I remember the first time I saw La La Land in the cinema when I was about 13. I recall walking out feeling like the film had been played at me rather than simply shown to me. As the years passed and I became more conscious of the act of watching a film, this particular feeling has followed me through every Damien Chazelle film since. It is the sense that someone is not just telling a story but conducting it. It is also why Chazelle should matter more than ever in 2025, especially as cinema wrestles with the rise of AI and the slow erosion of the human fingerprint.
Chazelle’s films feel like a handmade soap. You can sense the sweat of the performers. You can sense the strain of the cameras. You can sense the pulse of scenes that build, collapse, and rebuild with the logic of live performance. This is unusual now. Many directors work with clean digital processes. Some trust pre-visualisation tools and algorithms to shape the geometry of a scene. Chazelle works from rhythm instead. Every shot feels like it sits inside a bar of music. He once described editing as “counting beats.” You can feel that in every tight close up and every long camera glide.
His approach is what one might call “niche.” It refuses the trend towards smoothness. We could undoubtedly say that AI is incredibly good at producing smoothness. It can make images “perfect” for the audience. It can structure scenes in ways that feel technically correct. Yet it struggles with the instinctive chaos that defines Chazelle’s work. In Babylon, the camera bolts across a party filled with dancers, musicians, and extras who seem only half controlled. The movement is rough. The air feels hot. Nothing is clean. That is the point. Chazelle understands that cinema thrives on friction. Audiences respond to scenes that feel hard won. Machines cannot convincingly reproduce that tension yet. They can simulate energy but not spontaneity.
Chazelle also builds films around music in a way that I would say is unusually deep. Many directors treat a score as decoration. He treats it as the spine of the story. His long partnership with composer Justin Hurwitz is central to this. They shape scenes together before cameras roll. Sometimes the music comes first. Sometimes the rhythm of a character’s emotions leads the composition. In La La Land, every shift in feeling matches a shift in harmony. In First Man, the music creates warmth inside the coldness of space flight. In Babylon, the sound is wild and oversized. It mirrors a world that cannot contain its own ambition.
That musical integration is rare in modern film. AI tools can now generate background tracks in seconds. They can adjust mood or tempo on request. They cannot replace the slow creative conversation between two artists who shape a film together. Chazelle’s work shows how much richness comes from this kind of partnership. It shows how music and story can grow together rather than snap together at the end of production.
In 2025, audiences are hungry for films that feel touched by actual hands. Chazelle’s films offer that texture. They remind us why cinema is still built by people, not pipelines. And maybe that is why a Sheffield screening would feel right. A Chazelle film thrives in a room full of people breathing together. Maybe it is time for Sheffield to see one of his films the way they were meant to be experienced.
Image Credits – The Movie DB
