STACK #219 January 2023

FEATURE CINEMA

FURTHER VIEWING

When Robbie first read the script, she was immediately in. “My team was actually a little alarmed at my intensity,” she laughs. “I was like, ‘I have to do it. This role is mine.’” Of course Chazelle thought she was perfect. “For a role like Nellie you need an actor who truly has no fear. Someone that can take the screen as though she’s grabbing it by the sides and shaking it to do whatever she wanted to do. That, to me, is Nellie. That, to me, is Margot . In many other respects they are incredibly different people, but there’s an energy and fervour and hunger that they both share,” he explains. Brad Pitt effortlessly exudes charm, channelling silent era movie stars like Douglas Fairbanks and Rudolph Valentino to portray suave silent idol Jack Conrad. “Ever since Whiplash , Damien stood out as an original voice and a guy who was gonna be around a while, so I was pretty thrilled when I got the call,” says Pitt. “And then to read the script – it's mayhem, but really well grounded. Our first conversations were really about understanding that period in the wild, wild west. “I had kind of dismissed that era and hadn't really paid attention to it because it's not an acting style I relate to. It’s not what we gravitate to now. It was very big, and because they didn't have language of course, they had to communicate with the face and gestures. So it wasn't until I saw some of the films that Damien suggested that I found the real charm and warmth in them,” he adds. “Jack is sort of the über movie star,” adds Chazelle. “He’s the highest grossing leading man in the world when we meet him… and the kind of hysterical love and admiration that he inspires, at a moment in time when the whole concept of movie stardom was still relatively new, is really hard for us today to fathom.” If anybody can figure out how to persuasively portray movie stardom – either today or a century earlier – then you can count on Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt.

Babylon transports audiences back to old Hollywood, when silent movies transitioned to sound, and debauchery reigned. Words Gill Pringle

L a La Land director Damien Chazelle does not disagree when asked if he might just be a tad obsessed with Hollywood – assembling the world’s top movie stars and sending them hurtling back a century to explore old Hollywood in his epic new film, Babylon . “I've been a fan of film history for quite some time, especially getting to know the particulars of early Hollywood, the start of the American film industry and the birth of Los Angeles as a city,” says Chazelle, whose personal Hollywood dream began some eight years ago with his Oscar-winning movie Whiplash . “But what intrigued me was when I began reading about this weird phenomenon towards

the end of the 1920s, where there was a rash of deaths that seemed like they could have been suicidal drug overdoses. So there was a kind of drug epidemic going on at the time, and I was curious as to why exactly that might have been, and I found it coincided with the transition from silent movies to sound. “It gave a brutal face to it; a glare that cast everything I thought I knew about that era in a different light. And then looking at the types of behaviours that would lead to such outcomes; the kind of extreme living; the kind of passion and ambition and recklessness; unbridled ness of all sorts of stripes that characterised Hollywood at that time, and that just started my brain going.”

Naturally, he had no problem attracting the biggest names in Hollywood to come play with him: Margot Robbie, Brad Pitt, Jean Smart, Olivia Wilde, Samara Weaving, Tobey Maguire, Katherine Waterston… Babylon is possibly the most decadent depiction of old Hollywood ever made, and at the centre of it all is Margot Robbie’s Nellie LaRoy, an unknown starlet desperate to break into show business at any cost.

Diego Calva and Brad Pitt

Babylon is in cinemas on Jan 19.

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