Margot Robbie, Brad Pitt… What does Damien Chazelle’s new film have in store for us?

Brad Pitt in "Babylon” by Damien Chazelle, released January 18, 2023 © 2022 Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.

Brad Pitt in “Babylon” by Damien Chazelle, out January 18, 2023 © 2022 Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.

After attacking first-man (2014), to the epic tale of astronaut Neil Armstrong’s odyssey to the Moon (played by Ryan Gosling), it’s an epic of a whole different kind that Franco-American director Damien Chazelle will offer in early 2023. The film babylon will be set in the 1920s and depict the early days of Los Angeles and Hollywood. The director has been preparing this colossal project for fifteen years already, and says he is fascinated by this “time when there was no roadmap, when everything was new and wild” in an interview with the American media Vanity Fair.

A passion that is added to an obsession for glamorous universes, which we also find in his filmography. In whiplash (2014), it depicts the difficult road to success of a young drummer played by American actor and musician Miles Teller, whose tyrannical coach is played by American JK Simmons, who received the Oscar for best actor in a supporting role in 2015. La La Land (2017), a musical featuring the duo formed by American actors Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, told the love story in Hollywood between an actress and a pianist dreaming of success. For this film, Damien Chazelle won the Oscar for best director in 2017.

Margot Robbie in "Babylon” by Damien Chazelle, released January 18, 2023 © 2022 Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.
Margot Robbie in "Babylon” by Damien Chazelle, released January 18, 2023 © 2022 Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.

Margot Robbie in “Babylon” by Damien Chazelle, released January 18, 2023 © 2022 Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.

For babylonhe invites the two Hollywood superstarsare Brad Pitt and Margot Robbiealready present together in Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019). Brad Pitt will play the character of Jack Conrad, a famous actor with crazy elegance, while Australian actress Margot Robbie will play the role of Nellie Laroy, an emerging actress gradually integrating the Hollywood landscape. The one who will soon be starring in the film Barbieand which we saw in The wolf of Wall Street (2013), has according to the director “that – very Australian – cheeky, daring and hungry side that she was able to exploit and do some very fun things with” as he entrusts to American Vanity Fair. Actor Tobey Maguire, seen in Gatsby the magnificent (2013) by Baz Luhrmann and American actress Li Jun Li, seen in the series In their eyes (2019), will complete this promising cast.

The plot will be focused on several characters, the director wishing to insist on their trajectories as much as on the vagaries of success in Hollywood. He explains in the interview granted to Vanity Fair : “It was truly a Wild West period for these people, this cast of characters, as they rise and fall, rise, fall, rise again, fall again”. The emphasis is on the spectacular and the glamorous, as evidenced by the first images of the film unveiled this week. Margot Robbie appears there incandescent, in a sensual carmine dress, lying on a fresco on the ground, smoking a cigarette.

In addition to the sublime costumes, the sumptuous sets evoke the pomp and opulence of the early days of the Hollywood film industry. of the 1920s, and the festive effervescence of roaring twenties, period of all the excesses. In photography, the Swede Linus Sandgren collaborates again with the director, alongside whom he had also won an Oscar for his work in La La Land. The music, a central element of Chazelle’s films, will once again be composed by American composer Justin Hurwitz, who also won an Oscar for La La Land. All the elements are there to make babylon the success of the beginning of the year 2023.

babylon (2023) by Damien Chazelle, available January 18, 2023.

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Margot Robbie, Brad Pitt… What does Damien Chazelle’s new film have in store for us?