Paramount has pulled the curtain back on “Babylon,” Damien Chazelle’s period comedy documenting the excess of the early age of Hollywood. An early screening Monday evening at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills has opened the floodgates for first reactions.
The 188-minute epic represents a return to awards season for Chazelle, who became the youngest best director Oscar winner ever in 2016 for his work helming “La La Land.” His subsequent Neil Armstrong biopic “First Man” and his Sundance breakout “Whiplash” also made sizable dents in their respective awards runs.
Margot Robbie, Diego Calva and Brad Pitt lead “Babylon,” among a stacked cast that includes Tobey Maguire, Jean Smart, Li Jun Li and Jovan Adepo. Chazelle has described the film as being inspired by Federico Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita,” Robert Altman’s “Nashville” and “The Godfather” — “old-school epics that managed, through a handful of characters, to convey a society changing.”
Babylon
Exploring Babylon, Damien Chazelle’s star-studded new movie
The Oscar-winning director reveals the inspirations for his highly anticipated period drama featuring Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, and more.
Damien Chazelle is a bit tired. When he calls EW in early October, he’s still hard at work putting the finishing touches on Babylon, his sweeping epic (out Dec. 23) about the rise and fall of a menagerie of characters played by Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Olivia Wilde, and newcomer Diego Calva. They’re all striving to survive amid a great upheaval in 1920s Hollywood as it transitions from silent films to talkies.
The film has been a massive undertaking, which surprised the youngest-ever Best Director Oscar winner (for 2016’s La La Land). “The whole process of making it has been longer than I expected,” Chazelle, 37, admits. “But at the same time I was pinching myself, because this project has been a dream for so long. So actually getting to make it, as taxing as it might have been, was a pretty blissful experience.”
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The First Songs From the ‘Babylon’ Score Sound as Wild as Damien Chazelle’s Next Film Looks
THE FIRST OFFERINGS from the soundtrack to Damien Chazelle’s roaring Twenties Hollywood flick Babylon have arrived with a wild energy to match the film’s hedonistic vibe.
The two songs, “Call Me Manny” and “Voodoo Mama,” are both pulsating blasts of hot jazz stuffed with thundering drums and boozy horns. Composer Justin Hurwitz — who helmed the entire 48-track score — gave Rolling Stone some context for the two songs, too.
“Call Me Manny” plays when Diego Calva’s character, Manny Torres, is thrust into “the whirlwind of a new job.” Meanwhile, “Voodoo Mama” helps kick everything off, blaring as Margot Robbie’s character Nellie LaRoy “takes over the dance floor at the party” that starts the film.
How ‘Babylon’ Roars Through the 1920s
The writer-director Damien Chazelle and the production designer Florencia Martin discuss how they captured the excess of a period when Hollywood was heading for a reckoning.
After he turned the streets of Los Angeles into a playground and a dance floor for the musical “La La Land,” you might think the writer and director Damien Chazelle would have little left to mine from the location.
But it’s a big, big city.
His latest film, “Babylon” (out Dec. 23), aims to be even more extravagant in capturing the indulgent, mythical nature of the place where starry dreams are made (and dashed). It follows multiple characters through a period in the 1920s when Hollywood, high on the success of silent films, began experiencing growing pains and significant collateral damage from the transition into the sound era.
But before those problems set in, very little about the period, or the way it is portrayed in this film, is scaled back. Instead, Chazelle and his team want to capture what it might have been like to be swirling around in the excess of those early days, when the movies were silent but the living was not.
‘Babylon’ Will Now Premiere Before Christmas
Paramount’s Babylon is shifting release dates, abandoning its plans to open in limited release at Christmas, and instead heading to a wide release on December 23, releasing in the wake of Avatar: The Way of Water. The film was originally planned to go wide on January 6 before the changes.
