After achieving cult status alongside Simon Pegg and Nick Frost with Shaun Of The Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World’s End – the genre-bending films collectively known as the Cornetto Trilogy – and walking away from Marvel’s Ant-Man over creative differences, Edgar Wright is going properly solo.
Baby Driver is the filmmaker’s first venture as a writer/director his other feature, Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, was adapted from Bryan Lee O’Malley’s graphic novels and co-written by Michael Bacall.
Part heist picture, part shoot-’em-up, part puppy love romance, it stars Ansel Elgort (The Fault In Our Stars) as a wheelman for a criminal mastermind (Kevin Spacey) in Atlanta. Baby wants to go straight, and maybe start a better life with a fetching young woman (Lily James) who works at his favourite diner, and yes, all of this is very familiar. But that’s deliberate: as he does in all of his other movies, Wright is commenting on the archetypes from the inside out, and setting the entire movie to the beat of whatever song is blasting through Baby’s earbuds.
Here’s how he did it.
1. The inspiration
“The idea of the getaway driver sitting outside is something that’s always been stuck in my head,” he says.
“What do they do when they’re just sitting there? In Dirty Harry, there’s that little moment – just a tiny moment – when Dirty Harry knows there’s this robbery in progress because there’s a guy parked outside a bank, but there are three cigarettes on the ground. And he knows there’s a robbery in progress because he can see the driver’s been there for like 15 minutes, because of the three cigarettes.”
2. The music
“There’s definitely a thing where people try and soundtrack their lives,” Wright says. “I think in some ways that’s both a means of escape and an element of control. If you’re working in a shit job or you’re commuting to work, and the one thing you can control is what’s going into your ears, that’s a big part of your day. It’s all about control for Baby.”
3. The themes
“You start with the dream of being a getaway driver, and you end with the nightmare of being a criminal,” Wright says. “Plenty of people play those driving games and have that thing of ‘Ah, this is me versus the cops!’ with Grand Theft Auto, but the actual reality of doing it? I like the idea of the real world where consequences and collateral [damage] start to bear down from the second set piece onwards. I wanted to make the moral swamp deeper and deeper as it goes along: once you’ve been involved in crime, there is no way to extricate yourself. Even the best getaway driver in the world can’t escape crime.”
4. The location
“I had written it for Los Angeles, but once I made a decision to rewrite it for Atlanta, I think it actually made everything fall into place. Atlanta as a city is a main travel hub, and it’s also a hub for crime in some respects. Where Los Angeles is a city of hybrids and electric cars, Atlanta is still very much Charger and Challenger central. And it’s a huge music city as well. So it became a no-brainer. In a similar way, when I was shooting Scott Pilgrim in Toronto, setting it here made me so invested in being here.”
5. The language
“When you have characters called Baby, Buddy, Doc, Darling, normal lines sound like songs,” Wright explains. “Jamie Foxx can say ‘Well, hello Baby,’ or ‘What’s your real name, Darling?’ It just gives it a singsong quality. I wanted it to feel like it was sort of beat poetryesque.”
6. The heart
“There’s something really sincere about Ansel Elgort and Lily James,” Wright says. “You have these two young, idealistic, sincere characters in the centre surrounded by these darker, more cynical characters on the edges. It was written like that, but I think it ends up working even better with those actors.”
7. The tone
“Before I started writing, I knew what maybe eight or nine of the songs were for the major set pieces. And then as I would write the other scenes, I wouldn’t start writing until I had the right song. So it developed as it went along. And it’s also [Baby] sinking into a black mood of understanding of where he is. He’s a little bit more happy-go-lucky in the first scenes than he is in the middle, where he knows that doom is on the horizon. And as such the music is getting doomier [laughter], so it’s reflecting his black mood. I liked that aspect of it.”
8. The swerve
“I don’t want to give away the ending, but it is something I thought about,” he says. (Don’t worry, we won’t give away the ending either.) “Most heist/getaway movies end in one of two ways: the heroes get shot to pieces in slow motion, or die in a different way in slow motion,” he laughs. “Or they get away, and even in one my favourite films, Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway, when it gets to the end of the movie, I’m not elated. I think, ‘And then what?’ [laughter] They drive off towards Mexico, and then what? So I wanted to do an ending where the hero does something else, a third way. Something that you never see people do.”
