It’s easy to assume that movies from Hollywood’s first golden age — black and white and so slow compared to today’s editing — were the products of a restrained era. Maybe that’s because we associate old movies with older people in our lives. (Spoiler alert: Your grandparents probably got wild when they were 20.) The point of all this is that these assumptions were totally wrong. Old Hollywood was decadent, even insane.
Now BABYLON is here to pull us through an epic and unrestrained dash through Hollywood’s transitional period. As the business moved from silent films into the sound era, established creatives tried to survive and new talents made desperate bids to get their names in lights.
Damien Chazelle takes the emotions and energy of his previous movie, LA LA LAND, and blows them up to unbelievable proportions in order to capture the revelry and unease of ‘20s moviemaking in Los Angeles. With Margot Robbie as an actor who dreams of being the new “It Girl,” Brad Pitt as a silent star whose career is on the verge of tipping over, and Diego Calva as an assistant who wants bigger and better jobs, BABYLON covers the full span of the experience of clawing your way through the movie business in the late '20s and early '30s.
So what was that like to make? We talked to Margot Robbie, Jean Smart, Diego Calva, Jovan Adepo, and Li Jun Li about their work in Damien Chazelle's outrageous movie.
Watch our full video interview with the cast of BABYLON below:
BABYLON opens on December 23.
All images courtesy of Paramount Pictures.