The plot of Margot Robbie’s upcoming film is dense.
In Babylon, directed by Damien Chazelle of La La Land and Whiplash, Robbie, 32, plays an aspiring actress named Nellie LaRoy in 1920s Hollywood as the motion picture industry switches from silent films to talkies. Jack Conrad, a cinematic star in a different period of his career, is portrayed by Brad Pitt.
The duration of Babylon, as reported by Variety, is 3 hours and 8 minutes.
This will be the Oscar-winning director’s longest picture to date; Whiplash (2014), La La Land (2016), and First Man (2018) are all longer than 141 minutes.
The movie is “a tale of outsized ambition and spectacular excess,” according to an official synopsis, and it “traces the rise and fall of various characters during an era of unfettered decadence and wickedness in early Hollywood.”
Along with Diego Calva, Li Jun Li, Jovan Adepo, Tobey Maguire, Max Minghella, Lukas Haas, Olivia Hamilton, Rory Scovel, Katherine Waterston, Flea, Jeff Garlin, Eric Roberts, Ethan Suplee, Samara Weaving, and Olivia Wilde are all included in the cast of Babylon.
This movie is “probably the hardest thing I’ve done,” said director Damien Chazelle to Vanity Fair before. “Just the logistics of it, the number of characters, the size of the set pieces, the span of time that the movie covers — it all conspired to make it exceptionally tough, but it was a challenge that was quite exhilarating to take on,” the actor said.
According to Variety, the director declared at the Toronto Film Festival that he “wanted to do something enormous, raucous, and loud” after residing in the “quietness” of his space drama First Man. In that appearance from September, Chazelle said, “I’ll be really thrilled to finally finish it,” adding that he was still working on Babylon in post-production.
