Damien Chazelle is "trepidatious" about his next project after Babylon flop

Babylon has its defenders, but a mixed critical reception and poor box office performance puts Damien Chazelle’s fourth feature film in the “flop” category. While Chazelle has “no problem heaping praise” on the “tremendous” performances (which included Margot Robbie, Brad Pitt, and Diego Calva, among others), he regards his 2022 Hollywood historical epic with mixed emotion now. “I don’t think I’m at the point where I can evaluate whether I think I did what I wanted to do,” he tells Ben Mankiewicz on the Talking Pictures podcast. “It’s still very hard [for] me to watch anything I’ve done, but certainly something still fresh. So maybe in five years or 10 years I’ll have more of a sense of it.”

Chazelle is proud that his cast and crew were “all able to get together and put on a show,” but he’s cognizant that Babylon losing a bunch of money might affect future projects. “I’ve kind of been sort of head in the sand, just sort of writing. So I’ll get a real taste of how it’s changed or not once I finish this next script and try to get it made. So I’m in a trepidatious sort of state of mind,” he says of his post-Babylon reception in Tinseltown. “I mean, I have no illusions, I’m not getting a budget of Babylon size any time soon, or at least not on this next one.”

The filmmaker says he’s “learned the hard way” that when he’s working on a new movie, “there’ll be some fundamental part of me that’s anxious no matter what, whether the previous one worked or didn’t.” However, “on financial terms, Babylon didn’t work at all,” he acknowledges. Per Variety, Babylon made a paltry $15 million at the domestic box office and $63 million worldwide on an estimated $80 million budget.

“You try to have that not affect what you’re doing creatively, but maybe at some level, it can’t help but affect it. But then maybe that’s okay? I don’t know. I’m really of mixed minds about it. I guess, maybe at least [I have to] try to do what I would’ve done regardless,” Chazelle muses. “Who knows, maybe I won’t be able to get this one made. I have no idea. We’ll have to see.”

There’s no word, as yet, what Chazelle’s next project might entail. Matthew Vaughn of Kingsman fame and Argylle infamy recently told Deadline that his production company was working on a new Chazelle movie musical that Vaughn himself planned to direct, which is curious—putting Chazelle back in the driver’s seat of a musical could be an easy way to win back Hollywood’s favor, given how beloved La La Land is. But given Chazelle’s resumé so far, he may be too ambitious to tread musical territory again; perhaps he’s willing to pass off a musical script to someone else while he tries something new. (Vaughn also has a lot of projects on his plate, so maybe this musical thing won’t even come to fruition.) Financials are inescapable, but plenty of directors have had worse flops and got second chances. It would be a shame to keep one of the industry’s most prominent rising auteurs in director jail for too long.