Light spoilers ahead.
In the opening scene of Baby Driver, Baby (Ansel Elgort) sits behind the wheel fiddling with his click-wheel iPod. He cues up Jon Spencer Blues Explosion’s “Bellbottoms” and lip syncs into an invisible microphone, making an otherwise private experience a performance. As three robbers jump in the getaway car, Spencer’s fiery track sets the tone for the first of many breakneck chases—much as the song itself planted the movie’s initial seed. When Baby Driver writer-director Edgar Wright first heard “Bellbottoms” sometime around 1995, he wasn’t a filmmaker yet, but visions of car chases danced in his head. “It was as close to synesthesia as I’ll probably ever come: ‘When I listen to this song, I think of a car chase—what is the movie that goes with this vision?’” says Wright, best known for his comedies with Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) and his music-stuffed Scott Pilgrim vs. the World adaptation.
Great songs are the sugar coating of Wright’s blood-soaked film. After Baby’s parents are killed in a car crash, he begins a life of auto-related crime soundtracked by the music of stolen iPods (in an effort to drown out his tinnitus). With Baby’s iPods as the primary vessel, Wright stuffs the film from tip to tail with amazing music—soul ballads for the touching scenes, Queen’s “Brighton Rock” in a violent showdown, a cover of “Tequila” where every drum beat is swapped out for gunshots, and so on. There are tons of conversations about music, too: Jon Hamm asking about Baby’s signature driving song, Jamie Foxx offering a grim warning about “hex songs” (including “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” and “Hotel California”), and dialogue about T. Rex and Memphis soul singer Carla Thomas, which builds the foundation of Baby and Debora’s near-instantaneous romance.
In addition to music’s strong thematic thread, Baby Driver also features several musicians. Sky Ferreira plays Baby’s late mom, a singer who only got around to recording one demo. Flea is in Kevin Spacey’s crew of criminals, Big Boi and Killer Mike make brief cameos (and appear on Danger Mouse’s soundtrack original, “Chase Me”), and Paul Williams plays a creepy under-the-table arms dealer named the Butcher. There are tons of Easter eggs for music fans throughout the movie; we recently spoke with Wright about planting them.
Pitchfork: Did you name Baby’s love interest Debora specifically so you could use the T. Rex song?
Edgar Wright: Sort of? I definitely like that song, and I was trying to talk about music within the script a lot, so I was trying to think of a song with a girl's name. “Debora” was a song I liked, so I had the idea at first. Also, Debora is not a name with too many songs. I can only really find three songs with Debora in the title: T. Rex, Beck, and Dave Edmunds. The idea of talking about the Beck song came into it later—it starts with the lyric, “I met you at JCPenney/I think your name tag said ‘Jenny.’” It’s ostensibly a song about Jenny, and the sister is thrown in at the last moment.
Vinyl and cassette culture are well represented in the movie, but the click-wheel iPod is even more romanticized than those formats. Since you’ve been mulling over this movie for a long time, did the extinction of the iPod change how you approached Baby’s listening habits?
Not really, I kind of figured he would be stuck on that. If he grew up with that, it’s almost like his version of vinyl. If you think of Ansel Elgort’s age, he was seven when the first iPod came out [in 2001], which is enough to make anybody feel old. And if he's been stealing cars since he was 12, he's going to have inherited a lot of other people’s iPods. I thought that was kind of interesting, ’cause I thought if he stole cars, the main thing you end up with is a collection of sunglasses and a collection of other people’s listening devices.
Do you miss the original iPod?
I still use it! I have one in my pocket as we speak. Somebody from Apple came to see the movie, and when I told them that I still use the iPod, they looked at me like I was insane. They said, “Do you have Apple Music?” I said, “Yeah!” They said, “Oh.” I said, “I just like the iPod—having a hard drive with everything.” I realize that it’s going to die soon and I’m going to have to buy another one on eBay. It's a funny thing with technology where a company is trying to phase out different ways that you do stuff. If I was them, I would bring it back as an option.
