Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie chronicle hedonistic Hollywood era in 'Babylon', playing now in UAE

It charts the fortunes of largely fictional Hollywood actors and producers trying to navigate the transition from silent movies to “talkies”

By AFP

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This image released by Paramount Pictures shows Margot Robbie, left, and Diego Calva in "Babylon."

Published: Thu 19 Jan 2023, 11:05 AM

Last updated: Thu 19 Jan 2023, 11:13 AM

Babylon stars Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie admitted that Hollywood has largely kicked its former drug-filled excesses. Their new film about 1920s Tinseltown hedonism, a Paramount movie from La La Land director Damien Chazelle, is playing now in UAE.

Also starring Tobey Maguire and Jean Smart, Babylon charts the fortunes of largely fictional Hollywood actors and producers trying to navigate the transition from silent movies to “talkies” — as well as a lifestyle of cocaine-fuelled, no-holds-barred parties and wild on-set misbehaviour, all depicted in graphic detail.

Asked at a post-screening discussion if Babylon had made her nostalgic for the movie industry’s so-called “Golden Age,” Robbie noted that “there’s way less drugs now” in Hollywood.

“Sadly true!” joked Pitt.

Diego Calva and Brad Pitt in "Babylon"

The movie from Chazelle, who won a youngest-ever best director Oscar for La La Land and was also nominated for the screenplay of Whiplash, portrays a nascent 1920s and 1930s Los Angeles filled with wild parties featuring drugs, elephants and topless dancers, along with spendthrift, lawless film sets in the California desert.

It also tackles topics such as racism, and the devastating effect that rapidly evolving technology had on stars of the silent era, many of whom were abandoned almost overnight by the industry.

Chazelle said he was inspired to make the film after reading about the “weird phenomenon where towards the end of the 20s, there was this rash of suicides, deaths that seem that they could have been suicidal drug overdoses.”

Those deaths coincided with Hollywood’s transition from silent movies to sound, and “gave it this brutal face,” said Chazelle, who based his characters on multiple real silent-era stars and moguls.

Cinema in its youth

Pitt said he and Chazelle had discussed a period of history when Hollywood was “the wild, wild west.”

“I had kind of dismissed that era — 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’s very big. They had to communicate because they don’t have language, of course. They had to communicate with the face... it wasn’t until I sat down and saw some of the films at Damien’s urging that you find a real charm in them, and a warmth in them.”

“In the 1920s, the rules were not yet completely written, cinema was still in its youth,” said the American-born Chazelle. “We don’t really know this period, just before the arrival of sound, when there was a freedom that we would normally associate more with the 1960s,” he said.

Director Damien Chazelle and director of photography Linus Sandgren on the set of "Babylon"

Film sets of the time were “perhaps a little more brutal, a little more violent, a little darker, but also comical. “There was something rich and complex in it that inspired me.”

There are parallels to the tumult in today’s Hollywood, as streaming platforms and the pandemic have put cinemas in jeopardy and led to Hollywood relying on tried-and-tested franchises and superheroes.

“We are really at a crossroads,” said Chazelle. “Today in Hollywood there’s a lot of fear, and not a lot of people taking risks. There are always great movies being made, thankfully, but it’s a time of fear.”

As Babylon makes clear, Chazelle has a deeply romantic love for the big screen. He has tried his hand on a streamer, directing the series The Eddy about a Parisian jazz club for Netflix. “But the big screen is always something different — an experience that is not interrupted, not divided into chapters,” he said. “When you leave the cinema, the world looks different, something is changed.”

Kaia Gerber and Li Jun Li in "Babylon"

A tough project

Despite the huge success of La La Land, Babylon was a tough project to get off the ground, with a budget estimated at around $80 million thanks to its extravagant sets and hundreds of extras.

“Thirty or 40 years ago, it was not uncommon to see films like this. But financing this type of film is not so easy today and it’s becoming more and more difficult — so it’s more and more important to show that it can still exist. “The challenge today is to do something that justifies the big screen, as we can’t put just anything up on it. We have to fight for this privilege.”

For all the challenges, Chazelle retains a sort of morbid optimism about the industry. “People die, but Hollywood, industry and art don’t die, that’s the irony. It’s been 100 years that we’ve been saying cinema will soon die, or that it’s already dead, but cinema and art are a story of death and rebirth, they are cycles.”