SMOOTH CRIMINALS
Edgar Wright rounds up one of the year’s coolest casts for a heist movie set to music. TF unplugs its iPod to talk to the director plus stars Ansel Elgort, Lily James and Jon Hamm about pulling off scores to a score.
In 2014, when Edgar Wright was scripting Baby Driver, he found himself talking to a guy who’d served time for armed robbery. He was one of four ex-bank robbers Wright met with in a determined effort to bring authenticity to a screenplay penned, as he puts it, “By an English, middle-class kid.” The question was always the same: “Did you listen to music while taking down banks?” The answer was “yes”. One had favoured a rave compilation, another would blast Michael Jackson’s ‘Smooth Criminal’. Wright, sitting in London’s Soho Hotel, grins at the memory. “This guy in Boston told me about doing a job and, outside the bank, waiting to go in, ‘Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door’ by Guns N’ Roses started playing. One of the guys said, ‘This song is jinxed… This is a hex… We’re gonna die if we go in.’ So they didn’t. And I said, ‘That’s fucking amazing…’”
It’s a detail that made it into a script that was originally commissioned way back in 2007 by Working Title as part of a two-picture deal. Back then, all Wright said to Working Title’s co-chairman Eric Fellner and to Nira Park, founder of Big Talk Productions, was: “I have this idea for a car chase movie.” Fellner replied: “I want to see you do a car movie.” And that was that. But the story goes back further, to 1995, when Wright, aged 21, moved to Bounds Green in north London.
“I’d copied off my brother Orange by The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, and I used to listen to ‘Bellbottoms’ on audio cassette over and over and over again,” he says. “I used to think, ‘This is the perfect car chase song.’ I’d visualise it, and think about doing action that was truly set to music. Then I formulated the idea that it would be about a getaway driver who can’t operate unless he has the right music playing.”
In the finished movie, said getaway driver has tinnitus and keeps his iPod plugged into his ears to drown out the ringing. He’s played by Ansel Elgort, the fresh-faced star of The Fault In Our Stars and the Divergent series. Elgort, 23, looks 18, and is one of a small number of actors in that age bracket who can open a movie.
“I was dying to work with Edgar,” says Elgort, his drawl so laid back it’s hard to credit that he spends most of Baby Driver with his hair on fire. “He’s a great filmmaker, so specific. Reading the script, I could visualise it. I’ve never worked with anyone with such a complete vision.” He signed on the dotted and training began. “I went to tons of classes, loads of sessions with the stunt team. I learned to do most of the stuff that Baby does. They let me do the drift arounds when I first steal the car. That was cool. But they wouldn’t let me [ do the stunts] when the other actors were in the car, in case I killed them.”
Said actors are Jamie Foxx, Jon Bernthal, Jon Hamm and Eiza González, playing a team of bank robbers hired by Kevin Spacey’s crime kingpin to take down banks in Atlanta. Originally Baby Driver was located in LA, but tax breaks made Atlanta a more practical option. Wright happily adapted the script, noting, “Atlanta has a history for cars, music and crime. It’s accessed by planes, trains, freeways, so it’s the centre of the drug trade in the south-east. There are a lot of bank robberies because people get on the freeway and disappear.” The cast had a blast during shooting: Spacey and Foxx even told Elgort to make the most of it because shoots like this, where actors and crew go for dinner, are not the norm. All of them cite Wright’s passion and specificity as his USP.
“Even my character’s outfits and hair were driven by Edgar,” recalls Hamm, whose Buddy is no Don Draper when it comes to style. “He’s wearing clothes that are a little bit too young for him, and it doesn’t quite work. You see guys like that in the clubs in Hollywood or Miami – the 60-yearolds in designer jeans. And you’re just like, ‘Oh dear.’ Buddy shaves the sides of his hair and has a mop on top.”
Buddy’s tragic efforts are for his younger wife Darling, played by Mexican singer-actress González, who here makes her big-screen debut after cutting her fangs on From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series. “I did a lot of gun training,” she says. “I get to do a lot of shooting in this film, most of it with machine guns. Darling would die for Buddy. It’s a beautiful love they have.”
Which brings us to the other key bit of casting. For as much as Baby Driver is Wright’s car-chase movie, it’s also his ode to all those intoxicating US pictures focusing on outlaw couples in all-consuming love: They Live By Night, Gun Crazy, Bonnie And Clyde, Badlands and, of course, True Romance, scripted by Wright’s BFF Quentin Tarantino.
‘i wouldn’t write the scene until i found the right track’ edgar wright
Enter Lily James. Wright had never seen her in Downton Abbey but was bewitched by her lead turn in Cinderella. They met in London and he was “charmed”. Sending her audition tape to his regular DoP Bill Pope with no other instruction but to watch it, he received a two-word note in return: ‘Hire her.’ He did, certain he’d found his Deborah, the diner waitress who tumbles into love with Baby.
“Edgar gave me a list of films to watch,” she smiles. “True Romance, Wild At Heart – stuff where you feel the characters are destined to be together, whether they’re from different sides of the tracks, or are escaping the law. They transcend the darkness around them. I love those movies.” But love without music is like a car without gas or a gun without bullets.
TUNE YOUR ENGINES
“I wouldn’t write the scene until I found the right track,” says Wright, who arranged his iTunes by duration order so he could write, say, a two-minute scene, or a four-minute scene. All of the tunes used in the movie are favourites from growing up: ‘Bellbottoms’, ‘Hocus Pocus’, ‘Tequila’, ‘Brighton Rock’, ‘Never, Never Gonna Give Ya Up’. When he sent out the script to his actors, he did so using an app that played the relevant tune when they clicked on each page. Elgort listened to his getaway music for a full year before shooting began, and he still plays the mixtape now.
