On board with Baby Driver
Edgar Wright’s latest film mixes music with murderous mayhem
LOS ANGELES — A decade ago, writer/director Edgar Wright came up with an idea for a heist flick as jukebox musical, minus the actors singing songs.
Eventually, the movie became 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-superhero spoof Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and
The World’s End.
Despite those cinematic interruptions, Wright always returned to the Baby Driver project, laced with pop and R&B tunes accentuating holdups, car chases, gunfights and a love-story subplot.
“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,” Wright says. “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 González and Jon Bernthal show up as violent crooks. Lily James plays Debora, 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,” Wright says about the casting process. “Ansel quickly became the favourite. He’s very charismatic and can hold the screen, and he has a musical background. 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 1994 album Orange. So a track from it, Bellbottoms, opens the film. Other tunes in the eclectic soundtrack include B-AB-Y sung by Carla Thomas, Bob & Earl’s Harlem Shuffle, Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers’ Egyptian Reggae, The Beach Boys’ Let’s Go Away For Awhile, The Commodores’ Easy, Debora and Beck’s Debra.
It’s also no 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 known as ad exec Don Draper on 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 Wright 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 good-versus-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 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. You want that guy who ain’t going to take no for an answer.”