Damien Chazelle and his collaborators explainBabylonin three key scenes.
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It is during this production that Nellie LaRoy is discovered.
Damien Chazelle (writer-director):Pretty much all of that was our first two weeks of shooting.
Im a believer in trying to start with something hard.
We had about five days on the Margot set, five days on the battlefield.
It was a race to the finish a shooting pace that I hadnt experienced sinceWhiplash.
Tom Cross (editor):The goal was to really present the Wild West days of Hollywood.
So make it loud, reckless, revel in how feral that is.
They were shooting outside in really hot exteriors.
They built the stages outside and just covered them with some silks for control the light.
We wanted to embracethat hot-desert look.
Chazelle:Linus talked about trying to push the extremes of contrasts in the films style.
Outside, youfeel the sun attacking you, and the sky goes white.
Cross:We also talked about leaning into thecuttingstyle that you might have in the silent era.
Movies like D.W. GriffithsIntoleranceloomed very large.
And certainly on the battlefield with the crash cutting and these colliding images, we leaned into Sergei Eisenstein.
Whether thats some of the gross-out humor, or the level of drug use, or sexuality.
Theres nothing inCitizen Kanethat didnt exist at some stage in a silent film before.
All ofCitizen Kanecomes from Murnau, and Griffith, and Stroheim, and Lang and Expressionism.
But this time, the energy and invention of the previous scene is nowhere to be found.
Instead, the production spends an absurd amount of time trying to get one shot successfully into the can.
Everything goes wrong: Nellie misses her mark.
She speaks too loudly.
She speaks too softly.
Someones watch is too loud.
A metal pin in Ruths leg makes a hissing sound.
Someone opens the door to the soundstage.
The first assistant director (P.J.
Byrne) loses his mind.
Id also say a little bit of Lois Weber.
Alice Guy-Blache is a little earlier in the silent era, but that sort of domineering personality.
Dorothy Davenport is another one, someone who was a little outside the main studio system.
Not quite Poverty Row, but they definitely dont have the budgets that Jack Conrad has.
Theyre not shooting thousand-person battlefield scenes with an Erich von Stroheim punch in.
Theyre doing six movies at once on one bare-bones studio lot.
Someone like Ruth is probably shooting a movie a week.
For Ruth, I liked this idea of someone who can barely sit still, whos always moving.
When sound comes in, the Ruths of the world get weeded out.
That style will crescendo to something very chaotic and insane.
Something that was an amazing learning experience for me onWhiplashwas when we talked about the power of repetition.
But in this scene, we went in the opposite direction.
We went for the repetition to make the audience uncomfortable.
Theyre going to start wondering,How long is Nellie going to be doing this?
You have to embrace the discomfort.
Cross:So we created a little preamble for the beginning of every take.
Youre on this mechanical march toward a not-so-good outcome.
How do you make band practice feel like a war movie?
Chazelle:We wanted to create a sense of rhythm and musicality without any music.
Its one of the few scenes that has zero music at all.
And yet I think its a very musical sequence.
And Nellies Hello, college!
breaks through like nails on a chalkboard.
But I didnt want three hours of a Lina Lamont imitation.
But we had a rule: that there couldnt be any normal scenes in this movie.
As Chazelle notes, this sequence was originally supposed to feature Manny watching justSingin in the Rain.
Late in postproduction, the filmmakers realized that they had to change things dramatically.
Tom and I just went to work, and it was almost like improv sessions.
We just started free-forming it, knowing we didnt want to shootanything new.
Cross:There was a balance that we played around with.
The balance had to do with Mannys memories, and also the audiences memories of this time in Hollywood.
Part of it was harkening back to the beginning to the spirit that we introduced in that first party.
But then it was also about this vision of the future.
Chazelle:When Im asked, Why did you pick this clip or that clip?
Death and rebirth, death and rebirth.
Its a time capsule between him and me in the modern day.
And thats overwhelming and enlightening.
Thats the meaning of cinema.
Its really the meaning of life.
It is explained, but not in a too intellectual way.
Its more in an emotional way.
I dont recognize these movies.
This sequence was very vulnerable to that key in of logic.
And Damien and I, we really give a shot to not think of it so literally.
We tried to think of it more graphically.
Chazelle:If we let logic invade it too much, it would destroy it.
People were going, Youve destroyed the movie!
You had a good movie and youve just kamikazed it!
Thats what makes it the ending toBabylon.
This has to be a movie that always feels on the verge of kamikazing itself.
This would not be the appropriate ending for a different kind of movie.
But for this movie, its not only the appropriate ending, I would argue its the only ending.
