‘Baby Driver’ takes a wild ride
Thriller summer’s most original action film
Sometimes, a director feels too removed from the action. Which is why Edgar Wright chose to buckle himself into the side of a speeding vehicle.
“It’s good to show the actors that you’re with them,” the British writer/director says on the downtown set of Baby Driver, his new crime thriller (in theaters Wednesday) that combines high-octane pursuits, grand theft auto, bank robbery and a toe-tapping set of tunes to tie everything together.
In a summer full of superheroes and conventional blockbusters, Wright is crashing the party with arguably the season’s most startlingly original action movie and one of the best-reviewed movies so far this year.
Ansel Elgort stars as Baby, a talented getaway driver who’s called in on a string of heists, though he’s starting to rethink that career path after falling for a waitress named Debora (Lily James). He also has tinnitus from a childhood car accident, and drowns out the ringing in his ears with songs that keep him motivated.
“All he can think about is finding the right song and then when he does, there’s no way they can catch him,” Elgort says. “He’s on that adrenaline high whenever he’s driving.”
Wright has set action sequences to rock tracks before, like Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now po- wering a zombie-killing episode in 2004’s Shaun of the Dead. But never to this degree, where gear shifting and gun pops are choreographed to the tune at hand.
On this day, they’re shooting a heist set to The Damned’s Neat
Neat Neat. Baby and cohorts Bats (Jamie Foxx), Eddie No Nose (Flea of Red Hot Chili Peppers) and JD (Lanny Joon) jack an armored car and escape in a Chevy Avalanche, which they ditch in traffic to steal a Saturn Aura.
Baby tears through Atlanta streets and into a parking garage as cameras catch the rapid-fire zips and turns, and while a metronome counts off, the actors step to the beats with the stolen money into another pair of cars.
“It’s different from doing a musical where it’s like, ‘Dah dah dahdah, we’re gonna shoot our guns!’ ” Foxx says. “Edgar’s best friend is Quentin Tarantino (and) he has that same sort of genuine creative muscle you don’t see flexed a lot now.”
Wright rounded up a lot of music-minded folks, but they were as stoked as the filmmaker was about speeding around in the “biscuit,” a rig with a 650-horsepower engine used to get interior shots. It holds the actors in the body of a car, features a pod for the stunt driver that can be situated on the top, behind or to the side, and has places to stick a cameraman and his daring director, too.
“It’s like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride,” Flea says. “I get scared being in a car where no one’s really driving it and you’re speeding toward oblivion. I always feel like I’m about to have my face smashed off.”