SPRINTER BABY
BABY DRIVER (2017)
WE EXPECTED CAR chaos in Baby Driver, and it delivered in spades. What we didn’t expect was the mother of all footchases, with Baby (Ansel Elgort) forced to hop out of his getaway vehicle and rev his legs instead. The subsequent sequence, as Baby flees from cops through a park, a shopping mall and a car park, is a five-minute sugar rush, all synced to a ’70s tune by a Dutch rock band and an orchestra of sound effects. The team behind it remember putting together the high-speed pursuit.
Edgar Wright [writer/director]: The idea was to have, in what is ostensibly a car-chase movie, a really crucial action scene not be a car scene. Everything is starting to spiral out of control and it turns into a footrace.
Julian Slater [sound designer/mixer]:
It’s a bit of a left turn. You feel like you’re settling into the pace of the movie, and then Edgar takes you on a 90-degree turn and sends you off on this journey.
Paul Machliss [co-editor]: It’s a definite highlight of the film. I remember, way back in 2011 or 2012, Edgar saying, “Wouldn’t it be great to have a running scene, dropping Focus in?”
Wright: I knew it was going to be Blur’s ‘Intermission’ going into ‘Hocus Pocus’ by Focus. Later somebody pointed out to me, “Was it intentional to have Blur go into Focus?” I said, “Yes, it was!” [Laughs] “I’m going to claim that I meant to do that the whole time and I’m really clever.”
Steven Price [composer]: When I was at college, a friend of mine had this radio show and we used to play ‘Hocus Pocus’ by Focus all the time, because we liked saying, “‘Hocus Pocus’ by Focus.” But I love the track. There are so many funny bits in the scene, like when he’s hiding and the track goes down to that little quirky accordion sort of thing.
Machliss: I am a big fan of that much-maligned genre, progressive rock. It was just so nice to get a track of that vintage, something unique even back in ’73, and make a thing of it. You’re off on this footchase through all these locations at breakneck speed, and I can’t think of any other track now that would suit it better.
Wright: The studio were trying to cut days. And they always zeroed in on the footchase: “Can we not just go straight from the bank to the car park where it ends?” Eventually, I had to put my money where my mouth was and say, “Okay, I’m going to pay for the footchase days. And then, if the movie goes into profit, I want
to get paid back.” I paid out of my fee two days of filming, which is not an insignificant amount of money. But, you know, that was how convinced I was that it was going to be the standout set-piece.
Paul Darnell [parkour stunt double]: I get hired a lot to do footchases for movies and TV shows. I doubled Paul Walker in Fast Five, on the favela rooftops. I got chased by Dwayne Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson in The Other Guys. Baby Driver took it to the next level. Jumping over a car that’s coming at you? I’d never done that. And Ansel was super on par to do as much as he could do himself. We just got to play and experiment.
Wright: You’ve got this guy who’s extremely precise as a driver, and now he’s just out in the wild, flailing around, trying to figure out what to do and where to go. There’s a lot of stuff going on in that scene that I’m really happy with.
Darnell: Baby does a kong vault over a desk. There’s a lazy vault. And Ansel did the slide down the escalator, which Edgar actually tested out himself. That was pretty cool.
Slater: It’s a highly choreographed footchase with a crazy amount of stunts and parkour. And then of course the sonic aspect of it. We amped it up to 11 with that footchase.
The rap track that’s happening in the thrift store is in sync with ‘Hocus Pocus’. Even the dog barks as he’s running through the park are working with the music. It was the culmination of everything we’d been working on in that movie.
Price: Every gunshot is in time with the track. And sometimes clusters of gunshots are working like musical phrases. Police sirens and car engines would be pitched — everything was drawing into the music.
Jonathan Amos (co-editor): With Edgar’s work there’s always a sense of the music being folded into the action at an early stage and influencing the edit. But nowhere near this level. This was like a maniacal level of puppeteering. It was like having all the shackles taken off, just letting creativity run wild.
Machliss: The big thing was to have the footsteps land in the right time and make sure we had Baby running on the beat. I mean, it just demanded a supreme level of concentration.
Darnell: I was just blown away by how they pieced it together. We shot it over multiple months, and seeing how it all blended, it just made me smile. I was like, “Yes. Okay. I’m proud of this.”
Wright: When the film was done, I was very happy that it was talked about as a standout moment. And eventually I got my money back!