Thrills, chills at SXSW f ilm fest
Terrence Malick is a yes-show, glimpses of “Alien: Covenant” and choreographed, rhythmic gunplay.
Every year at the SXSW Film Festival, there is a screening driven by a palpable anticipation as the audience makes its way into the Paramount Theatre.
This year, as a playlist of music with the word “baby” in the title, including Prince’s “Baby I’m a Star,” pumped through the theater, Saturday night’s world premiere of Edgar Wright’s “Baby Driver” took things up a notch.
The film, which might be characterized by the singular genre descriptor of highenergy crime caper gangster romance musical car movie, played straight through the roof. Ansel Elgort stars as a young heist driver known as Baby, who is trying to get out of the criminal life when he is hired for one more job.
The cast also includes Kevin Spacey, Jamie Foxx, Jon Hamm, Eiza González and Lily James. Among many cameos are filmmaker Walter Hill, musicians Paul Williams, Killer Mike, Big Boi and Jon Spencer, as well as the unusual hard-partying duo the ATL Twins.
In introducing the film, which opens Aug. 11, Wright noted that he first thought about the movie 22 years ago when he began to visualize a car chase while listening to the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion song “Bellbottoms” (used in the picture’s first heist/chase scene). Wright said he first described the idea for the movie to his producers Nira Park and Eric Fellner as “a car film driven by music.”
After the screening, Wright came back onstage and brought out Gonzalez, Hamm and Elgort for an extended Q&A moderated by Austin-based filmmaker Robert Rodriguez.
“It’s sort of like the old Warner Bros. gangster films in that it’s a cautionary tale,” Wright noted. “The first chase that you see is the dream, that’s the sort of dream chase. People who have had fantasies of being in a high-speed pursuit, that’s sort of how you hope it would go.”
Wright noted that he worked with choreographer Ryan Heffington, whose work includes Sia’s “Chandelier” video and the recent Kenzo ad directed by Spike Jonze, so that the action has a rhythmic, at times dancelike quality, with actors firing their weapons in time to the songs.
Hamm talked about working in such a specific way: “Edgar writes and makes these things so incredibly cinematic, there’s not a lot of other work to do. It’s a pretty fully realized thing. It’s a testament to his talent that it’s come out this well.”