Wright, naturally, is no stranger to choreographing action to music – it’s a technique he used in Spaced, Shaun Of The Dead, Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World and The World’s End, each time pushing it further to fully synthesise action, stunts and dance choreography. Back in 2002, he even road tested Baby Driver in his video for ‘Blue Song’ by Mint Royale, with Noel Fielding playing the wheelman outside a bank. This time, though, he took things to the nth degree, utilising a variety of methods to lay down his action beats. If it was a big, loud action scene where sound was going to have to be replaced anyway, he’d blast the track through the set. If he was recording sound, the actors would have earwigs, and Wright and Pope would also be plugged in. And sometimes the music was just for Elgort, playing through his iPod headphones.
Especially tricky were the gun fights, for these, too, are synced to any given track’s rhythm section. “Automatic weapon fire is so loud that it wipes out the music,” winces Wright. “So when they’re firing in time, it would be the choreographer talking to the stunt guys, going, ‘So your bit is, “Boom, boom… boom boom boom.”’ You can’t hear the music, so it’s this thing of getting to know the rhythms. In theory, you could digitally put muzzle flashes in time with the music, but it never looks quite right. So we did it for real. Everyone is firing in time with different drumming rhythms. It’s not like a Michael Bay or Tony Scott action scene where you run big chunks of the scene and have 14 cameras going; it would be one camera, going this is your bit – boom boom boom – then on to the next. Very specific.”
Hamm was stunned when he saw the finished film. “It’s not a musical in the grand MGM tradition, but it’s an important element. Music is in 90 per cent of the film and drives a big portion of the plot as well. I think a lot of people will engage with the film from that perspective as well. I think back to Quentin Tarantino and Reservoir Dogs and everybody having that soundtrack and being like, ‘What is this?’ A bunch of old songs, but in a different context. It really is very cool.”
But here’s the thing – in a movie that’s bursting with ballistic car chases and balletic gunplay, the standout sequence is a foot chase. It is, without a word of hyperbole,
the best we’ve seen since Keanu crashed through houses and backyards before blowing out his knee in Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break. And yet it almost didn’t happen.
“At several stages in production the studio was asking me to cut the foot chase out,” grins Wright. “They were saying, ‘Why do you need two days to do this bit?’ They wanted to save some money. I was like, ‘I swear, this is going to be one of your favourite scenes of the movie.’ I’m a big fan of foot chases anyway – I’ve done one before in Hot Fuzz – but I liked the idea of a car movie suddenly turning into an on-foot movie.”
The heist leading up to the chase took four days to shoot. The fleet-of-foot sequence itself took three days. The set-piece it then bleeds into took another four. All for a few minutes of precious screen time. “Ansel had never seen Point Break so I showed him the chase scene,” says Wright. “And me and Bill Pope watched it again. When the foot chase was over, Bill turned to me and said, ‘That’s a lot of work!’”
Indeed it was, the production moving across intersections, through parks, over walls, into shops, down an escalator, along alleyways and up a hill “like a travelling circus”. And while Elgort had a parkour double, he did most of it himself.
“I played basketball at high school and I rock climb, but I trained to jump over desks and through the mini-van,” he shrugs, his nonchalance such that you’d never believe the mini-van stunt is worthy of Tony Jaa in Ong-Bak.
“A lot of the stuff we did in one take because once you get a stunt right, you don’t want to risk getting hurt.”
This last applies to the camera operator too, for while 90 per cent of Baby Driver is shot in 35mm anamorphic, there are a couple of moments in the foot chase that were caught with a digital camera on a rig called the mini-cam. Wright laughs delightedly. “Every time I watch it and I see Ansel jump over the chair and clear it, I think, ‘Wait, how did [ the camera crew] not crash into the chair?’ It’s such an amazingly operated shot.”
Did watching her co-star run and gun engines cause pangs of jealousy for James? She rarely, after all, gets to (ahem) drive the action, instead riding shotgun or watching on while the bullets fly.
“I have my moment,” she points out, though just what that is, exactly, won’t be spoiled here. “I needed it – it felt necessary. But it was fun being in the cars with Ansel and the stunt drivers. They were really intense manoeuvres. I had to hold my breath as we were skidding about. My life was very much in his hands.”
ON THE QT
Debuting at Austin’s South By Southwest festival in March, Baby Driver elicited rave reviews. But one very special person had seen it before that. Presumably, Total Film asks, Tarantino loved it – it certainly feels like his kind of movie, given the underworld sleazeballs, quotable dialogue, wall-to-wall music, adulation of pop culture and the fact Wright not only picked QT’s brains on how to shoot the ultimate car chase, but even employed Allan Padelford, the camera-rigs expert who worked on Death Proof.
“I told Quentin about Baby Driver a long time ago, and I’m not going to mention another movie, but when he watched it, he said, ‘I told you you should have done Baby Driver instead!’ That was his review of it.” [ cracks up]
Tarantino was presumably referring to Scott Pilgrim given it was shot in Canada with Hollywood actors and a production budget of $60m, yet made only $47m at the worldwide box office. But it shouldn’t be overlooked that that technically dazzling, big-hearted action-fantasy has since become a cult classic. The same fate, surely, awaits Baby Driver, though like Pulp Fiction it’s one of those rare movies that could pull off the trick of enjoying cool cachet and mainstream success.
If that’s the case, you can bet Wright and his gang will be spinning some victory tracks. Starting with the 12-inch of ‘Smooth Criminal’.