Jaime Leigh McIn­tosh: ​‘We weren’t stuck in this idea of what the 1920s should look like’

Jaime Leigh McIn­tosh, the head of the hair depart­ment for Damien Chazelle’s 1920s extrav­a­gan­za Baby­lon, used to have her hair cut by her moth­er using kitchen scis­sors. She didn’t let this expe­ri­ence deter her from pur­su­ing a career in hair styling though – after watch­ing Full Tilt Boo­gie, a film that goes behind-the-scenes dur­ing the pro­duc­tion of Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn, McIn­tosh realised that the film indus­try could sup­ply her with the vari­ety and excite­ment she was look­ing for. McIn­tosh spoke to LWLies about the mak­ing of Babylon.

LWLies: What were your thoughts when you first received the script for Babylon?

McIn­tosh: Baby­lon is a hefty 180-page script, but I couldn’t put it down. The prospect that I could work on it was so excit­ing, but I do remem­ber think­ing, ​“How are we actu­al­ly going to do this?” There were these mas­sive par­ty scenes with loads of cast, and Covid-19 had just begun. The film was put on hold for over a year, but Damien and I exchanged char­ac­ter-relat­ed images through­out that time.

What was your work­ing rela­tion­ship with Damien Chazelle like?

Amaz­ing. He is so col­lab­o­ra­tive and open to talk about any­thing. Damien’s vision was quite dif­fer­ent to a nor­mal 1920s film, so it took me a while to wrap my head around it. He told me that if the pho­to and ref­er­ence exist­ed in the 1920s, then we could do it. I researched so deeply to find 1920s pic­tures of men with messy hair and long side­burns and women with long, loose hair instead of per­fect fin­ger waves. We weren’t stuck in this idea of what the 1920s should look like.

What’s the sto­ry behind Mar­got Robbie’s warm dark blonde wig?

It was prob­a­bly the longest, most in-depth test­ing I’ve ever done for one char­ac­ter before. There was a lot of talk of Clara Bow at the start, but then it changed, and all we could set­tle on was the colour. We didn’t want to go full blonde because we’ve seen Mar­got like that before. We did some sleuthing and found out that she was going to have dark hair in Ams­ter­dam. That was com­ing out around the same time, so it wasn’t a good idea to have the same hair colour. In the end, we stuck to some­thing that was very nat­ur­al for Mar­got. We didn’t want to give her an insane amount of hair either because Mar­got her­self doesn’t have the thick­est, cra­zi­est head of hair, and it had to be believable.

Heba Tho­ris­dot­tir, the head of the make-up depart­ment, and I did a test with Mar­got. I rent­ed 15 dif­fer­ent wigs, which were all dif­fer­ent lengths and styles — every­thing from tiny bobs with micro-bangs to long and wavy styles. Damien want­ed to put most of those wigs on cam­era, so we repeat­ed and test­ed those looks with an unfin­ished ver­sion of the red dress that you see in the film.

He want­ed to see her out­side in the wind, walk­ing towards the cam­era. He want­ed to see the wig mov­ing while she danced to see what kind of feel­ing that gave. We nar­rowed it down to the longer style, and I was kind of freak­ing out. I thought, ​“The lead­ing lady of a film set in the 1920s is going to have long hair? This is crazy!”

Did you sug­gest any changes to Margot’s look at that stage?

We dis­cussed that as her jour­ney goes on, and she does more in the indus­try and starts to feel the need to con­form in some way, then we could do a length change, so she’s a lit­tle more in the peri­od, but it’s still wild and she’s got her own thing going on.

Once we’d worked out how long and thick we want­ed it, I told the wig­mak­er Robert Pick­ens the end result we were after. Then, we did a test fit­ting with Mar­got and Damien. We need­ed a few lighter strands for dimen­sion and to give it more bright­ness. I cut it to the right length, the cam­era test­ed it again and away we went.

How does styling a wig dif­fer from styling nat­ur­al hair?

Besides nor­mal hair styling, there’s also the mim­ic­k­ing of nature — you’re cre­at­ing a nat­ur­al head of hair, so the hair has to go in believ­able direc­tions. I tried to use as lit­tle hair prod­uct as pos­si­ble because the more prod­uct that is in the hair, the more it stiff­ens and starts to look hel­met-like. The wig was so snug on Margot’s head that I didn’t need to over­load her with hair­pins. I just glued the front hair lace and used four hairpins.

Was Mar­got accus­tomed to wear­ing a wig?

She’s so expe­ri­enced with wigs. Once she got the go-ahead to do what she want­ed with it, then she went for it. And it real­ly helped to sell the sit­u­a­tion because some­times you can tell that the actor doesn’t feel like they can touch their hair because it doesn’t belong to them. I always set the wig up to be as move­able and change­able as it can be, so they feel like it’s theirs. In one scene, she was danc­ing around and touch­ing the wig. I came in to reset it between takes and I told her, ​“The hair touch­ing…”, and she was like, ​“You want me to stop?”. And I told her, ​“No! I love it!”

Can you walk me through your typ­i­cal work­ing day dur­ing the mak­ing of Babylon?

I worked 10 to 18 hours a day. Some­times, we had to process twen­ty-some­thing cast mem­bers in the morn­ing, so we had a very tight sched­ule. If you said you need­ed 45 min­utes, then you couldn’t real­ly take 46. We used to start any­where between 4 and 6 a.m. depend­ing on whether we were shoot­ing out­side or not. My back­ground super­vi­sor and her assis­tant processed the back­ground actors — on some days, there were up to 800 of them!

I was look­ing after Mar­got Rob­bie and Diego Cal­va every day, and Brad Pitt, too, when he was work­ing, but he was in a dif­fer­ent trail­er, so I spent a lot of time run­ning between trailers.

We trav­elled to set with our cast, and then we’d be with them all day. Before each dif­fer­ent shot, we got ​“last looks” to make sure there weren’t any con­ti­nu­ity shifts. If they shot more than one scene in a day, then we’d change the actor’s hair to suit the storyline.