Babylon

"Babylon" director Damien Chazelle said scheduling issues meant Emma Stone dropped out of the role before Margot Robbie was cast.

That's the sort of under-reported aspect of moviemaking where sometimes the stars — forgive the pun — have to align." It's hard to imagine many other people other than him doing his role," the director said. More movies should do that." So I think things happen for a reason," Chazelle added. The "Whiplash," "La La Land," and "First Man" director pointed out that there's a lot of luck involved with getting actors on board, adding: "So, it's a lot of luck that comes in. "And certainly now that I see Margot and the role, it's hard to imagine anyone other than her doing it.

Writer-director Damien Chazelle pulls back the curtain to give us a glimpse of the chaos that reigned in early Hollywood, both on and off-set.

28 minutes ago And is it really such a tragedy that movie stars — as opposed to musicians, say, or studio gofers — are obliged to change and adapt to new technology? And yet, as the film meanders on through the 1920s, incorporating the stories of a number of supporting players — jazz musicians, studio gofers — it becomes difficult to figure out what Chazelle is trying to say.

Alternating between its two modes – rollicking satire and elegiac reflection – with whiplash abandon, Damien Chazelle's three-hour extravaganza, ...

The cocaine-addled starlet Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) is meant to be a tragic diamond in the rough, sneered at by snobs, but comes across as a grating exhibitionist whose greatest talent is control of her tear ducts. The visual extravagance is blessedly not pumped up by CGI, but it is larded with cinematic clichés, like the camera swooping across a room towards the bell of a trumpet (a move repeated ad nauseam), or conversations jazzed up by whip pans. Dedicated to the proposition that more is more, Babylon is a marathon of excess. Babylon’s determination to wallow in decadence leads it to portray an artistically glorious period (1927 alone saw the US releases of Murnau’s Sunrise, Keaton’s The General and von Sternberg’s Underworld) as one of decline and feverish hedonism. Viewers steeped in the period will recognise details scavenged from the lives and careers of Clara Bow, Jeanne Eagels, John Gilbert and Anna May Wong, as well as an homage to Morocco (1930) and recreations of scenes from MGM’s The Hollywood Revue of 1929 and even the 1918 Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle short The Cook. Periodically during its more than three-hour runtime, the film pauses its bombastic, unrelenting assault on the senses in order to tout the magic of movies.

Sean and Amanda also share some final Oscar nomination predictions!

Then, the team from Babylon—writer-director Damien Chazelle, actor-producer Olivia Hamilton, and producer Matthew Plouffe—talk with Sean about making their ambitious Hollywood feature, and the hive that has grown around it (1:41:00). [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/show/6mTel3azvnK8isLs4VujvF?si=d7BOe53_QVSHWI3urtI6_w) / [Apple Podcasts](https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-big-picture/id1439252196?mt=2) / [Stitcher](https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-ringer/the-big-picture-2) / [RSS](https://rss.art19.com/the-big-picture) [An action-packed episode!](https://open.spotify.com/episode/1I9jFvlmEp2ww8nAXymwVt) Chris Ryan joins Sean and Amanda to share some final Oscar nomination predictions (1:00) before engaging in a truly chaotic 2023 movie auction.

He's a hanger-on in the circle of legendary actor Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), a Valentino-level heartthrob who is living high on the hog in the era of sex, drugs ...

Babylon sees Chazelle exposing the best and worst of his game; the score by Justin Hurwitz is dreamy, evocative and very La La Land, and both Pitt and Robbie fire on all cylinders with some meaty roles in which they excel. Damien Chazelle’s follow up to La La Land and First Man is a lavish, deliberately shocking and rather melancholy story of the non-stop party of Roaring Twenties film-making, and the profound sense of sadness that set in as careers crashed and burned with the coming of sound, so hardly of-the-moment for 2023. He’s a hanger-on in the circle of legendary actor Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), a Valentino-level heartthrob who is living high on the hog in the era of sex, drugs and wild orgies.

Racy period epic Babylon drops in the UK today! Scott Garfield/Paramount Pictures. Starring the likes of Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, and Diego Calva, ...

I think a lot of that speaks to the sort of unregulated, "Wild Wild West" freedom that existed in Hollywood early on. So a lot of that excitement gets funnelled away, and you have to jump ahead 40, 50 years to find any kernels of that sort of freedom coming back. The world of the movie goes through a pretty big change, and I wanted to capture that but still make it feel snappy. It’s like Orson Welles said, “it’s the biggest and best toy train set that a boy could ask for”. It had a percussion to it and a rhythm that felt right to me. What I really appreciate about this movie is that Damien was intent on not doing a stodgy period piece, but capturing that “Wild Wild West” idea of Hollywood at the time, according to reports. It’s amazing how you can chuck a scene and things can just grind to a halt. Damien: It wouldn’t say it was easy, but it was really fun; I felt like a kid in a candy shop. Damien: The irony is that the first somewhat polished cut of the movie was shorter than the current movie – it was like two hours fifty minutes or something. In retrospect, that original version short-changed the nuance of the role. I know there was an attempt to cut down the film, I saw a shorter version and it felt longer. Damien: Okay, so the ending is where we started, but there was a build-up to it, and it was very different in early drafts of the script.

