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The trailer for the Paramount Pictures film begins with Margot Robbie and Diego Calva doing drugs together and discussing how they want to grow their budding Hollywood careers. Various high-octane scenes are intercut during their conversation, including wild celebrity parties with naked people. “When I first moved to L.A., signs on all the doors said: ‘No actors or dogs allowed,’” Pitt’s character says. “I changed that.”
Damien Chazelle wasn’t positive he could make a movie like Babylon when he began crafting it 15 years ago, but successes like La La Land and First Man reassured him that he could pull off the large spectacle necessary to bring Babylon to life.
“It was really a wild West period for these people, this gallery of characters, as they rise and fall, rise, fall, rise again, fall again,” Chazelle told Vanity Fair. “The thing that they’re building is springing back on them and chewing them up.”
Per Vanity Fair, the movie “features a cast of (mostly fictional) characters whose dreams of fame and success rest on navigating a perilous town.” It has the visual extravagance of something like La La Land, which in itself felt like it owed a debt to Baz Luhrmann, whose hyper-stylized and meticulously-designed films like Moulin Rouge and Elvis tend to focus less on story and more on tone and style.
From Damien Chazelle, Babylon is an original epic set in 1920s Los Angeles led by Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie and Diego Calva, with an ensemble cast including Jovan Adepo, Li Jun Li and Jean Smart. 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.
The film stars 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, and Olivia Wilde.
Babylon is scheduled for limited release on December 25, followed by a wide release on January 6, 2023.
