Strange truth about fake extras in Oscar-winning movie revealed after 10 years

A producer has broken down the classic movie Whiplash ahead of its tenth anniversary of release and revealed that she’s still bothered by some embarrassing movie tricks.

At the 2014 drama, Miles Teller portrayed young jazz drummer Andrew Neiman, who, while enrolled at a prominent New York music school, is driven to breaking point by his extremely strict teacher, Terrence Fletcher (JK Simmons).

The film, which Damien Chazelle of Babylon directed, received high marks from both reviewers and audiences. It subsequently received five Oscar nominations, and JK won the best supporting actor prize.

During an appearance on the Hollywood Gold podcast – to celebrate the recent cinema re-release of Whiplash – producer Helen Estabrook lifted the lid on those stunning scenes and confessed that there was a big dose of movie magic going on at the time.

‘The thing I think about all the time with that film, and I think that one of the main things that I’ve carried with me throughout my career… The very end of that film, in the giant final sequence, we ran out of time with the extras,’ she told the host.

‘Obviously, we had no time. If you look closely, you will see that, in the audience, the people are actually white T-shirts on chairs. It’s just T-shirts on chairs. That’s our audience.

‘I remember so vividly coming home at the end of that day thinking, “Well, we’re screwed.”’

Helen revealed that she was reminded of the T-shirts coming to the rescue ahead of the cinema re-release, explaining that the fake crowd was prominent in one of the new movie posters.

‘We’re getting ready for this re-release that Sony Pictures is very kindly doing for us’, she continued. ‘They were sending us new key art and posters for it. One of the posters, you could very clearly see that it’s just Miles and a bunch of T-shirts in seats.

‘I wanted so badly to be like, “Please, can that be our poster?” because that is this movie. That is what this movie is: It’s Miles, JK and T-shirts on seats.’

Anyone else desperate to rewatch and catch a glimpse of the T-shirts?

Whiplash has won high praise from many and currently has a seriously impressive Rotten Tomatoes score of 94% from the audience and reviewers.

Critics commended it as a ‘pleasure to watch’, ‘simply outstanding’, ‘utterly brilliant and intense’, and ‘as close to perfect’ as film fans can get.

It’s no wonder that Sony Pictures has issued a re-release, with Damien’s masterpiece currently back in cinemas in the US.

Speaking to Vanity Fair ahead of the anniversary celebrations, Miles opened up about the intense shoot, sharing that he had a blast on set.

‘All the musicians in the film were real musicians – which is highly unusual – and they’re all playing live the whole time,’ he told the outlet. ‘There were a lot of moments in there where I was really drumming. Getting to jam with the musicians, man, that was so fun.

‘The last scene in the movie, there weren’t really cutaways, so we got to do that whole thing. That solo is so aggressive, and we filmed the crap out of that.

‘Anytime Neiman goes off, whether it was with the practicing or just trying to keep the tempo or whatever it was, Damien would just – that was the one time where he would just roll camera and roll camera and not even yell cut, because he wanted this utter exhaustion.

‘That was a part of the last couple days of filming, and those were 16-hour days and filming until five o’clock in the morning.

‘People always ask me like, “Oh, so what was it really intense?” I was like, “No, I don’t know.” As soon as they yell “cut,” me and JK would make a joke, or me and JK were talking about baseball.’

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