The timing is unfortunate. If this had been released a few weeks earlier it would have been received far more enthusiastically. As it is, it has been totally drowned out by news of Nouvel's cross complaint.
Exclusive: Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, and Diego Calva light up ‘Babylon’ in the first official look at Damien Chazelle’s epic ode to Hollywood’s Golden Age. https://t.co/CTAFWrJjeJ
— VANITY FAIR (@VanityFair) September 7, 2022
Based on early footage and images, Babylon looks to be a lavish romp through Hollywood’s nascent Golden Age, starring a brash Brad Pitt, an uninhibited Margot Robbie, and newcomer Diego Calva. But beneath the glitz and glamour, Chazelle wanted Babylon to underscore the fact that the town’s rapid change and growth came at a price. “Everything is shifting underneath people's feet,” he says, “and I became really fascinated by the human cost of disruption at that magnitude, at a time when there was no roadmap, when everything was just new and wild.”
Casting two of Hollywood’s biggest movie stars in Babylon’s lead roles made sense thematically, as well as financially. Pitt and Robbie, who starred together in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, play actors at very different points in their careers, and Chazelle knew his stars would see echoes of their own lives in the parts. “Part of what was magical about working with them in these roles is that each of them felt like they were really able to make the performance the most personal thing they had done,” he says.
The majority of characters in Babylon are fictional, though Chazelle took inspiration from real-life Hollywood stars. Pitt’s character, Jack Conrad, is a hard-partying “uber-movie star,” as Chazelle puts it, inspired by the likes of John Gilbert, Clark Gable and Douglas Fairbanks: “He’s reaching a point in his life in his career where he's starting to look back and starting to wonder what's ahead.” (Pitt expressed a similar sentiment about his own work in a recent GQ cover story).
As for Robbie, she’s playing Nellie LaRoy, a scrappy aspiring actress who’s an amalgam of early stars like Clara Bow, Jeanne Eagels, John Crawford, and Alma Rubens. Nellie is a new Hollywood transplant who’s suddenly in the spotlight, an experience that the Wolf of Wall Street’s breakout could relate to. “Margot as a person has this—it's a very Australian sort of thing—brash, bold, hungry kind of edge to her that she was really able to tap into and do a lot of really fun things with,” says Chazelle.
Calva, the cast’s newcomer, plays Manny Torres, a Mexican actor who, as an outsider in Hollywood, serves as the audience’s eyes in the world of Babylon. Says Chazelle, “In many ways, he was going through a very similar experience to the character he was playing as well, of just stumbling on a larger-than-life campus and going, ‘What the fuck is going on?’”
Babylon’s rich supporting cast —including Jovan Adepo, Li Jun Li, Jean Smart and Tobey Maguire—also play fictional characters (the only named real-life person in the main ensemble is producer Irving Thalberg, played by Max Minghella), whose dreams of fame and success rest on navigating a perilous town.
But Chazelle wanted to plumb the lower depths too—to juxtapose La La Land’s gorgeous, Hollywood-glam set pieces and Whiplash’s darker examination of ambition’s toll. “It was really a wild West period for these people, this gallery of characters, as they rise and fall, rise, fall, rise again, fall again,” he says, adding that “the thing that they're building is springing back on them and chewing them up.”
Expect a story that explores the multiple levels of transformation, from the city itself to the industry, and the people hoping to make it big. Chazelle references the “headlong, heedless ambition” of that time as a central theme of his movie. And, not coincidentally, he says Babylon is his most ambitious work yet: “It was definitely the hardest thing I've done. Just the logistics of it, the number of characters, the scale of the set pieces, the span of time that the movie charts—it all conspired to make it particularly challenging, but it was a challenge that was pretty exciting to take on.”
