Director Paul Schrader Slams Historical Inaccuracies in ‘Babylon’

Despite its stellar cast and huge budget, Babylon just can’t catch a break. Director Paul Schrader, who wrote Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and directed 2017’s First Reformed, thinks the Damien Chazelle flick got a lot wrong. “BABYLON is many things but well researched isn’t one of them,” he wrote on Facebook. “After reading a number of planted articles about the filmmakers’ voluminous ‘research,’ I was scratching my head. Does any film historian agree the film’s putative historicity?” Earlier this month, Chazelle told Indiewire that he started the film’s “addictive” research process 15 years ago. In his review for The Daily Beast, critic Nick Schager wrote that “despite primarily taking place in the 1920s, no one looks, acts, or talks like they’re from the swinging decade—a state of affairs that, as with the modern expletives spewed about with gusto, feels at once purposeful and without a real point.” Babylon follows the change in characters’ lives in 1920s Los Angeles, as silent films gave way to the talkies. It stars Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie. The $80 million movie opened to a paltry $3.6 million at the weekend box office.