Elephants, alligators, 700 extras: The epic movie that surprised Jean Smart

By Louise Rugendyke

Jean Smart plays writer Elinor St. John in Babylon.

There’s an unhappy elephant in the room in the highly anticipated new movie from La La Land director Damien Chazelle.

The elephant is sent in to distract from the body of a young starlet being dragged out of a bacchanalian party being held at a studio executive’s house. Drugs and alcohol are flowing and people are humping on the dance floor. It’s wild.

Sitting to the side of it all, keenly observing, is Elinor St John. Played with cool precision by Jean Smart, Elinor is a journalist who covers the film scene in 1920s Hollywood. She’s after information and not above dishing out harsh truths to the entitled stars and the grasping up-and-comers.

Smart – who has been dubbed the “queen of HBO” for her recent run of award-winning and scene-stealing performances in Hacks, Mare of Easttown and Watchmen – was not so worried about the elephant as the young stars on set.

Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) in the middle of one of the many wild parties in Babylon.

“I was a little taken aback at first, at the very uninhibited, adorable extras that we had,” says Smart, laughing. “They just went for it. I thought, ‘I gotta hand it to you. I couldn’t do that.’

“But it was amazing that in all that chaos, it was really choreographed so perfectly, everybody knew where they were supposed to be and exactly when. I cannot give Damien Chazelle enough credit for even attempting to pull that off.”

A “little taken aback” sums up Babylon perfectly – it’s three hours of sensory overload, big scenes, even bigger performances by stars Margot Robbie, Brad Pitt and newcomer Diego Calva, and an alligator (as well as the elephant). It’s a big swing by Chazelle (who at 32, became the youngest person to win the best director Oscar) that leaves you dazed at the end but unable to stop talking about it. Is it good? Is it bad? Who knows but it’s certainly something.

I am sure I will never, ever be on a set again with 700 extras. That will not happen. Only Damien Chazelle would do that.

“I guess if you took everybody’s fantasy of what the roaring ’20s were and put them in a film with a lot of historical dark facts they didn’t know, that’s what you’d get,” says Smart.

Smart’s character is loosely based on Elinor Glyn, a British writer who popularised the “It Girl” phenomenon and had influence over the careers of silent-era stars such as Rudolph Valentino and Clara Bow. Pitt’s Jack Conrad, meanwhile, is loosely based on 1920s heartthrob John Gilbert, while Robbie’s scrappy Nellie LaRoy is a mix of Clara Bow, Joan Crawford, Jeanne Eagels and Alma Rubens. All thrived in the silent era, but struggled as Hollywood evolved into “talking pictures” and a new, less permissible, moral code.

Manny Torres (Diego Calva) and Elinor St. John (Jean Smart) are both outsiders in their own way in Babylon.

“The kind of people who were attracted to movie making were probably a pretty interesting lot,” says Smart. “You know, as Jack’s character said, ‘On hotels, they used to say no dogs, no actors allowed.’ And that really was the attitude about people who were entertainers.

“So there were misfits and rogues and prostitutes, crazy people. But I mean, the people who were excited about making a movie – this new, incredible technology – I think a lot of those people had to be non-conforming people.”

In that sense, Chazelle fits right in. You have to be a little crazy to pull off a film like Babylon. It’s a story about outsized ambition only matched by the shoot. As well as the topline cast, which also includes Tobey Maguire, Lukas Haas, Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Samara Weaving and Olivia Wilde, it’s stacked with extras, who are usually in a state of undress or sweaty and caked in dust.

“I am sure I will never, ever be on a set again with 700 extras,” says Smart. “That will not happen. Only Damien Chazelle would do that. Because he wanted it all to be real. I mean, they are flying through that desert on that camera truck.

“And those crazy extras, they’re chasing Manny on a horse and people are shooting each other. And you think, ‘How many people must have gotten hurt in those scenes [in the 1920s], especially when you find out they recruited all these extras from the street. They would just get junkies and street people go, ‘OK, here’s a sword. Just run out there’ and you think, oh my god, it’s just insanity.”

Now 71 and riding a wave of career success, Smart seems a long way from those misfits who were once – and still are – drawn to Hollywood. She got her break in theatre before a string of roles on TV in shows such as Designing Women, Frasier and 24, and, she says, has been spared any type of brutal career assessment like the ones her character hands out in Babylon.

“I don’t know why I’ve been so fortunate,” she says. “I know that I’m very lucky to have had the opportunities I’ve had and keep having. And at the age I am, as much as I would like some of these opportunities to come along 20 or 30 years ago, I am thrilled that it wasn’t the opposite, where I kind of skyrocketed when I was young, and then just continued to fall. That would be devastating.”

Babylon is released in cinemas on January 19.

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