Damien Chazelle & Producer Matthew Plouffe On Building ‘Babylon’ & The Need For Original Pics To Survive On The Big Screen – Crew Call Podcast
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Damien Chazelle’s Babylon, in its tale of how the talkies rocked the silent motion picture era, is no doubt a metaphor for the streaming revolution that’s impacting the film industry today.
We dive deep into the topic today on Crew Call with the Oscar-winning La La Land filmmaker and his Babylon producer Matthew Plouffe, a former Focus Features exec who first heard about the director’s dream to make a 1920s Hollywood-set feature some 13 years ago after meeting him.
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“If you want your movie to play on the big screen, you have to go grab it, you have to demand it,” Plouffe tells us about the survival of original movies on the big screen.
“I think filmmakers embrace that: What is going to bring people to the bring screen? How can I grab that audience? I hope that inspires them. It’s what inspired me when we were making this movie.”
“There is a fight to be fought,” says Chazelle about survival about original pics not being relegated to streaming, “I’m an optimist, but there is work to be done.”
With Babylon, Chazelle sought to “capture what that time was really like” about the “unhinged and wild and brilliant people who started the industry.”
One sequence during the pic’s first act features Margot Robbie’s Clara Bow-inspired character, Nellie LaRoy, arriving on a vast silent-movie set in the middle of the desert where several films are being made — from bawdy comedies to war movies. Cacophony abounds with orchestras playing amid the dust, along with broken cameras and riotous, vagrant-like extras.
A few scenes later, Nellie is learning to adjust to the strict “‘”Quiet on the set” mode of the sound era, where actors had to be attentive to their decibel levels on a studio set given microphone’s sensitivity.
There’s another scene in Babylon where we witness a movie theater audience dancing in their seats in a happy uproar as they first experience a talkie film.
“There’s a disaster movie, a darkness to this,” observed Chazelle in studying the changeover in the era with “rashes of suicides among starts and bit players.”
Chazelle, his wife and producer Olivia Hamilton and Plouffe took Babylon over to Paramount, where Wyck Godfrey then was president of the Motion Picture Group. Godfrey was a producer on Chazelle’s First Man.
“He responded to it and became that champion,” Chazelle tells us. “He fought hard to shepherd the movie into the studio. Without him, I’m not confident it would be a Paramount movie.”
Babylon looked to start production in March 2020, but the pandemic hit and filming didn’t start until July 2021 in Santa Clarita. The area remains a hotbed for Hollywood shoots, going back to the silent era when Charlie Chaplin shot Modern Times in high plateau area about 25 miles north of L.A. The mansion of late Western star William S. Hart served as the domicile for Brad Pitt’s movie-star character in the film, Jack Conrad.
Says Plouffe, “There was something essential to us about making the movie the way movies were made in the 20s, in the places where they made films and not faking that.”
Listen to our conversation below:
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