‘Babylon’ images reveal first look at Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt in ‘La La Land’ director’s new movie

Margot Robbie, elegantly yet scantily dressed in red, hoisted toward the heavens at a Carnivale-style festival. Brad Pitt sporting a thin mustache and slicked hair, pouring booze while wearing a tuxedo.

If the first images of Damien Chazelle’s new venture Babylon provide any glimpse into what’s to come, his promising “larger-than-life” epic is going to dazzle and captivate fans all over again.

Coming off the huge success of La La Land and First Man, Chazelle told Vanity Fair in a recent interview accompanying the first looks at the movie that he boldly wanted to explore “a big, epic, multicharacter movie,” and from the looks of it, he’s succeeded.

“I kept putting it off, because it was just a little too massive,” Chazelle said.

Reeling in mega stars Pitt and Robbie certainly fits the bill, too. The film is set in the Golden Age of Hollywood during the 1920s, a time and place that Chazelle felt showed a glamorous and unstable lifestyle, both in the city and with people across the ever-changing landscape of America.

“Everything is shifting underneath people’s feet,” he told Vanity Fair, “and I became really fascinated by the human cost of disruption at that magnitude, at a time when there was no road map when everything was just new and wild.”

Remember that Robbie and Pitt already teamed up once before, in Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood, which featured stunning (and award-winning) performances. Though it was set in another time, surely the duo can capture the magic of living and thriving in Hollywood amidst chaos and turmoil, all with elegance and unmatched flair all over again.

Of Pitt’s character, Jack Conrad, Chazelle said, “He’s reaching a point in his life in his career where he’s starting to look back and starting to wonder what’s ahead.”

On the other side, Robbie, who plays Nellie LaRoy, has a presence about her that will elevate the role and film all at once, according to Chazelle.

“Margot as a person has this — it’s a very Australian sort of thing — brash, bold, hungry kind of edge to her that she was really able to tap into and do a lot of really fun things with,” he said.

We’ve already seen the intensity Chazelle can bring to the screen with his first big film Whiplash, which is a buzzing, humming, immersive and extraordinary event from start to finish. Following that, we saw him transform Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone for La La Land before teaming with Gosling again for the quiet yet furious First Man. Sure, perhaps we can overlook 10 Cloverfield Lane, but since he wrote the movie yet didn’t direct it, we can certainly say the storyline was absolutely captivating.

We get two shots of both Pitt and Robbie. The first one with Pitt, mentioned above, has him smiling knowingly alongside Diego Calva, playing Manny Torres, who looks a bit stunned and miffed all at once in his tux. The second shows him with Hollywood-esque sunglasses and a turtleneck sweater, expertly holding a cigarette in his raised hand at eye level.

The two images of Robbie are both seemingly from the same scene as she’s sporting the same red outfit. In the second photo, she is lying down, eyes closed, with a cigarette dangling from her lips.

“I wanted to capture just how big and bold and brash and unapologetic that world was,” Chazelle said.

We also get a glimpse of Lukas Haas as George Munn alongside an ecstatic Calva in another scene, which is set outdoors with both sporting either dirt or soot on their cheeks and clothes.

And while there are a few more festival-going shots, one with Calva and Jean Smart, who plays Elinor St. John, and another of Jovan Adepo playing the trombone as Sidney Palmer, as well as a photo of Li Jun Li as Lady Fay Zhu, we’ve saved the best for last.

One image you could spend a bit of time gazing at is a stunning transformation from Tobey Maguire, playing Charlie Chaplin, replete with heavy red circles around his eyes and a paler than usual face, sporting a vest and dress shirt on an elegant, over-the-top couch that appears to be outdoors.

Chazelle added that the scale and scope of the whole project were a lot, but totally worth it.

“It was definitely the hardest thing I’ve done. Just the logistics of it, the number of characters, the scale of the set pieces, the span of time that the movie charts — it all conspired to make it particularly challenging, but it was a challenge that was pretty exciting to take on,” he concluded.

Babylon is set to hit theaters on Dec. 25 of this year.