The art of the steal

Go to crime flick and a musical breaks out

A decade ago Edgar Wright came up with the idea for a heist flick as jukebox musical minus the actors singing songs. Eventually, the movie proposition transformed into Baby Driver but a few other films got in his way first.

After his twisted 2004 zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead, the distractions included Wright’s 2007 cop send up Hot Fuzz, his 2010 anime tribute as a superhero spoof Scott Pilgrim vs, the World and 2013’s doomsday lampoon The World’s End.

Despite those cinematic interruptions, he always returned to the Baby Driver project laced with pop and R&B tunes accentuating hold ups, car chases, gunfights and a love story sub-plot. “I initially did these mixes where a British DJ and I put together all the sound effects and songs so you could really get a sense of what the Baby Driver movie would be like,” says Wright. “It was sort of like an opera.”

The refined result features Ansel Elgort as a getaway driver coerced into bank jobs by a conniving mob boss (Kevin Spacey). Jamie Foxx, Jon Hamm, Eiza Gonzalez and Jon Bernthal show up as violent crooks. Lily James plays a diner waitress who falls for Elgort’s Baby just as his situation gets dangerous.

Obviously, Wright didn’t prepare the script with Elgort in mind (the actor was only 13 when he first wrote it), but he wears the headliner role well. “I met everyone out there,” says the director of the casting process. “Ansel quickly became the favourite. He’s very charismatic and can hold the screen, and he has a musical background, and he connected to the script in a way that was interesting to me.”

Indeed, both Wright and Elgort share an obsession with music of all kinds. In fact, Wright’s original inspiration for making Baby Driver was The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion’s album Orange, so a track on it, Bellbottoms, opens the film. Other tunes in the eclectic soundtrack range from B-A-B-Y sung by Carla Thomas, Bob & Earl’s Harlem Shuffle, Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers’ Egyptian Reggae to The Beach Boys’ Let’s Go Away For Awhile, The Commodores’ Easy and T. Rex’s Debora as well as Beck’s Debra.

It’s also not a coincidence that many of the chosen Baby Driver songs have been sampled by rappers. “When I got the script there was a music audio that went with the dialogue timed to the speed I was reading it,” says Hamm, best remembered as ad exec Don Draper from the Mad Men series. “Edgar loves music and movies, and he’s an amazing writer and a very curated human being.”

The amalgamation of abilities is one of the reasons he attracts respected actors to his films, but even he was surprised when Hamm, Foxx and Spacey responded to his screenplay so quickly. Their powerful presence helped the filmmaker achieve the dynamic he required. “The premise is that the gang of hoods live in a darker more cynical world than Baby,” Wright says. “Baby is fooling himself because he’s not a criminal and he’d rather be a regular guy after he meets Debora.”

In other words, the film has the essence of a goodversus-evil fairy tale on the verge of murderous mayhem choreographed by Wright as a conductor. “Edgar inspired me,” Elgort says. “Hopefully, one day if I direct, I can come close to the job he did.”

Certainly, the cast and his loyal crew fed off his energy and his dedication during the shoot in Atlanta, which was mostly 18-hour days, six days a week over three months. “Edgar is a remarkably talented with a specific vision and he seemed like he was not going to sleep until the movie got made,” Hamm says. “That’s what you want in a director.”

Edgar Wright