‘Driver’ shifts car chase into musical
Romantic gangster car chase musical. “A tad unlikely, huh?” Edgar Wright said with a laugh. He knows the shorthand description of his superstylized new heist movie “Baby Driver” sounds just as outlandish as it is fitting.
Then again, maybe it shouldn’t be all that surprising. Wright has a reputation for his moreis-more aesthetic and is no stranger to blurring, even upending, genres. His 2004 cult sensation “Shaun of the Dead” was billed as an apocalyptic zombie-horror comedy. And his 2010 graphicnovel-inspired “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” was a teen romance-ninja warrior video game mash-up.
“I only make a film every three or four years, so I think I try to do at least two movies at once with each one,” Wright said during a recent visit to San Francisco with “Baby Driver”’s 23-yearold star, Ansel Elgort (“Divergent”).
Elgort, a ballet-trained actor, musician and DJ from a creative New York family (he was named after photographer Ansel Adams), shot to fame after playing Augustus Waters in the teen-romance blockbuster “The Fault in Our Stars” three years ago. He folded his 6-foot-5 frame into a chair beside the ebullient British writer-director Wright, 43, and both men laughed throughout the interview.
They clearly relish memories of the movie’s “herculean” shoot in Atlanta last spring — racing cherry-red Subarus on Interstate 85 (including a high-speed three-card monte on wheels, shot from above), staging gunfights in multilevel parking garages and parkour-styled chases on foot.
“‘Baby Driver’ is my action musical,” said Wright. “I find something I really love, like the car chase or heist movie, and then I think, ‘What kind of twist can I put on it so it’s new?’ ”
The film’s biggest and most entertaining twist, which wowed audiences at its South by Southwest premiere in March, is the extent to which all the action — every gunshot, skid mark and slammed
“Bank robbers don’t use fancy vintage cars. They’ll use something stolen that day from an airport or train station, then they’ll ditch it for a switch car, a normal commuter car that blends into traffic.” Director Edgar Wright
door — is synced by the second to the soundtrack. (The eclectic mix includes everything from Jonathan Richman and the Commodores to Queen, Young MC, Danger Mouse and Big Boi.)
Elgort plays the babyfaced title character, a young getaway driver trying to pay his final dues to crime boss Doc (Kevin Spacey) with one last robbery. The cast also includes Lily James as his girlfriend, and Jamie Foxx, Jon Hamm and Flea as a ragtag crew of thieves.
Wright said he first got the idea for Baby’s character more than 20 years ago, and he gave him a comic-book-worthy backstory: He has tinnitus from the childhood car accident that killed his parents. Ever since then he’s lived with his iPod earbuds in 24/7, to drown out the ringing (“a hum in the drum,” says Spacey’s character).
“You know those moments in life when the music you’re listening to syncs up with your life?” said Wright. “I was trying to take an instant like that, when you notice your windshield wipers moving to the beat, and create a world in which that’s happening all the time. Baby’s basically trying to bend the world to fit his playlist.”
The use of pop music in Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and John Landis movies (“especially ‘The Blues Brothers,’ which is mind-blowing”) inspired Wright. “But I wanted to take that even farther, to its nth degree.”
He remembers “listening to the song ‘Bell Bottoms’ by the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and imagining this car chase to it, the action crescendoing with the music.”
Wright wrote the screenplay while listening to the film’s playlist (wisely clearing the rights for every song beforehand) and storyboarded every scene to a song, beat by beat. “It’s as painstaking to make as it is fun to watch,” he said.
“I read the script on a special app with the music synced up as you read,” said Elgort. “You could tell just from reading one page how stylistically cool it was going to be.”
Wright said that once he had the action-musical format in mind, he “talked to a lot of ex-cons, bank robbers and getaway drivers who had already done their time” to get his heist details just right.
Joe Loya, who robbed 30 banks (and wrote the book “The Man Who Outgrew His Prison Cell”), lives in the Bay Area and consulted with Wright and Elgort. He has a small cameo in the movie. “I asked Joe and other ex-cons about specifics about the job, like if they ever played a certain song on the way to a robbery,” Wright said.
Lessons learned: “Bank robbers don’t use fancy vintage cars. They’ll use something stolen that day from an airport or train station, then they’ll ditch it for a switch car, a normal commuter car that blends into traffic. It’s all about switching and ditching.”
“I loved doing the stunts, sliding down escalators, jumping through a car,” said Elgort. “I rockclimb in real life, I do dangerous s— all the time, so it was cool to finally be able to do it in a movie.”
He kept a Subaru WRX from the shoot and said he “totally has the racing bug now, after learning how to drift. There are skid marks outside my house. I do 90s in my driveway.”
“It’s our running joke that Ansel is literally as old as my idea for this movie,” said Wright. “I was waiting for him to become a star.”
Just ask the teenage girls who shriek outside film festival screenings when they spot Elgort. Or his 7.8 million Instagram followers. The wait is clearly over.
Jessica Zack is a Bay Area freelance writer who frequently covers art and film for The Chronicle.