#Baby driver soundtrack with scenes full
Then I thought: What if the getaway driver is listening to that track? Suddenly, it was the starting point for some sort of diegetic action-musical … taking what I love about the movies of Tarantino and John Landis and Scorsese and putting it into one full movie. But over the years, I had this sequence, and I knew it was the germ of something but I didn’t know what. It all starts there, with that weird moment of synesthesia – it wasn’t even “Oh, I know this will be the opening of a movie.” It was just something that appeared to me when I heard the song. I mean, that song was never not going to be in the movie. “Bellbottoms,” Jon Spencer Blues Explosion (1995) We’ve tried to avoid spoilers, but proceed with caution. The end result, however, is the 21st century’s first killer crime-movie musical – a mix tape of gunfire, giddy hardboiled dialogue (“Shop! Let’s talk it!”), a gajillion song clearances and genius-level action choreography.Ī few days before Baby Driver skids into theaters, Wright sat down and walked us a through a few of the choices he made, why certain songs made the cut and how he and his team constructed the elaborate music-video–style chase scenes one funky breakdown and guitar solo at a time. Some of the getaways and shoot-outs are scored and edited to deep cuts others take well-known ditties and use them as the cinematic equivalent to adrenaline-rush click tracks. But chops-wise, this tale of a boy, his best girl ( Downton Abbey‘s Lily James), a good set of wheels and some great curated playlists is a quantum leap forward, in which sound and vision meld together into seamless, truly jaw-dropping set pieces. It is, however, almost assuredly unlike anything you’ve ever seen.Īlready being hailed as one of the year’s best movies, Baby Driver continues the 43-year-old director’s superfan aesthetic of reconstituting tidbits from his formative filmgoing days – you can spot nods to Heat, Point Break, Sharkey’s Machine, Steve McQueen star vehicles and a host of one-last-job heist thrillers. That opening sequence, Wright recalls as he sits in a midtown New York conference room, leaning forward excitedly, is remarkably close to the out-of-the-blue thing he saw decades ago. Then his cohorts jump in the ride, Baby hits the gas and a high-speed pursuit through downtown Atlanta, expertly timed to the song’s faux-Elvis yelp and garage-rock guitar freakout. The kid – let’s call him Baby – beats the steering wheel as Russell Simins’ chaotic drum part plays in his earbuds. His passengers, including Jon Hamm and a tatted-up Jon Bernthal, calmly get out, grab guns and enter the establishment.
A young man in shades (Ansel Elgort) pulls up to a curb across from a bank. So it’s no coincidence that, 22 years, several mileage-may-vary Hollywood detours and one well-respected career later, “Bellbottoms” is the very first thing you hear in Baby Driver, Wright’s singular take on Seventies existential-cool crime movies and post-iPod music obsessiveness. Think Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, if the fig-leafed figure was a scruffy film geek drunk on genre flicks and the divine digit he touched granted drive-in–ready hallucinations of Dodge Challengers burning rubber. And then he put on “Bellbottoms,” the first track of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion’s album Orange, and as he sat there listening, Wright saw it: a completely fleshed-out, fully loaded, car chase-filled action scene unfurling in his mind’s eye, perfectly synced to the dingy hipster-skronk of the trio’s ode to Seventies jeans. The filmmaker was in the process of editing his first movie, a low-budget Spaghetti western homage, but the future director of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz had nothing lined up and no sense of what he really wanted to do with his life. And, like “Drive” before it, that music seems to be an integral part of the experience in Edgar Wright’s upcoming film, which premiered at SXSW to strong reviews.Edgar Wright was, by his own account, “21 years old, living in North London, broke and on the dole – that’s British for ‘welfare'” in 1995 when he was struck by what he can only compare to a near-religious vision.
In “ Baby Driver,” Ansel Elgort plays a getaway driver who constantly has music playing in order to drown out his tinnitus.