Damien Chazelle Babylon is a celebration of the film industry and cinema history, but it’s not just a love letter; It is a comprehensive depiction of warts. There is a lot of fun and excess, but also a lot of tragedy and death. The film particularly highlights the hardships of being an actor in the industry — and it made me wonder how the stars reflected personally on filming compared to their careers in modern Hollywood.
I interviewed Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Diego Calva, Jovan Adepo, and Lee Jun Lee earlier this month during Press Day in Los Angeles for the… Babylon, and one of the questions I asked all of the cast was about how they dealt with the sad lives of on-screen characters dealing with the hardships of the industry. Pitt — who plays Jack Conrad, an A-lister whose star begins to fade in the transition from silent films to talkies — reasoned that the “messy” lives of the heroes are more a reflection of the human experience in general than just performers, though He admitted that the stars of the 1920s and 1930s lived life less responsibly:
We were just talking about it. I mean, we humans are messy. We’re awesome, we’re terrible and it gets complicated, we’re all over the place. So I think, you know, it’s the same in whatever kind of environment you’re landing in. I have never quite experienced dysfunction to the extent of some of this, except perhaps in my younger years. When people started they were more reckless.
After her co-star’s comments, Margot Robbie attributed some real-life insanity as shown in Babylon To the youth of the industry – in many ways. Her research led her to realize that thriving movie studios are run by people in their mid-30s, and there was a level of shock that occurred when lives were changing overnight. I explained,
You start looking for some of the people Damian said [Chazelle] I pointed us at it, and I started tallying up how many people had died very young at that time, and how young everyone was in general: people running studios at 35, people going from being poor to being the biggest movie stars in the country, like Quickly! And they were 20 if that, and then they died by the time they were 25, 30. It was kind of crazy and it felt like, at this time, everyone just had a “live fast, die young” kind of feeling. I do not think that is the case now for several reasons; Industry has evolved. But yeah, it was a crazy time. I don’t think it’s quite the same.
One thing that definitely helped is Hollywood learning from history. Characters played by Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie Babylon Fictional, but essentially an amalgamation of real people, and in some cases these people can be seen as cautionary tales. The industry is still riddled with all kinds of similar scandals from the first half of the 20th century, but things are definitely different now.
Paired with Li Jun Li, Jovan Adepo has been able to find connections between the experience of being an actor now compared to the era in Babylon – although his focus was more on being on set. In the movie, there’s a sequence where Margot Robbie’s Nellie LaRue shoots her first performance in a talkie, and the handling of the fidelity of the sound leads to fury as the production is forced to do repetitive things. Adepo can relate saying,
It’s not about facing the fear, but just like seeing the things they had to deal with back then and pointing out that they’re still kind of there now – especially like the problem with the sound and like the problem like trying to get the lighting right.
Featuring an outstanding cast that also includes Jean Smart, Tobey Maguire, Lucas Haas, Max Minghella and Olivia Hamilton, Babylon It’s now playing in theaters across the country — and it’s certainly sparked a lot of discussion. Once you’ve watched the movie, check out our analysis of the finale, and hear about ReelBlend’s new interview with writer/director Damien Chazelle.
For a preview of all the exciting movies currently in the pipeline with release dates next year, check out our 2023 movie release calendar.
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