Babylon's Damien Chazelle breaks down one of Total Film's scenes of the year – the Bel Air Bacchanal

No other film this year began with as much gusto as Damien Chazelle’s Babylon, an outlandish ode to an industry in transition as talkies swept Hollywood in the '20s and '30s. A dazzling 20-minute sequence set at a studio exec’s debauched mansion party introduced all the story’s key players amid the drug-snorting, dancing, and orgiastic excess.

Below, Chazelle explains how this scene came together and the challenges of shooting it. This interview first appeared in Total Film's Review of the Year 2023 supplement, which you can order online here. 

Damien Chazelle: I needed an excuse for the main characters to be introduced. It would tell us something about where their society was, where the various characters were in the pecking order. You can learn a lot about Hollywood in any given moment through its parties. Who gets in, who doesn’t, who’s at the door, what kind of music they’re playing, what the dress code is… 

There’s always a fair amount of on-the-fly changes [when shooting], but the broad strokes of it were all figured out beforehand. The music [by Justin Hurwitz] was really helpful, because we basically had all the music beforehand. I could kind of storyboard to the music, and figure out, "This part of the music will be here, this downbeat will correspond with this close-up, and this crescendo here will correspond with this camera movement…"

And then I worked with the choreographer, Mandy Moore. She had a little dance studio on the Paramount lot that we [rehearsed in]. It’s kind of like a piece of theatre. We taped the floor and created a dedicated set: "Here’s where the door is. Here’s where the bandstand is…" We could try to map out the scene. We would do little rehearsals of either a group of dancers, or, for instance, Diego [Calva, who plays studio neophyte Manny Torres] and Margot [Robbie, aka actor Nellie LaRoy], or Li Jun Li [singer Lady Fay Zhu]. So by the time we got on set, there had been a lot of storyboards, rehearsals, discussions… But you still wind up adapting a lot to the set.

It’s a mixture of different locations. It’s all pieces of real places. The exteriors are Shea’s Castle, which is this sort of weird '20s building out in the middle of Lancaster [in California] that, like a lot of buildings at the time, some kooky, rich person built in the desert in the style of an Irish castle or something. It feels very out of place in an amazing way. And then the interior’s the lobby of the Ace Theatre in downtown LA. Then there’s a couple of little side rooms, and those were built by Florencia [Martin], the production designer, on a stage.

The brunt of [the shoot for this scene] was about seven or eight days. And then there was one day for the exterior stuff – everything on the perimeter of the house and outside. And then we had little bits and pieces in individual rooms. I think the highest number [of extras] we ever had was 150, maybe. We wanted it to feel more like 300. It was actually part of the reason why we picked an interior location that was a little bit on the small side – smaller than we might normally have – where you’d feel a little packed in.

It made it a little harder to move the camera around, a little harder for the crane and things like that. But it gave a sort of sardines-packed-together feeling to it, which I think helped make it feel like more people than it actually is. You could always have people on the edges of the frame. And you could pepper people up in the upper balconies, and the little alcoves. It felt a little bit like an overflow of people pouring in from every corner.

It’s definitely art imitating life, or vice versa, in the party sequences, because of the music – we’re blasting the music on set for every take – and just the sort of effect that you get chemically from people sort of crammed into a room, dancing to the music. I definitely feel like at the end of one of those big takes, there was a kind of fervor – an exaltation or something. We had a pretty amazing team who somehow managed to just keep going take after take. Again, the music helped. We had real musicians in the halls that would break out other songs in between, just to keep the energy always going if we were flagging, so that felt like a real party.

Babylon is available on DVD, Blu-Ray and Digital, and is streaming on Paramount Plus. 

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