From Hollywood to Home: Black Voices in Entertainment
- Sisters discovered and embraced surprising, sometimes scary, similarities while collaborating, finding connection rather than separation.
- Collaboration forced them to stop distinguishing themselves and celebrate shared identities and overlaps.
- Damien Chazelle reflected on his Princeton youth and drum lessons with Tony DeNicola in Lawrenceville.
- DeNicola’s old big band drum kit inspired the core idea for Whiplash.
Embarrassing or not, the result is truly incredible to watch. In keeping with an event celebrating a film from the past, Bucking Fastard made Kate look back at her own past—and her relationship with her sister and costar. “It’s interesting hearing your sibling’s perspective of what your childhood was like because I’m the older sibling with Rooney, but I’m also the younger sibling with my older brother,” says Kate.
“She has a different perspective of what our dynamic was. But now as adults, I really look up to Rooney and I like to let her lead. I don’t know what she would say, but I definitely now as adults really let her lead and want her to lead in a lot of ways. But it’s impossible to ignore all of the family dynamics of an entire childhood, so a lot of that came into play.”
If anything, working together forced the sisters to stop trying to distinguish themselves from one another and embrace just how similar they really are. “You spend a lifetime trying to separate from your siblings, especially just if you like the same things or whatever. You want to be unique and you want to be different,” she continued. “But for this, it was so important to find the similarities. And I guess the surprising part about it was that it all came for free. We’re so similar in so many ways, in so many really scary, freaky, weird ways. And that I think was the beautiful part about it was that we got to discover each other in a really specific way at work.”
The evening also had Chazelle thinking about his own past. Growing up in Princeton, he would drive to Lawrenceville, New Jersey, for drum lessons with the late Tony DeNicola, a relationship that would eventually serve as the basis for his breakout film Whiplash. “He was great, this old Italian American from the big band years,” said Chazelle. “He had his old kit that was from god knows when with the old calf skin heads and it was amazing.”
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