From Whiplash to First Man, Damien Chazelle has never shot and missed when it comes to the fall awards season. And now that he’s back again with his latest, the Hollywood drama Babylon, you know he’ll be a factor again. Especially with a cast that includes Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Tobey Maguire, and many more.
Vanity Fair has our first official look at Babylon. If you thought La La Land and First Man were ambitious, Chazelle looks to top those with an epic, star-studded, lavish story of early Hollywood and the change from silent films to talkies…
“The basic idea was just to do a big, epic, multicharacter movie, set in these early days of Los Angeles and Hollywood, when both of these things were coming into what we now think of them as,” said Chazelle. “Everything is shifting underneath people’s feet, and I became really fascinated by the human cost of disruption at that magnitude, at a time when there was no road map, when everything was just new and wild.”
“It was definitely the hardest thing I’ve done,” Chazelle continued. “Just the logistics of it, the number of characters, the scale of the set pieces, the span of time that the movie charts—it all conspired to make it particularly challenging, but it was a challenge that was pretty exciting to take on.”
Also in the cast are Jean Smart, Jovan Adepo, Max Minghella, Lukas Haas, Samara Weaving, Katherine Waterston, Spike Jonze, Max Minghella, and newcomer Diego Calva. You know what? That’s only a glimpse at the starry affair that Chazelle has put together.
Babylon opens in theaters on Christmas Day.
