The ending of any party can always be sad,” considers Damien Chazelle, the outrageously talented, Oscar-winning director of Whiplash, La La Land and First Man. “It can be ugly, it can be scary, it can be cfunny, it can be all sorts of things. There’s always something fascinating to look at when people are dancing their asses off, and suddenly the music stops playing, and not everyone realises.”
The specific moment that Chazelle is talking to Total Film about is the late 1920s into the 1930s in Hollywood, as the emergence of ‘talkies’ (or motion pictures with synchronised sound) engenders a tectonic shift in the film industry. Chazelle’s party analogy is particularly apt, because his new film Babylon - set at that crucial period of change - goes to extremes to portray the all-out excesses of the hedonistic carousing that made the ’20s roar. It’s an idea that’s lived with Chazelle for as long as he’s been making movies, at least.
“It first started as I first became aware of just how cataclysmic, for people at the time, the suite of changes that were ushered in through Hollywood towards the end of the ’20s and into the early ’30s actually were with, obviously, sound coming in, chief among them,” continues Chazelle. “But various other changes - changes in mores and moral codes, and how the business was structured, and how behaviour was regulated - were sweeping into Hollywood around the same time.”
That transition - which hinged on 1927 groundbreaker - was In but Chazelle takes a wilder, darker look at the metamorphosis. Initially holding a light-hearted view (“Just like it was a game of musical chairs, and it was funny to see who was left standing”), his approach changed.
