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aramount Pictures' Babylon is set in 1920s Los Angeles, where the film industry is making the bumpy transition from silent films to talkies. Written and directed by Academy Award winner Damien Chazelle (Whiplash, La La Land), the film stars Brad Pitt as Jack Conrad, the silent era's leading man, who is now struggling to be taken seriously as moviemaking evolves. Margot Robbie is Nellie LaRoy, a rising starlet who's creat- ed her own path, but is also facing career challenges. And Diego Calva portrays Manny Torres, a hard-working immigrant who manages to climb the Hollywood ladder, ascending from go-fer to stu- dio executive. The film's ensemble cast also includes Jean Smart, Jovan Adepo, Li Jun Li, PJ Byrne, Lukas Haas, Olivia Hamilton, Tobey Maguire, Max Minghella, Rory Scovel, Katherine Waterston, Flea, Jeff Garlin, Eric Roberts, Ethan Suplee, Samara Weaving and Olivia Wilde. Editor Tom Cross has a history of col- laborating with Damien Chazelle, having worked on Whiplash, for which he won the Film Editing Oscar, as well as on La La Land (Oscar nominated) and First Man. "I've edited four feature films for Damien," says Cross. "There was a short film version of Whiplash, which led to the financing of the feature film, and that's how we connected. And with each of these projects, I get very excited because as an editor, I get to really flex a lot of different storytelling muscles and stylistic muscles." Chazelle, says Cross, likes to articulate his story through the editing process. In the case of Babylon, the director would send him drafts of the script as he worked on it, along with photos and reference movies that inspired him for how he wanted to tell the story. "The list of reference movies was mon- umental," says Cross. "He had Clara Bow movies. There were a lot of silent movies. There were also a lot of big, epic movies. Some of the big references were movies like La Dolce Vita. And one big thing was, as he was writing the script, he told me that he wanted it to be very different, in some ways, from the previous movies we had done." 'Different' because it would involve an ensemble cast. The script was approx- imately 180 pages, and Cross could foresee the edit being a challenge. "It was a little daunting, because we had never done an ensemble before and ultimately ended up being, I think, the most difficult movie I've ever worked on." On past projects, Chazelle and Cross would collaborate on the movie's ending first. But on Babylon, they started at the beginning, "because the movie and the characters go through so many changes that by the time we get to the end of Babylon, the movie is very different in terms of where the characters are, but also stylistically very different than where we started," Cross explains. The feature was shot on 35mm film in the anamorphic format by cinema- tographer Linus Sandgren, who also worked with Chazelle on First Man and La La Land, for which he won an Oscar. Cross and his editorial team were set up in Building 32 on the old Fox lot, where the film would ultimately receive its color grade and final mix. "It's a long movie," says Cross of the final cut, which comes in at three hours and nine minutes. "It was always de- signed to be epic, so even though it was going to be a big, long movie, [Damien] really wanted it to move. And something we knew early on was that it was going to be a music-driven film. It was going to be a movie where the storytelling — the picture editing — would be heavily inter- twined and braided together with Justin Hurwitz's music." Cross cut the feature on an Avid Media Composer at DNx115 resolution, which provided quality suitable for projected screenings during the review process when necessary. He had the benefit of hearing some of the rough music demos even before shooting began, which helped him in figuring out the film's pacing. "I could tell that there was an energy to it," he recalls of Hurwitz's work. "It was very up-tempo. It was very fast and kind of frenetic, so I had a feeling that a lot of the pace and the style of the picture editing would follow suit." The shoot began some time in July of 2021, and editing was almost simultaneous. "When Damien comes in to work with me, we have a very interesting process, which is different from the way I do other movies," Cross explains. "We start cutting together to Justin's music. We even do music edits. Then we hand it back to Justin, who is in a room next door to my editing room, and he refines it and improves it, and he starts to embellish it and add his own improvements. He sends it back to me, and then I, in turn, revise my picture to match what he's doing. We have this kind of 'rinse, repeat' cycle back and forth. And we did that for every scene that had Justin's music — and there's a lot of music in the movie. So the three of us [worked] very closely together." Babylon is a tale of both intense ambi- tion and extreme excess, and that is clearly illustrated in one of the film's early se- quences — a party at an exclusive mansion, filled with drugs, debauchery and even an elephant! It's the first time Jack, Nellie and PARAMOUNT PICTURES' BABYLON BY MARC LOFTUS FILMMAKER DAMIEN CHAZELLE CALLS ON FREQUENT COLLABORATOR TOM CROSS P EDITING www.postmagazine.com 16 POST JAN/FEB 2023 Brad Pitt and Diego Calva, on-set with director Damien Chazelle.