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 which is 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. “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 Clara Bow-inspired character, Nellie LaRoy, arriving on a vast silent movie set in the middle of the desert where several movies 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.