The hardest part was the poop’: An oral history of Babylon’s explosive elephant opening

Why a gross-out gag took an artistic army to pull off

After an early New York screening of his new film, Babylon, director Damien Chazelle admitted that his jazzy ode to the depraved underbelly of early 20th-century filmmaking was ultimately a “hate letter to Hollywood.” Obviously, he loved cinema — no one gets into movies without passion — but a decade of research into show business’s turbulent transition from silents to talkies left him seething.

There’s a lot of shit that goes into the industry, into the making [of a movie], and the lives wrecked in order to make this thing,” Chazelle said at the Q&A, “but something comes out of the other end that is undeniable and that humanity will always have to show for itself.”

Chazelle’s interest in “shit that goes into the industry” and “something that comes out of the other end” isn’t just metaphorical. Though Babylon weaves together the lives of glamorous movie star types played by Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt, the movie’s focus is on Manny (Narcos: Mexico’s Diego Calva), an immigrant with big-screen dreams who, in the film’s increasingly notorious opening, is dragging an elephant up a hill to a cocaine-fueled party hidden away in the desert hills of Los Angeles. Moving an elephant in a flimsy 1920s-era truck proves difficult, and more so when the animal unleashes fecal hell on Manny and his wrangler accomplice. Chazelle, working somewhere between There Will Be Blood and Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, sends his camera right into the spew. Seriously, it is a tremendous amount of dung. Everywhere. This is minute four of a 189-minute run time.

The elephant scene sets the tone for Babylon, a roller-coaster ride that zips through zany set pieces and around dark turns as it interrogates what we really know of the “golden age” of Hollywood. And despite all the work that went into realizing the world of his film, Chazelle couldn’t have imagined what it would take to get the largest-known land animal to spray poop on the camera and cast. This is how it happened, safely, and how the gag left one courageous stuntman soaked in the name of art.

I started with the idea of an elephant at a party. It felt appropriate as the type of thing that they would sometimes do at parties of this time, with everyone trying to top each other in how outsize and elephantine (excuse the pun) they could make their soirées.

Then it was this funny thing of working backward from that and actually asking, practically speaking, how do you transport an elephant to a party? Especially if it’s in one of the big castlelike houses at the time, out in the middle of nowhere, up on a hill — it’s as impractical as possible for getting an elephant there. And what if everything that could go wrong does go wrong? The truck driver for some reason wasn’t aware that he’s transporting an elephant, refuses to, then has to be bribed. Then they get the elephant going, but then they have to go up an insanely steep hill. Will they be able to make it? Then when it feels like things couldn’t possibly get any worse, well, that’s when the elephant suddenly has a bout of diarrhea.

Linus Sandgren, director of photography: Damien wanted the movie to feel like something between Whiplash and La La Land in the style. That had to do with the energy. We mixed the styles quite a bit in regard to movement and stuff, where you had both handheld and long sorts of moves, as well as the frenetic editing from Whiplash.

Jimmy Ortega, “elephant wrangler”: I was booked on the job for a month, and then one day, a buddy of mine called me and said, “Hey, Jimmy, your scenes are coming up. What do you know about elephants?” I said, “Well, they’re big... I’ve seen them at the circus...” And he goes, “OK, let me talk to the director.” And then he calls me back like a half hour later and goes, “You’re the guy.” So I start doing everything, watching documentaries about elephants, trying to prepare for it, and then I get one more call: “Hey, man, I forgot to tell you, but the elephant’s just gonna shit on you.”

Chazelle: Everyone for some reason thinks of the past as gentler, quieter, less vivid colors, sepia, and that the wildest thing people did was maybe have too many sips of champagne or someone dances the Charleston and a bunch of people go, Ooh! It’s a quaintness that has really warped our perception of what was actually a really transgressive, radical, wild, filthy, insane time. So to put the audience at ease in the beginning, then really deliberately pull the rug out from under their feet and have the elephant literally shit into the camera... We had to go for that sort of hard collision.

Sandgren: Some people may leave the theater at that point. We had that discussion. In the first 15 minutes, we give everyone a lot of what they’re going to get. We establish the comedy of the film.

Florencia Martin, production designer: That elephant we used was so incredibly specific, and for Damien, it needed to look 100% real.

Chazelle: We couldn’t shoot with an elephant. We did things to this elephant on screen that should never be done to any elephant.

Martin: So, first thing we did, the most important thing we did, was cast an elephant. We looked at many elephants in sanctuaries across the United States to find an elephant that had features that were a good fit. We found one who had a little spot in front, was the right scale — this was supposed to be a circus elephant; they weren’t African — and it was great casting. Then we worked with [Industrial Light and Magic] and the incredible [visual effects supervisor] Jay Cooper, who really understood how important this was to Damien, to photograph the elephant and build him in 3D.

But we had to resolve the volume of the elephant in the space. We didn’t want to have a void there; we wanted something for the actors to act against. So we worked with our prop master Gay Perello and art director Ace Eure to find all the pieces of elephant as puppets and prosthetics.

Arjen Tuiten, prosthetic designer: They first called me about doing the makeup on Babylon’s Elephant Man-looking guy and the conjoined twins for later scenes. But then they were like, Oh, we also have this elephant behind. We know it’s not really your cup of tea, but do you want to please take it on, so it’s under one roof? I’m like, Uh, yeah, I’ll do it.

One of my guys went to the LA Zoo with the visual effects team, and we studied one of the elephants that they liked. We photographed it, then started sculpting. And we worked with Elia in special effects, who did the fake feces. There was so much to figure out for it to be safe for the actor.

Elia P. Popov, special effects supervisor: My company [Jem V/X] builds stunt vehicles. Probably close to 300 stock vehicles per year out of here alone. On Babylon, it was our responsibility to manufacture anything that has to be what they call “show action.” So in the case of the opening scene with the elephant truck and all the poop emitting, the truck itself was a picture car, but the elephant box didn’t exist.

Martin: We did extensive research on horse trailers of the period, and it actually scaled to where we could fit an elephant behind the truck without it being uncomfortable. We didn’t want to put an elephant in a situation where it would be completely outside the trailer, and obviously the elephant is much taller than a horse, so we redesigned the truck, which was a Model T, and redesigned the truck bed in a way that our characters would have dismantled it at that time in order to make the elephant fit in. We got it so that his legs are at the back and his butt is kind of pushing the back gate forward. It was amazing to work with such artisans who could be so accurate.

Popov: Step two was getting the prosthetic from Arjen, and building a whole system to mount the elephant butt in the bed itself. Then we also came up with an auger system to distribute the elephant poop.

Sandgren: There was a green-screen buck that they later put CG skin on, but the ass was there, and it could shit.

Tuiten: We sculpted the behind and then we did two different... anuses? I guess you could call them that. We made them out of a very light shell of soft silicone. They had to be reinforced.

Martin: Elia basically reconstructed the guts of an elephant in a very simple way in order to get our elephant poop to push through the anus accurately, and projectile forward.