Anticipation for Edgar Wright's trailblazing highway ballet "Baby Driver" is revving up to maximum velocity ahead of its release this week, with longtime fans eagerly awaiting the quirky director's latest offering, and casual moviegoers intrigued by the film's slick trailers and universally strong early reviews. Mr. Wright visited Washington, DC on June 15 for a press screening and Q&A, and he also headlined a weekend panel at DC's Awesome Con during which he showed the first five minutes of the film to a very excited crowd.
CNN's Jake Tapper hosted the Thursday evening post-screening Q&A at Landmark's E Street Theater, and actress Felicia Day moderated the Awesome Con panel on Saturday afternoon. Both ably guided Mr. Wright through their respective conversations, teasing out intriguing and frequently funny details about the process of filming the kinetic caper story. "Baby Driver" is the story of Baby (Ansel Elgort), a young getaway driver who wants to escape a life of crime to be with his new love Debora (Lily James), and foil felonious mastermind Doc (Kevin Spacey), who wants to keep him in the game.
On his inspiration for writing the film, Mr. Wright said that he "wanted to do a film about a young criminal wanting to be a regular Joe. But the other big inspiration, this goes back twenty years (to when) I was 21, is the first song in the movie, "Bellbottoms" by the John Spencer Blues Explosion. I had that on audio cassette in 1995 and I used to listen to it over and over again whilst I was living in North London and I dreamt up a car chase while I would listen to the song. I think that's one of the ways that me and the main character are similar because we're both obsessed by music and motivated by it. When I listen to some music I can literally visualize scenes. So, it's true to say that the music inspired the script."
Mr. Tapper observed that the music in "Baby Driver" is "almost a character in the film. We're listening to it at the same time that he's listening to it; I don't think I've ever seen that before." Mr. Wright agreed: "Obviously there's a lot of directors who use music brilliantly - John Landis, Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese - and the idea with this was to take that a stage further, so every song you hear is happening diagetically. It's happening in the scene, you can hear it, it's not happening on the soundtrack. It's either in his ears or it's on the stereo or it's on vinyl, or you hear music in the mall. I wanted (the audience) to see a heist movie through a young person's eyes, and also hear the entire movie through his ears."
Casting was a subject that Mr. Tapper wanted to explore, noting that the film featured two young actors as the romantic leads, and "an ensemble of incredibly well-known, incredibly gifted actors. Were there people that you had in mind when you wrote the screenplay?" "The only person I wrote it with in mind was Jon Hamm. I've known Jon since 2008, and when I was writing the script I thought he would be perfect for that bit. I'll be totally honest: I never thought Kevin Spacey and Jamie Foxx would do the movie - they were too big. I never dreamt I would get an Oscar winner in each of those roles. And whenever there would be a two shot with Kevin and Jamie in it I would whisper to my cinematographer, "Double Oscar shot!" Two Oscar winners, one shot."
During her panel, Ms. Day took the conversation in a technical direction: "I love your editing; it definitely makes your style iconic, and when I was watching (the film) I was thinking, ‘this is a musical way of editing.' Do you ever think about it like that? When you start with a song, are you cutting to the song?" "With most movies they shoot a lot of cool action and then they slap on a cool song afterward, but we had all the songs cleared before so we were doing the scenes to the music. So it's not just editing, it's also the choreography. With this movie my editor was on the set the entire time, and we were constantly editing what we'd done. It was amazing because we could show the actors (right away), and I think some of the actors were blown away."
Car chases are a huge part of "Baby Driver", and with Ms. Day's prompting Mr. Wright name-checked some of his favorite directorial inspirations: "Ron Howard, who started his career doing car-chase movies - his first movie is called, "Grand Theft Auto." Quentin Tarantino, who did "Death Proof." And George Miller, who did the greatest action film of all time. You know, it's amazing, George Miller, 71 years old, hasn't made a live-action film in 18 years, comes back and wipes the floor with everybody with "Mad Max: Fury Road." Incredible."
Mr. Wright went into depth telling the Awesome Con crowd about his own experience shooting the car chase scenes for "Baby Driver," and his account made for some of the most fascinating moments of his presentation. "In Atlanta, GA, we were shooting on the I-85, which is quite a big deal, and we shot on a Sunday morning. You notice that most car chases in movies are at night because it's easier (at that time) to close down the streets. We decided to do it during the day because it's a bank robbery and it's supposed to be in the middle of the day, and that makes it twice as complicated. And you can't use any green screens at all."
"You can't close the freeway but you can create what's called "the bubble", which means you have police cars two miles back, police cars two miles ahead, and in the middle is all of your cars and all your cameras. You've got about 50 cars on the road (to portray regular traffic) and you're in the middle of all that. But that means that every time you do a take you have to loop back around seven miles to get back to the reset - you can't just turn around. It's an amazing thing, being with all the actors and doing this high-intensity thing."
With that intensity came some directing challenges, as Mr. Wright shared in response to an audience question. "Whatever articulate and intelligent direction that you have for the actors when you're normally talking goes away when there's a loud car on the freeway. Then basically your directions come down to shouting through a walkie-talkie: "Intense! Intense!"
Intense is certainly the watchword for "Baby Driver," which is - and it's not too early to say this - destined to become a new classic. When asked about the genre movies that inspired him, Mr. Wright cited "Bullitt," "The Italian Job," "Vanishing Point," Smokey and The Bandit," "The Driver," and "The Blues Brothers." So how does Mr. Wright's entry finish up against such illustrious competition? With its high-octane visuals, throwback soundtrack, and deceptively sweet romance embedded in an edgy heist tale, "Baby Driver" definitely delivers.
