Plus, the Oscar-winning director talks about the time Margot Robbie punched a hole through the set.
Warning: This article contains spoilers forBabylon.
The writer and director tells EW he wanted to make that obvious right from the beginning.
Damien Chazelle behind the scenes of ‘Babylon’.Scott Garfield/Paramount
“You wind up declaring, rather overtly, exactly what the parameters of the film are.”
Here, Chazelle explains his choices.
But there was always some physical prop on set to create the moment.
Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) is carried aloft during a big-scale Hollywood production in ‘Babylon.'.Scott Garfield/Paramount Pictures
“The elephant was a buck that was manned by puppeteers,” he says.
(He doesn’t say what his substitute elephant poo actually was.)
“Parties and festivities were the only real way to justify them assembling,” the Oscar winner says.
Tobey Maguire in ‘Babylon’.Scott Garfield/Paramount
Lastly, there’sBabylon’s final Dante’s Inferno-esque party involving Tobey Maguire’s character.
This posed one of the biggest logistic challenges of the film.
“And so you better choreograph that activity.”
A film crew attempting to get the perfect shot in ‘Babylon’.Scott Garfield/Paramount
Chazelle also enlisted intimacy coordinator Michael Arnold for the film’s sexier moments.
“He dubs himself the sex choreographer.
And then there’s the drugs of it all.
Manny (Diego Calva) and Nellie (Margot Robbie) share a moment in ‘Babylon’.Scott Garfield/Paramount
That’s the tricky thing, because you couldn’t just say, ‘Okay, everyone improvise!’
because then it would just ultimately be like throwing too many colors onto a canvas.
It just becomes mud.”
Naturally, things don’t go well, and Nellie ends up getting bit in the jugular.
Of course, none of the actors handled a real snake, though there were some present.
There was also a wound appliance for the snake jaw to latch on to.
There was something to me that felt a little bit apropos to Hollywood, for whatever perverse reason."
In some ways it was one of the easier parts of the film to make, recalls Chazelle.
“And it was a very precisely storyboarded scene, the camera doesn’t move much.
But each individual shot wasn’t the hardest thing ever.”
“I remember one take Margot punched a hole through the set,” the director remembers.
She somehow miraculously was fine, but the window was shattered.
She was fine, but the set was destroyed."
“There’s a brutality that comes from that.
But it’s inextricable from the rebirth that follows.”
That, on some level, is very scary, and it can even be depressing.
