Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1492834
31 S P R I N G Q 1 I S S U E C O V E R S T O R Y Ai-Ling Lee. P H OT O : M A R K E D WA R D S A scene from "Babylon": The director wanted a film "stuffed with characters and action." P H OT O : PA R A M O U N T t h e r e w e r e s o m a n y e l e m e n t s a n d s o many decisions that had to be made," said re -recording mixer Andy Nelson, CAS. "The overall approach . . . was just bold and out there." Added supervising sound editor, sound designer, and re-recording mixer Ai-Ling Lee, CAS: "[Chazelle] wanted the sound to feel real and visceral and larger-than-life." For Cross, "Babylon" represented an altogether different kind of project with his longtime collaborator Chazelle. Their previous films — the music-school drama "Whiplash" (2014), for which Cross won the Oscar for Best Film Editing; the musical "La La Land" (2016); and the Neil Armstrong biopic "First Man" (2018) — were each ambitious, each difficult in their own way, but also fairly streamlined. "'Whiplash' and 'La La Land' were really two-handers, and 'First Man' was a single-character portrait in a way," Cross said. When he read Chazelle's 180-page script for "Babylon," however, the editor knew the scale of the film would be unapologetically vast. "He wanted to show this version of Hollywood that existed during the silent era, these wild roller-coaster days, and show that world through the perspectives of different characters," Cross said. "We wanted to make sure that all the characters had their own arcs." Added Cross: "It may be the hardest movie I've ever worked on." The challenge for Cross was in not shortchanging any one character's story. When cutting most movies, the editor has found that it's possible to boil a story down in post-production without losing anything essential, but if that approach had been taken in cutting "Babylon," someone's sto- ry — Jack's, Nellie's, Manny's, or Sidney's — might be compromised. "On 'Babylon,' you can only boil down so much until you start taking away character arcs or char- acter beats," Cross said. It's another way of saying that "Babylon" could have been about just Jack, Nellie, Manny, or Sidney, but as Chazelle saw it, it had to be about all of them — and at feature-length. At the same time, Cross added, Chazelle had no desire to make a film that was slow, meditative, or contemplative. "Babylon" had to be stuffed with characters and action — and to be constantly whirring, buzzing, humming. "He wanted it to be driving," Cross said. "He wanted it to feel like 'The Wolf of Wall Street.'" The tone is established in the film's opening minutes with an audacious party