How did these songs enter the movie’s universe for you? Would you be hearing them in the wild and you’d think, “This should be in Baby Driver,” or was it more like you were sitting at a desk and thinking them up as you typed out a draft?
I've been thinking about the movie for a number of years, so for quite a while I've been thinking, “This is a good Baby Driver song.” The Damned one [“Neat Neat Neat”]—that’s a song that I’ve loved for a long time, and I’ve never heard in a movie, so I thought. Also, a lot of the songs in the movie had some interesting things happening structure-wise—tempo changes, breakdowns, loud and quiet bits. I’m always trying to find songs that have sections like that. When I actually sat down to write the movie, had earmarked about 10 songs: Jon Spencer, the Damned, the “Tequila” cover, “Hocus Pocus” [by Focus], Blur [“Intermission”], the Barry White song [“Never, Never Gonna Give Ya Up”], the Queen song, and some others.
I'd actually started to break down the songs with a DJ friend of mine, Mark Nicholson, whose nom de plume is Osymyso. I'd say, “Can you help me put sound effects into this song?” He’d make a version of it that has all of the sound effects—he dubbed car noises, police sirens, and gunshots. I'd heard that [Button Down Brass] cover of “Tequila” on a compilation, which has this dueling drum solos. I thought that would be an interesting thing for a gun fight. Before I'd written a word, I said to Mark, “Hey, could you dub gunshots onto this drum solo so I can map it out?” Then I wrote the scene, did storyboards, and edited the storyboards to the music, so then you can have an animatic. Then we would literally make everyone learn how to fire to their little drum parts. It's kind of an insane thing to go through with people, but it totally works. It's like, “Okay, so your bit is this: ‘Bam ba-bam bam bam.’ And your bit is this: ‘Da da da-da-da.’”
Obviously you're playing a lot of songs on set. During filming, did anybody ever complain about having to work to the same songs over and over again?
There was one song that I eventually ditched from the movie ’cause it started to get on my tits. The scene that now has “Smokey Joe’s La-La” by Googie Rene originally used to be “Nut Rocker” by Bee Bumble and the Stingers. It was in there for a couple of test screenings, and then I thought, “You know what, I'm gonna redo this part of the scene in a little reshoot, and I'm gonna change the song.”
You’ve said you put the Commodores song “Easy” in Baby Driver because of Ansel Elgort's audition. Sky Ferreira sings the song in the movie, though. When did you decide that that would happen?
That actually came later. Basically the choreographer Ryan Heffington and I sprang it on him in the audition. I was very impressed, ’cause we didn't let him prepare anything. I just out of nowhere said, “Hey, what song can you lip sync by heart?” And he paused for a second and said, “‘Easy’ by the Commodores,” which is quite a surprising choice for a 20-year-old actor. It was so impressive to me, I thought, “There's gotta be a way of getting this into the movie.” After the junkyard sequence where he disposes of a dead body, that’s his song for banishing the black mood away.
I had the idea that the mom was a singer, but it wasn’t until a later draft I thought maybe it’d be interesting to catch a glimpse of that in flashbacks. It’s kind of a sad thing when you think his mom was an aspiring singer, she had one demo tape, and then she died. So, obviously that one demo tape is very important to Baby.
It's a movie that is practically 100 percent music. Were you ever wary of sensory overload—having one amazing song step on another?
I think the whole idea was to have it be if Baby can't exist without music playing, then the film has almost got to be wall-to-wall music. There are obviously moments where he’s deprived of music, and it becomes tense for a second. I remember once, somebody at the studio said, “Do you think it's going to work with wall-to-wall music?” When you do the edit, audiences totally embrace that aspect of it. I think if I had half-arsed it, then it wouldn't be the same movie. It would be more generic.
Were there songs that you considered for the movie but they got left out?
The thing is when people say to me, “What songs could you not fit in?” I'm like, “I don't want to say, because I might want to use it in the future.”
So a sequel might happen?
That’s up to the audience.
