The song that begat ‘Baby Driver,’ a quasi-musical on wheels
NEW YORK — In the jagged grooves and quivering violins of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion song “Bellbottoms,” a young Edgar Wright heard a movie.
When Wright first started fanatically listening to the lead track off the band’s “Orange” album in 1995, the British writer-director had a vision that has culminated, more than two decades later, with his new film, “Baby Driver.”
“The idea for this movie is as old as ‘Orange’” Wright said in an interview. “I was either 20 or 21 and I had just moved to London. I was working on my first movie I ever made. I was completely broke. I think I had a cassette of ‘Orange’ that I had copied off of someone else, maybe my brother. I listened to ‘Bellbottoms’ all the time. I just started to visualize this car chase. I’d think, ‘This would be the perfect car chase song in a movie, but what’s the movie?’”
“Baby Driver,” it turned out, was the movie, but it took years for Wright (“Shaun of the Dead,” ”Hot Fuzz”) to find the story that matched his initial inspiration. Eventually he hit on his protagonist: an uncommonly young, freshfaced getaway driver (Ansel Elgort) who obsessively syncs his life and his car chases to the music of his iPod. The movie wouldn’t just tie together song and cinema; it would be about the fusion of music and action.
While not exactly a musical, “Baby Driver” (which opens Wednesday) was built on top of its soundtrack, starting with “Bellbottoms.” Martha and the Vandellas’ “Nowhere to Run” plays during a tight squeeze. A hair-raising escape is set to the Damned’s “Neat, Neat, Neat.” Things happen on the beat.
Wright had to secure his soundtrack’s rights before shooting; many of the songs, like the Blues Explosion one, were cleared years ago. Actors received their scripts with a thumb drive of music attached.
“It’s something about trying to assign order to life by soundtracking your every move,” said Wright. “It’s that thing when everything breaks right and it’s the right song and the right moment. It’s something that a lot of people do on a sort of everyday level, but what if you put it together with an extremely high pressured job, like being a getaway driver for a very dangerous gang?”
So it’s fitting that the movie was essentially born from a single song. It’s the start of the film, too: “Bellbottoms” kicks off the high-octane opera that is “Baby Driver.”
“I definitely get a kick out of it,” said Jon Spencer. “Edgar is sort of a very Blues Explosion kind of director — sort of post-modern, post-genre, everything is kind of amped up. Who better to use a Blues Explosion song and that particular Blues Explosion song?”