigger project off the ground with no success for a while, and then finally, out of frustration, I just wrote this leaner, meaner, personal script about my experiences as a jazz drummer, and that's the one that wound up getting made.

I remember being inspired myself when smaller films, whether it's 'Beasts' or 'Winter's Bone,' wound up in the Oscars lineup.

I remember auditioning for 'Moulin Rouge!,' the part that Ewan McGregor played. I was so young: I was literally just out of college.