“Babylon,” the new film by Academy Award winner Damien Chazelle (“La La Land,” “First Man”), premiered Wednesday night in New York. As you’ve probably heard already, the film—a tale of outsized ambition and outrageous excess, tracing the rise and fall of multiple characters during an era of rampant depravity in early Hollywood— has been met with polarizing responses. Some call the film genius; others describe it as Chazelle’s first flop (you can read more reactions here).
Wherever you ultimately land on the film will be subjective, though your reaction likely won’t be tepid; this is a film that provokes big, loud responses. That’s because it’s an undeniably big, bold, brassy, ambitious film with delirious audacity, some of which absolutely has to be admired on at least a technical level (I’m in the pro “Babylon” camp ultimately, though with a few reservations about the last of three long hours). The bravura filmmaking is stunning, the choreographed long shots are outstanding, and all that’s packed into them, and the film is riotously funny, wild, and deliciously outrageous.
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.
During the Q&A for the film, Jean Smart said her character, a fictional gossip columnist named Elinor St. John, is one of many characters in the movie that is seemingly “infatuated with the magic of Hollywood.” And that might be the perfect summation of what the film is about in many ways. It’s a portrait of many points of view, from veterans, stars, studio execs, gossip columnists, wannabes, hopefuls, and rising stars that are all hopelessly drunk and addicted to the magical influence of the big screen and how it can transport us as audiences.
Smart recalled a moment where she tells Brad Pitt’s character, A-list star Jack Conrad, no matter what happens to his career, he will “’ Spend eternity with the angels and ghosts,’ she’s just as fascinated and starstruck as anyone.”
Asked about reading the screenplay and their reaction to the script, many of the cast admitted it was an intimidating read. Li Jun Li, who plays the dancer/actor Lady Fay Zhu in the film, said she was “blown away” by the screenplay. “It took me three days to read the script.”
“It was terrifying,” Margot Robbie added about her first pass at Chazelle’s screenplay. “It was thrilling, and I’m sure we were all reading the script and thinking, ‘how is this going to get made??’ And pragmatically, I was thinking, how am I going to cry on queue?? With certain scenes, I thought, ‘I’m terrified,’ [so] I have to do it.”
Smart, who cracked quips all night long, said she was bracing for a backlash for all the debased bacchanalia in the film. “I thought we would be run out of town, tarred and feathered by the extreme Christian right, who already thought Hollywood was Sodom and Gomorrah, she laughed. “This was going to put our nail in the coffin. Thank god, it’s coming out after the mid-term elections.”
Sometimes the saturnalia actually got out of control, and Chazelle admitted that some of the “most uninhibited extras I’ve ever seen” were pretty method and mischievous, and the “party atmosphere” of the film rolled into real life.
“I’m not sure if I’m supposed to say this… but some of the extras were caught bringing in [MDMA],” he said to uproarious laughter from the audience. “And things like that, and they had to get politely sent home, and I was like, ‘But guys, they’re just in the spirit of the thing. This is a sign it was working.’ Bless their hearts!”
As you’ve probably heard from some of the early reactions, there’s an outrageous scene of explosive elephant diarrhea in the film (not to mention scenes of significant vomiting). Chazelle noted that the elephant itself wasn’t real—serious hats off to the VFX crew because it looked real and noted, “The diarrhea was practical, and I do have some great behind-the-scenes photos,” he laughed. The director chuckled, reminiscing about his cinematographer Linus Sandgren being covered head to toe in a poncho, holding the camera, as practical [but fake] diarrhea was essentially dropped all over him. “He was ready for battle with his camera,” he said. “I feel like everyone was brought to their knees at some point during the course of the making [of the film].”
Music is integral to the film, once again created by Chazelle’s composing collaborator Justin Hurwitz. And in discussing the music, Chazelle revealed the structure of the narrative. “As much as it’s a movie about moviemaking, it’s also a party movie,” he explained. “And I mean that in the tradition of something like ‘La Dolce Vita,’ and films like that where it wanted to be structured around parties. Parties would be the instances where the characters would coalesce together and go their separate ways.”
“So, each party would be a way of where society is at any one given moment,” he continued. “From the total unhingedness of the opening, through to the pool party where the wheels are starting to come off the wagon, and you can see the end coming, to the Hearst bungalow party where Margot vomits. And then the Tobey Maguire’s section of the movie is like the ‘last party,’ where its just completely… everything that might have been fun before has been completely upended.”
Chazelle said music had to not only structure the entire film, but most of it also had to be completed before the film even started production.
“Think of it as a movie structured by four parties, and it’s not a party without music, so each of those [events] had to be propelled by diegetic music that would blend into score,” he explained. “So a lot of the music had to be done before shooting began. For Jovan to practice to, for Li Jun to sing to, for Margot to dance to, even for certain cases for Brad and Margot to act to.”
The film begins to wrap up—no real spoilers here because it’s so abstract and open to interpretation— with a conceptual “power of movies” montage that’s pretty experimental. Diego Calva’s character in the 1950s watches a movie and then is essentially transported; the film’s linear logic breaks down, and the film explodes into a collage of essentially the future of cinema, breaking down even further into just the photochemical process, lights, experimental abstract imagery either devoid of meaning or rich in meaning, depending on how you look at it.
Asked what it all means, Chazelle said he’d rather not answer. “I’ll skip [revealing] the message part,” he said. “That’s for the audience to decide; I think anything I say would ruin it.” Chazelle described this non-linear, conceptual, intangible section of the film as “free jazz,” a free association of images, sound, light, color, and the collision of all these images juxtaposed to one another. “It was one of the most joyful experiences of editing I’ve ever had,” he explained. “By the end, it’s reducing cinema to its essence, colors, shapes, and music, and that’s everything. How that alone can tell a million stories, unleash a million emotions, that to me, through all the shit of it, that’s the magic of it.”
“That’s where the love letter of it all comes through for me,” he continued. “I think of [this] movie as a poison pen, a hate letter to Hollywood, but a love letter to cinema. So there’s a lot of shit that goes into the industry, in the making, and the lives wrecked in order to make this thing, but something comes out of the other end that is undeniable and that humanity will always have to show for itself.”
“Babylon” opens in wide release on December 23 via Paramount Pictures.