Sex, drugs, Margot ... and a funky chicken!
BRACE yourself for bad behaviour on screen in Babylon, a 188-minute epic from La La Land director Damien Chazelle. Some friends who have seen it are not fans of the period comedy, which tells the story of Hollywood as movies transition from silent pictures to talkies.
Margot Robbie plays actress Nellie La Roy — loosely based on wild child Clara Bow (aka ‘The It Girl’) — and Brad Pitt is actor and director Jack Conrad. It’s totally over the top, with Robbie fighting a rattlesnake and projectile vomiting (thankfully not simultaneously).
The film opens with an elephant being persuaded up a hill ... he’s wanted at a house party. Nellie takes so much cocaine that she collapses, amid an orgy scene where a chicken high on drugs gets chased through the house.
Actress Jean Smart (of Hacks) plays a gossip columnist who is also present at the party. She said: ‘That first tracking shot ... with the chicken high on cocaine ... went on for ever, with about 37 insane things happening, like people snorting coke off naked bodies. I remember thinking: “Thank God we have some really uninhibited extras in Los Angeles.”’
She joked that she told herself: ‘Just don’t look down, and don’t back up.’
Robbie, in London this week to promote the film, said she didn’t think she was anything like Nellie — who rockets to fame but ends up overwhelmed by gambling debts and drugs — ‘but then I have friends who’ve seen the movie and they go: “That’s totally you!” ’ When asked if making the film made her nostalgic for old Hollywood, she said: ‘I think there’s way less drugs now.’ Co-star Pitt chimed in: ‘Sadly, true.’
Director Chazelle said: ‘Towards the end of the 1920s there was this sort of rash of suicides, deaths, drug overdoses and I found it coincided with the transition from silent to sound. I started looking at the kind of extreme living — the passion, ambition and recklessness of all stripes — that characterised Hollywood at that time, and it got my brain going.’
The film will be released in America on December 23, and in the UK in January.