Chazelle was born in Providence, Rhode Island to a Catholic family. His French-American father, Bernard Chazelle, is the Eugene Higgins Professor of computer science at Princeton University. His mother, Celia Chazelle, is from an English-Canadian family based in Calgary, Alberta, and teaches medieval history at The College of New Jersey.
Chazelle was raised in Princeton, New Jersey, where, although a Catholic, he attended a Hebrew school for four years due to his parents' dissatisfaction with his religious education at a church Sunday school.
Chazelle has a sister, Anna Chazelle, who is an actress. Their English-born maternal grandfather, John Martin, is the son of stage actress Eileen Earle.
Filmmaking was Chazelle's first love, but he subsequently wanted to be a musician and struggled to make it as a jazz drummer at Princeton High School. He has said that he had an intense music teacher in the Princeton High School Studio Band, who was the inspiration for the character of Terence Fletcher (J. K. Simmons) in Chazelle's breakout film Whiplash. Unlike the film's protagonist Andrew Neiman (Miles Teller), Chazelle stated that he knew instinctively that he never had the talent to be a great drummer and after high school, pursued filmmaking again. He studied filmmaking in the Visual and Environmental Studies department at Harvard University and graduated in 2007.
At Harvard, he lived in Currier House as roommates with composer and frequent collaborator Justin Hurwitz. The two were among the original members of the indie-pop group Chester French, formed during their freshman year.
