Damien Chazelle is no stranger to either star power or turning back the clock to look at historical figures. He’s made Los Angeles, Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone sing and dance in ‘La La Land’ and chronicled some of legendary astronaut Neil Armstrong’s life in ‘First Man’.
But for ‘Babylon’, Chazelle is thinking even bigger. He’s got Hollywood on his mind, and more specifically the 1920s, a pivotal time for both the movie industry and the city most identified with it.
At this point, Los Angeles is expanding rapidly, an infusion of money and people arriving, the latter on the hunt for wealth and fame.
Movies, and the performers who star in them, are making the difficult transition from the silent era to talkies, with some careers on the rise and some on the wane. It’s an idea that Chazelle – who won the Best Director Oscar for ‘La La Land’, but saw Best Picture go instead to ‘Moonlight’ during one of the biggest Oscar night surprise moments back in 2017 – has been percolating in his head for at least 15 years, ever since he moved to Los Angeles with his own dreams of success.
“The basic idea was just to do a big, epic, multi-character movie, set in these early days of Los Angeles and Hollywood, when both of these things were coming into what we now think of them as,” he tells Vanity Fair. “I kept putting it off, because it was just a little too massive.”
But with the likes of ‘Whiplash’, ‘La La Land’ and ‘First Man’ under his belt, he finally felt ready to tackle the giant movie he’d been making in his brain for years.
And he’s recruited quite the star cast, with Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, and relative newcomer Diego Calva, leading a sprawling ensemble that also includes Jean Smart, Jovan Adepo, Li Jun Li, P.J. Byrne, Lukas Haas, Olivia Hamilton, Tobey Maguire, Max Minghella, Rory Scovel, Katherine Waterston, Flea, Jeff Garlin, Eric Roberts, Ethan Suplee, Samara Weaving and Olivia Wilde.
For the most part, the cast are playing fictional folk, albeit based on real movie stars of the time. Minghella is one of the exceptions, playing powerhouse producer Irving Thalberg.
Pitt’s hard-partying Jack Conrad, for example, has echoes of 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,” says Chazelle of the character.
Robbie, meanwhile, is Nellie LaRoy, burning with ambition and energy, who is the Clara Bow or Joan Crawford of the story. And Chazelle sees her as a good fit for the person playing her: “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.”
And then there’s Calva, playing Manny Torres, a Mexican immigrant who is a wide-eyed newcomer to the world and serves as the audience’s POV.
We’re promised wild, lavish parties, scandals and more when ‘Babylon’ opens in theaters on December 25th.
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