Academy Award winner Damien Chazelle’s audacious new film “Babylon” is out in the world. Or rather, the highly-anticipated movie, the last major Oscar contender of the year (Unless “Avatar 2” surprises), has been seen by critics in New York and LA, and the responses to the wild film have been dividing. Known for “La La Land” and “First Man,” Chazelle’s films are already bold, innovative, and ambitious, but “Babylon” takes some major wild swings. “Babylon” premiered Wednesday night in New York, and the provocative film—a tale of ambition and excess in the late 1920s/early 1930s Hollywood while tracking the rise and fall of multiple characters during an era of depravity—was once again met with polarizing responses. Some herald it as Oscar-worthy genius; others call it Chazelle’s first misfire (you can read more reactions here).
Regardless, nearly everyone who has seen it can likely agree the film is aspiring, daring, wild, and over-the-top (though whether that’s a good or bad thing tends to be subjective). On a technical level, “Babylon” is nearly as outrageous as its uninhibited content, filled with dazzling set pieces, jaw-dropping tracking shots, and hyper-ambitious dance and camera choreography (when Margot Robbie read the script, she thought, “how is this going to get made??’”). It’s a riotously funny film too, but results will vary as it’s three hours long.
The film’s massive cast includes Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, newcomer Diego Calva, Jovan Adepo, Li Jun Li, Jean Smart, and Tobey Maguire, not to mention a supporting cast that includes Lukas Haas, Max Minghella, Samara Weaving, Olivia Wilde, Spike Jonze (as a raving Germanic filmmaker in the classic “crack the whip” fashion) Katherine Waterston, Red Hot Chili Pepper bassist Flea and many more.
The post-film Q&A was lively and eventful, with various mishaps adding to the pratfall-like comedy. Brad Pitt almost fell backward out of his chair at the beginning of the discussion, luckily catching himself with the help of some help from Robbie and Smart. Later on, his microphone didn’t work, which led to further antics.
Much of the conversations revolved around the extreme elements in the film, the elephant diarrhea (read more about that here), the vomiting, the vibrant and grand tracking shots, the snake fight scene, whether these actors could have survived the “talkie” age of cinema after the silent era and of course, the nudity.
“I remember a lot of naked people … like, a lot,” Diego Calva said to much laughter.
Margot Robbie said she would sometimes have to dance for practically eight hours in a day and called her quickly-rising-star Nellie LaRoy character her favorite but most challenging role ever. “Nelly’s the most physical character I’ve ever played,” she explained. “I miss her. She was something else; I love her. But I feel like it’s the first time I’ve ever been pushed to my limits by a director in the greatest way ever. I’ve never been fully let off the leash before. I don’t think, not fully. There’s always been like, ‘you gotta bring it back [down] because we have to move the plot forward,’ but Damien was like, ‘More! More! Bigger! Go for it, more! Go for it!’
“He would let us improvise in some of the most insane scenes. Some of them are in the movie,” she said with a pause and then a laugh that indicated that most of that improv was on the cutting room floor, but clearly, it helped the process regardless. “[Damien] has such a clear and specific vision, but then he can also totally relinquish control of a set and let us go mad, and you can go mad because you know you have a great director looking out for you, so I couldn’t have wished for anything better, it was the greatest experience of my life. It’s the greatest character I’ve ever played and probably the greatest character I ever will play.”
“I was so in awe of that big tracking shot that kept going on and on and on with like 37 bits going on,” Jean Smart detailed. “And all you’re thinking is, ‘please don’t let me be the one that blows this, and we have to start all over again, please, please, please. All I’m thinking is don’t block the chicken’s close-up.”
Brad Pitt tried to answer a question about the tracking shots and choreography and then threw his non-functioning mic behind him in frustration, causing an eruption of laughter. He eventually borrowed Robbie’s microphone. “I shot the first four days, [witnessed] some amazing choreography, and it was raucous, and it was bawdy, and it had this great energy to it, and half the background is naked, and they’re snorting cocaine off someone’s ass,” Pitt explained. “And then I had three days off, and I came back, and it was still going. I was like, oh my god.”
“I still marvel how much this man got in one shot,” Pitt continued. “I’ve never quite seen it. I’ve been really fortunate to work with some of the great filmmakers, and I already consider Damien Chazelle one of the greats.”
The actor described the screenplay when he first read it as “something spectacular … a very visceral read … It’s extreme, it’s big, it’s bawdy, and at the same time underneath it, there’s just real heart and need for meaning.”
“None of us really matter in it,” Pitt said of his character and all the other characters in the film, one of the themes being cinema will outlast us all. “But we’re all a piece, a little piece of this art of storytelling, and I feel pretty damn honored.”
Without spoiling too much, one sequence in the film involves Margot Robbie and a rattlesnake fight. Suffice it to say, shooting it was as comedic for the cast as it was for the audience who saw the finished product.
“I felt like a real tit,” Robbie said, laughing about her scene with a fake snake. “I’m running around with my arms, trying to whip [the snake[ around with my arms, trying to make it look crazy, I felt like a real tit. But it was also funny, and I had no top on, you know, a lot was going on, but once you get past the ridiculous of it, it was a lot of fun.”
The film starts in the late 1920s in the silent era of cinema and travels through the 1930s during “the talkies” when sound revolutionized moviemaking. In real life, a lot of famous actors could not make the proper transition to the sound era—Charlie Chaplin did make sound films, for example, but name one famous Chaplin film with sound—and the film certainly depicts the struggles that some of the characters go through in this new boon era.
Asked whether they thought they could have made the transition successfully, most of the actor’s reactions were candid and amusing. “I think I would have been better in silent films,” Robbie said. “I really appreciate that kind of acting, it’s all head-to-toe acting, and close-ups were kind of a rarity. Even when you’re watching films further in the 1930s, you still wait for the close-up; it’s all still pretty much head to toe, and then, boom, the close-up. Now it’s the opposite, now it’s a real luxury to get a wide establisher that you spend all your money on, but I like the head-to-toe acting, the I like the technicality of it, the physicality of it.”
“I woulda been shit,” Pitt quipped to much laughter. “Says the man who fell off the stage at the beginning,” Robbie said, adding her own bon mot.
“Alright, yeah,” he said. “if I coulda been in a Buster Keaton movie, I woulda been really happy, but otherwise, I woulda been shit.”
“Babylon” opens in wide release on December 23 via Paramount Pictures.
