BABYLON opens at cinemas nationwide this Friday, 20 January
Written and directed by Damien Chazelle, BABYLON is an original epic set in 1920s Los Angeles. The film features an ensemble cast led by Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, and Diego Calva and includes Jean Smart, Jovan Depa, and Li Jun Li.
A tale of outsized ambition and outrageous excess, it traces the rise and fall of multiple characters during an era of unbridled decadence and depravity in early Hollywood.
For writer/director Damien Chazelle, the film is the result of 15 years of research.
“I wanted to look under the microscope at the early days of an art form and an industry, when both were still finding their footing,” says Chazelle, “and, on a deeper level, I liked the idea of looking at a society in change. Hollywood underwent a series of rapid and at times seemingly cataclysmic changes in the 20’s, and some people survived, but many didn’t. In today’s terms, we would call it disruption. You look at what these people went through, and it gives you a sense of the human cost that accompanied the kind of ambition that attracted so many people to Los Angeles at that time. There’s a darker side to the story of that transition than I’d seen before. It went beyond the arrival of sync sound to include a host of new moral codes — finally culminating in the Production Code of the 30s — and the reorganization of a more free-form, unregulated community into the global corporate industry that we know today. Coinciding with all of this is Los Angeles morphing from a mostly rural desert town at the start of the 20s to one of the world’s major megalopolises by the decade’s end. A lot of gleaming new buildings and soundstages rose from the ashes, but the human wreckage was considerable.”
FULL CAST: Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Diego Calva, Jean Smart, Jovan Adepo, Li Jun Li, P.J. Byrne, Lukas Haas, Olivia Hamilton, Tobey Maguire, Max Minghella, Rory Scovel, Katherine Waterston, Flea, Jeff Garlin, Eric Roberts, Ethan Suplee, Samara Weaving, Olivia Wilde
Trailer link: BABYLON | TRAILER – YouTube