How the 'Babylon' makeup artist used dirt and sweat to turn Margot Robbie into a budding movie star

A creative brief that director Damien Chazelle sent to Heba Thorisdottir, head of the make-up department at " Babylon", included dirt and sweat - and he wanted a lot of it.

All of this was part of the gigantic files filed with the research that the filmmaker had done on Hollywood in the years 1920 . What he was looking for from his team were looks that had never been done before, because this movie was about a cast of characters trying to break into Hollywood.

A book of clichés from the time served as Thorisdottir's holy grail. It showed women who had nothing, who were prostitutes or who wanted to be arrested because they "wanted medical help". "He gave everyone all the information and it made it easy to collaborate with people," Thorisdottir said. His collaborators were costume designer Mary Zophres and head of the hair department Jamie Leigh Macintosh.

Chazelle's decadent epic follows Nellie LaRoy, played by Margot Robbie, and an ensemble cast with Brad Pitt, Jean Smart, Li Jun Li, Diego Calva and Jovan Adepo as Old Hollywood went from silent to talkies.

With the character Robbie, an aspiring movie star, Thorisdottir said, "He wanted a stark difference between Nellie LaRoy, the movie star versus Nellie Roy, someone trying to make it work behind the scenes."

For Nellie's entrance scene, the audience doesn't learn much, other than that she is a wild child who shows her uninhibited side during a party. When she wakes up the next morning, it's a brief scene, but Chazelle shows the audience how the character lives — she has nothing. It was "such an important scene," Thorisdottir said. "Where I went with the makeup was to show that she had nothing on. Maybe she has lipstick on or maybe she borrowed one. She didn't She's not a movie star yet to care."

It's Nellie's confidence and attitude to be a star that gets her where she is.

Later in the film, as Nellie shoots a scene on a "talkie", she has to do several takes. For this, Thorisdottir was nearby on the set. Not only did Chazelle want to do a long take, but Nellie is sweating to varying degrees as the crew yells at her and her nerves show. Thorisdottir was on standby to reset Robbie's makeup and spray her with a watery sweat concoction.

Collaborating with Zophres and McIntosh, Thorisdottir stuck to Chazelle's creative brief and wanted to ensuring Nellie's appearance was timeless “Damien was very clear, he didn't want cupid lips and thin eyebrows. He wanted this portrait of people trying to make it in Hollywood."

Chazelle wanted to show Manny (Calva) with dirt under his fingernails, but not just anyone which. He was special. Said Thorisdottir, "He kept sending me pictures of the patina he wanted on Diego's hands at all times, and it was of 'There will be blood.' I called makeup artist John Blake and asked him 'How do you keep it?'"

Blake came to the rescue of Thorisdottir, cooking up a batch in his kitchen and sharing his secret so that she can put this specific patina under Calva's fingernails to get them dirty.

Tobey Maguire appears in the third act of a Block House party, playing a character Nellie owes $60,000. Thorisdottir knew this sequence would be "filled with monsters, and his makeup would be inspired by 'Death in Venice'."

Thorisdottir wanted to pass on someone who had leftover makeup from the night before. Revisiting "Death in Venice," she said, "I love the part of the movie where there's a thing now you see it and now you don't. It was just flashes of paleness . Damien loved that idea and wrote it into the script, so his character puts on more whiteness to go clubbing."

Calva's character had the biggest arc. The makeup artist described it...