SOUNDTRACK DRIVES ‘BABY DRIVER’
British filmmaker Edgar Wright has created a quintessentially American heist movie via classic R&B.
The flick is a candidate for the list of great American heist films. It’s fast and rhythmic, stylized and syncopated, with a soundtrack perfectly fit to the action.
Edgar Wright, director of “Baby Driver,” offers this fun fact: Golden Earring was a Dutch band.
Yes, he’s talking about the group that gave us the 1973 hit “Radar Love,” that song about driving all night, hands wrapped on the wheel.
“‘Radar Love’ is one of those songs I heard a lot as a kid,” Wright says. “But I did not realize they were from the Netherlands. It sounds like the most American song of all time,” he says while discussing the greatness of Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs” soundtrack.
It’s a conversational tangent. But you can see why Golden Earring would resonate with Wright: Though he’s British, he’s crafted a classically American movie.
“Baby Driver” opened this past week as a candidate for the list of great heist films. It’s fast and rhythmic, stylized and syncopated to a soundtrack that feels so perfectly fit to the action that you wonder at times if it was choreographed by a ballet director. The story centers on a wunderkind getaway driver (Ansel Elgort) who can do with a car what Eddie Van Halen does on a guitar or Tarantino on celluloid — he transcends the medium, all to the pulsing music he hears through his ever-present headphones.
Set in Atlanta and featuring Detroit horsepower and a fasttalking Kevin Spacey, the film feels as American as apple pie.
“When I first started thinking about it back in London, I knew it wasn’t an English film because you don’t really have car chases in London,” Wright says from a suite in the South Congress Hotel in Austin. “Most banks are more inner city, and London is designed to be a traffic snarlup. You’d be hard-pressed to drive anywhere at speed in central London. Forget it.”
So that’s when this Briton, whose previous films “Shaun of the Dead” and “Hot Fuzz” mined a particular essence of millennial England, decided he wanted to make an American heist movie. He just had to be sure he understood American driving and car culture. So Wright, 43, used down time after a production to embark on the quintessential American experience of driving coast to coast.
“Once I’d done my tarmac time, I’d been on the road enough, I felt like I could write this movie,” he says.
Of course he could. Because, like Golden Earring, Wright realized that if you want something to feel American, the best way is to make it sound American — whether it’s roaring engines, screeching tires, classic R&B or motormouthed criminals.
Musical motivation
Wright doesn’t look at you when he speaks.
It’s an odd experience, as the director will shift his head around the room, looking out a window for a bit, then to the ceiling, then to a wall or floor — anything that isn’t your eyes. It would be disconcerting if his multiminute rambles weren’t so intriguing.
Like, for instance, the genesis of “Baby Driver.”
Wright says he’s been gestating the film since 1995, when he first heard the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion’s “Bellbottoms” and saw visions of a car chase tracked to that song. The tune is a crash course in America, with the titular frontman sneering in a fauxElvis voice about the virtues of flared blue jeans before a rolling bass line and hiccuping guitar launch into some bastardized blues riffs.
For years, that song played in Wright’s head as he researched heists, talked to ex-cons about the art of getaway driving, even asking them how they responded to music while they were committing crime.
“Before I started properly writing it in 2010, I had the main action scenes broken down in my head. Those songs that never changed: ‘Bellbottoms,’ ‘Hocus Pocus’ by Focus, ‘Neat Neat Neat’ by the Damned, ‘Never Never Gonna Give Ya Up’ by Barry White, ‘Brighton Rock’ by Queen, ‘Tequila’ and maybe a couple of others.”
The songs each provide mood and verve in the film’s key moments, including the opening scene when the getaway driver, “Baby,” jams out to “Bellbottoms” as he waits for his fellow crooks to return from a robbery.
It’s one of the movie’s great moments, seeing this stonefaced adolescent wearing shades and earbuds suddenly lip-syncing and tapping on the steering wheel or turning on his windshield wipers to the beat. After the robbers emerge, the song becomes his sonic road map to elude the police.
From that opening sequence to the final credits, music gives the movie an identity and form that few films achieve. Instantly, “Baby Driver” is in the same category as Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” or Wes Anderson’s “Rushmore,” movies that perfectly execute a song either to deepen or propel a scene.
“I was treating it like musical set pieces. Like, we’re going to listen to this Barry White song in full. Action is going to unfold in time with the music and sometimes counter to the music.
“You know, I’m not dissimilar to the main character in that music is something that motivates me,” Wright says. “As you get older, you constantly start soundtracking your life …
“It’s not like I had synesthesia or anything, but definitely when I listen to music that I really enjoy, I start to imagine visuals to go with them. I’ve done that in other films before, like ‘Shaun of the Dead.’ A song inspires a scene or set piece.
“And with this movie, it was like this idea, is there a way of doing that for this entire movie? Could you make an action movie that’s about somebody’s relationship to music?”
Winks to the past
Much of the movie’s music is a knowing wink from one fan to another.
For instance, there are moments in “Baby Driver” when you think you’re going to hear House of Pain’s ’90s hip-hop anthem “Jump Around” or Dr. Dre’s “The Next Episode,” but what follows are the songs that were sampled to build those classic tracks: “Harlem Shuffle” by Bob & Earl, and “The Edge” by David McCallum.
The most heavy-lidded wink is Paul Williams’ cameo. Williams, the ’70s icon who penned the bulk of The Carpenters’ hits and whose oeuvre includes the “Bugsy Malone” and “Phantom of the Paradise” soundtracks, is himself a secret handshake, the kind of artist who is lauded by those in the know.
“The nice thing about it is that we finally got to work together,” Wright says. “I’ve known him for, like, 10 years. He’s always said to me, ‘If there’s ever a part for me, think of me.’ Finally, I was thinking, ‘I have the part for Paul Williams.’ But with this movie, there’s a link to the genre itself by the fact that he was Little Enos in ‘Smokey and the Bandit.’ So, it actually has a link to the past with ’70s car-chase movies of old.”
This is how Wright thinks and speaks — in a circuitous fashion that tends to connect whatever song, talking point or idea back to film. He’s an obsessive who understands the medium with such nuance and history you understand how this Englishman has crafted one of the most Americanfeeling movies of the season: He didn’t study America, he studied American film.
Back in March, Wright stood on the stage of Austin’s Paramount Theatre after “Baby Driver” premiered during the South by Southwest Film Festival. He was being interviewed by Austin film hero Robert Rodriguez, and the two let the audience into an enlightened conversation about filmmaking that veered through and into subjects such as clearing the rights to necessary music and filming car chases without the use of a green screen, which Wright did for “Baby Driver.”
In a mind like Wright’s, every detail counts, whether it’s knowing how getaway drivers properly grip the steering wheel or the arcane fact that “Radar Love” was written by a Dutch rock band. As he sat through opening weekend and saw the positive words about his latest film (“Baby Driver” was sitting at a 97 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes), you have to wonder whether his mind was drifting back into film minutia or if he was simply hearing “Bellbottoms” one more time, thinking about how the song by a New York band allowed an Englishman to craft one of the better heist movies in many years.