Wright reveals how he pulled off movie magic
MOVIE: Baby Driver STARRING: Ansel Elgort, Kevin Spacey RATING: MA15+ SHOWING AT: Grand Central
IF YOU saw Baby Driver over the weekend – and many of you did, according to its second position at the Australian box office, just a whisker behind Spider-Man – you were probably marvelling at how director Edgar Wright pulled it off.
If you haven’t seen it, go and do it right now. Walk out of work, school and all life responsibilities and head down to the cinema. You won’t regret it.
The exuberant “car chase” movie about Baby, a savant-like getaway driver for bank-robbing criminals, is also a technical achievement like nothing else you’ve seen at the movies.
Crucial to the success of the film is Wright’s ability to synchronise his song choices with every movement – not just in car chases but in gun fights, doing the coffee run or flirting at a laundromat. There are some 30-odd songs in Baby Driver and every one was chosen to meld perfectly with the action. How did he do it? Wright let everyone in on some of his movie magic during a Q&A with George Miller (Mad Max: Fury Road, Babe) after the Baby Driver premiere in Sydney.
On picking the songs:
“All the songs were written into the script, it would be pretty foolish to walk onto the set and say ‘We don’t have this Tequila song cleared but we’re just going to go for it’. We cleared all the songs beforehand and we rehearsed a lot of it. There was nothing on set we hadn’t rehearsed.
“They’re all songs I like. Some of them have a dramatic structure and you could do something with it. And they’re songs that aren’t really in other movies or don’t have music videos – something that doesn’t have a defining image with them, so not Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
“I wouldn’t start writing a new scene until I had the right song. Is there a change in tempo? Does this song go with the scene or does it work against it? I wouldn’t write a word until I had it so I would sit there with iTunes until I had the right song.”
On getting the actors’ movements to sync to the songs:
“If Ansel was wearing headphones in the scene, then his headphones would plug into a playback pack and we’d be playing the music straight to him. Sometimes, when it was a scene where he didn’t have the headphones in, he’d wear an earwig (a small wireless earpiece that doesn’t show up on camera).
“If other actors also had to work to the music, they also had earwigs — so when Jon Bernthal, Jon Hamm and Eiza Gonzalez were walking towards the bank [in the opening sequence].
“If there was a scene with no dialogue, we just played the music out loud. With the Harlem Shuffle sequence [in which Baby goes to buy coffee in a continuous one-take] he walks two city blocks, gets the coffees and walka back. All around that set, there were speakers hidden everywhere that was playing the song out loud.
“Anywhere that got tricky was when you couldn’t hear the music playback for love or money. Some of the
driving scenes, even with the best earwig in the world, that music is going to be drowned out by the noise of the road. The other tricky stuff was when we got into the gun-shooting sequences, when they were shooting the guns in time with the music but the sound of assault rifles just cancels everything out, you can’t hear any playback.
“In those cases, we had to go back to traditional choreography and this is where it gets really bananas. We don’t edit the guns to the music in post-production. We choreographed the gunfire to the bits of music. So in the Tequila scene, Jamie Foxx, Jon Hamm, Eiza and the stunt guys had to learn their percussion parts of the song.
“What it comes down to is you rehearse, you rehearse and you rehearse it. Our choreographer is a man named Ryan Heffington, who did Sia’s Chandelier video. All the actors just got it, it was kind of amazing.”
On how he timed the songs to the scenes:
“If the song was five-minutes long, the screenplay would be five pages long. It was one of the benefits of putting it to the song, it meant you could work out exactly how many shots you needed for the song. So that meant saying to the stunt guys, ‘this alley scene is 10 seconds long because that’s the length of the guitar part’. It would help me write. Then I’d do the storyboard to see if I could cut it to the music and make it work. And most of the time, it worked, pretty precisely.
“But then there would be happy accidents. My cinematographer Bill Pope watched the animatic of the second chase and said to me that we were going to run out of music. He said that the way I had cut the animatic is much faster than the car stunts would take and the sequence would take longer than I thought. Of course, we shot the scene and Bill was completely right. We ran out of song 45 seconds before the scene finished. I didn’t want to cut any of the footage out because the action is pretty good and I didn’t want to start another song and we can’t have no songs because that goes against the premise of the movie.
“On the last day of shooting, there’s that shot where they carjack the car from the young mother and Baby takes the iPod and starts rewinding the song to get the last verse again. I shot that to get me out of the fix. And that’s exactly what the character would do in that moment [because he had timed the getaway to the song and things had gone wrong].”
On shooting on the highway in Atlanta:
“The first chase is pretty accurate to the location. The parts on the freeway were shot on the I-85, which is the main freeway in Atlanta. The freeway wasn’t closed for us, it was this thing called the bubble, where you’d have a two-mile motorcade of police cars. Every time you reset, you have to go back seven miles and every reset would take half an hour.
“We were only allowed to film on the freeway on Sundays and only from 6am to 2pm on a day where there wasn’t a ballgame. Even with begging and bribing, the police cars were gone at 2pm and I didn’t get all the shots I wanted. We got lucky that something had gone wrong with one of the cameras and we got an insurance claim on the whole day so we got to go back and do it again six weeks later.
“Even on a Sunday, you’re causing traffic chaos. A friend of mine, Kumail Nanjiani (Silicon Valley, The Big Sick) was shooting in Atlanta at the time and while I was doing the freeway sequence, he sent me a text that said, ‘Everybody in Atlanta hates you’. That’s all it said, nothing else.”
On the car he personally drives:
“I’m pretty pathetic. I wish I had a cooler, more masculine answer to this. I drive a Prius. Not very Mad Max-y, I know.”