Damien Chazelle seemingly did not satisfy his fascination with Hollywood with 2016's La La Land as he has returned to the setting with Babylon.

Damien Chazelle's party-starting paean to the Silent Era certainly packs a punch, but can 'Babylon' keep the night going on forever?

The rest of the film follows each as they rise through the ranks – Nelly as Tinseltown’s favourite new ingénue, Manny as a top producer. It’s frustrating, and discourages the audience from engaging emotionally. Every character kicks off their adventure with a well-written intro scene, adding sufficient layers which make the audience sympathise and care about what they do next. This makes for a seriously exciting first act, but – as with all substance-fuelled benders – the effects eventually wear off. First though, there’s plenty of fun to be had watching all of the madness. Nellie tells him about her dreams of becoming a star and living the hedonistic high life (“I just want for everyone to party forever”).

CINEMA Babylon. Directed by Whiplash and La La Land's Damien Chazellea, and boasting a stellar cast including Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, and Tobey Maguire, ...

A feel-good flick with a great cast and an uplifting story, be sure to give this a go! Packed with action, great performances, and a solid story, give this a go if you're a fan of slick and uncompromising sci-fi. Yun Jung-yi is part of the military elite and has made a name for herself after a string of almost flawless victories.

Hollywood happened quite by accident. In 1910, the director DW Griffith came to Los Angeles with a troupe of actors to make a short film.

Stars rose, stars fell, and the arrival of sound terminated many a career. Brad Pitt’s character Jack Conrad is inspired by John Gilbert, a huge star of the silent era who was dumped by his studio during the transition to sound. Southwest of the Hollywood Hills, Beverly Hills was emerging, made fashionable by Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, whose grand house Pickfair became a social hub for the film industry’s elite. The day before he filed for bankruptcy, Ray and Grant hosted a lavish dinner at which each guest was tended by a personal butler. In Hollywood, in the 1910s, absolutely everything was new — the place, the industry, the studio concept, the art of cinema itself. And in the opening section, actors, directors and crew give tantalising insights into what the dawn of Hollywood might have been like. Allan Dwan, the pioneering director and writer, was there from the start. In 1910, the director DW Griffith came to Los Angeles with a troupe of actors to make a short film. The dawn of Hollywood was the cultural equivalent of the Gold Rush. Hollywood’s golden age began in the 1920s, when studios run by canny European immigrants gained control of the means of production and began pumping out films. Babylon hurtles its characters pell-mell towards the arrival of sound, a revolution that would spell disaster for many. At that time, most of America’s expanding film industry was based around New York, where the weather was terrible for nine months of the year and movie studios had to pay regular fees to Thomas Edison, who owned numerous patents on the movie-making process.

Spoiler warning!* The Margot Robbie-led Hollywood epic is filled with loud yelling, projectile vomit and elephant faeces, but Chris Edwards thinks its ...

But on another level, and hopefully this is where Manny kind of reaches a place of peace at the end, it's comforting, because you can’t help but be aware of how much bigger it is than you, and how you’re a part of something bigger. “And his place as being, in some ways, one solitary frame in the infinite reel of celluloid that is the history of this art form.” If that sounds a bit pretentious, it’s probably because it is. Weirder still, as part of the audience surrounding him, we’re expected to understand and even share his feelings. Like the rest of the zombified audience, he too is now enjoying Singin’ in the Rain. Whiplash is the best film about jazz drumming I have ever seen. “[He’s] reflecting on his place in the bigger scheme of things,” the director told Or, as we’re probably meant to perceive it, a bird’s-eye view of the top of our own heads. The camera then hovers directly above the audience, giving us a bird’s-eye view of the top of their heads. Ostensibly, Babylon is a film about the highs and lows of four individuals working in 1920s Hollywood. In the final scene, as an older Manny enters a cinema to catch a screening of that very movie, he soon realises that the traumatic events of his Hollywood career have been reimagined as a Gene Kelly-led musical comedy. As Manny understandably begins to weep, the camera pulls out and sweeps across the audience, revealing a sea of faces that look significantly happier than his. Yet another ode to the majesty of movies, Babylon concludes with a nauseatingly saccharine sequence: a flourishing, Oscars-style montage, pulling together clips of various notable films throughout history.