Arguably one of the most highly anticipated films for 2017, Baby Driver is an action thriller
motion picture that is both directed and written by renowned British director Edgar Wright,
the one and only behind remarkable works of art such as Shaun of the Dead (2004), Hot
Fuzz (2007), Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (2010) and Ant-Man (2015).
Starring Ansel Elgort, Jon Hamm, Jamie Foxx, Lily James, Jon Bernthal, Kevin Spacey and
more, Baby Driver details a story about a young getaway driver who relies on
the beat of his music to overcome tinnitus in
his ears he suffers after a childhood accident.
When he meets the ideal woman of his dreams Debora, Baby ceases the opportunity
to ditch his criminal life behind and make a clean getaway to finally live free. That
said, he must face the music when a doomed heist threatens his life and love after being
coerced into working for a huge crime boss
Here are 69 facts about Baby Driver You didn't know
Wright cast Ansel Elgort to play Baby, the main character in Baby Driver, because of
his passion for musicality. Elgort, aged 22 at the time of shooting, writes music, plays
instruments, can DJ and even dance. Naturally, he is a quintessential fit for a character
who holds music as a huge part of his life.
The car Baby drives in the opening scene is a 2006 Subaru WRX in San Remo Red.
The stunt supervisors all agreed that the gun fights in Baby Driver were the hardest
to film as every gun shot had to be perfectly timed to the music playing for that scene.
No one could mess it up as every step had to be in time, every line had to be the same
and every movement had to be faultless.
The Mike Myers masks actually were supposed to be the masks of Michael Myers from the
Halloween series but the producers were unable to obtain legal permission. Edgar Wright then
reached out to the comedian Mike Myers about using masks of his likeness instead, who thought
the scene was funny and gave his blessing.
According to Edgar Wright, each script sent to the main actors that were wanted for their
respective roles included an Ipod that contained list of songs that were to be played while
reading a particular scene for the movie in order to emphasize the tone.
The extensive collection of sunglasses and iPods that Baby owns were not bought by him;
they were taken from cars he stole. In an interview, Edgar Wright said: 'If he has been
stealing cars since he was 12, the main thing he would have inherited from these stolen
cars are people's sunglasses and iPods.'
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. Edgar Wright explains why Baby
doesn't use smartphones for his music and calls. It's because modern day technology
like smartphones can be tracked, so by using burners and iPods, Baby can stay off the grid.
In almost every scene where no music is playing, you can hear a slight ringing in the background
the sound of Baby's tinnitus.
In speaking to Slash FILM about Baby Driver , Edgar said, What I did with this season
is I picked movies that had car chases of my youth. So there are not as many recent
ones because I capped it where I started making movies myself, which was around 1994. I chose
the car chases that really inspired me when I was younger. Because I had the original
idea for Baby Driver in 1995 so I was thinking about the films up until that point.
The movies that he was talking about are: Bullitt (1968), The Italian Job (1969), The
French Connection (1971), Vanishing Point (1971), Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry (1974), Freebie
and the Bean (1974), Smokey and the Bandit (1977), The Driver (1978), The Blues Brothers
(1980), and To Live and Die in LA (1985).
n 1995 Wright was 21, living in North London, and while he was editing his first film Fist
Full of Fingers he was listening to Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and would visualize the action
of Baby Driver, specifically the film s opening car chase, without knowing anything about
the story or characters
They shut down the I-85, one of Atlanta s busiest highways, twice for the opening chase
sequence, and the second time they reshot about 85% of the sequence. But Wright was
able to cut a lot of the footage together to show the actors what the movie would look
like, since this was towards the beginning of the shoot.
Wright says he didn t really intend for Baby s jacket to be like Han Solo s, but says even
Phil Lord and Chris Miller pointed out that it looks like Han s jacket.
The freeway carjacking scene is soundtracked to Neat Neat Neat by The Damned, but cinematographer
Bill Pope told Wright the scene was going to be longer than the song. Wright s fix was
to have Baby rewind the song at one point, so the song actually does last for the entire
sequence. Wright shot the rewind bit on one of the last days of production as a fix.
Wright was inspired to use The Damned in the film after watching a documentary in which
the band members were lamenting the fact that their songs never get used in movies.
Blues rock singer Jon Spencer, whose song "Bellbottoms" is used in the first robbery,
plays a jail guard.
When Edgar Wright wanted Ansel Elgort to be more stern in a shot, he used the code words
"Man Driver!" He taught him the "Kubrick look" by showing Ansel a picture on his phone of
Malcolm McDowell in character in A Clockwork Orange (1971).
The first R-rated movie to be given permission to show footage from a Disney film Monsters,
Inc. (2001). Pete Docter, the director of "Monsters, Inc.", is given a 'special thanks'
credit as a result.
Baby and Debora are frequently dressed in black and white. In an interview, Ansel Elgort
said it was to contrast with the other characters and to give their love story a more timeless
feel.
During the opening credits, when Baby is going to get coffee and listening to "Harlem
Shuffle," lyrics to the song can be seen on graffiti, signs, and posters as he passes
them.
In early 2017, Edgar Wright tweeted Meryl Streep's in our movie!' After he quickly
deleted it, many people speculated whether or not Streep was in the film. While she doesn't
appear in the film itself, Streep does appear on a TV screen while Baby is flipping through
channels in a clip from It's Complicated (2009).
In the restaurant scene, Kevin Spacey's character is seen talking to Big Bo and
Killer Mike. They also contribute a song to the film's soundtrack.
As this movie is filmed in Atlanta and Edgar Wright added many touches to make
it authentically Atlantan, when the Bo's Diner chef answers the phone and says "what'll ya
have?," this is most likely a reference to the famous Atlanta diner The Varsity, where
the employees take your order by asking "what'll ya have?"
Both Ansel Elgort and Jon Hamm received a month of driving training to prepare for the
extensive and elaborate chase scenes in the movie.
Multiple actors auditioned for the role of Baby's foster father, Joseph, but CJ Jones
was the only one who auditioned that was actually deaf.
Despite Edgar Wright insisting on using less CGI, visual effects company Double Negative
provided around 450 VFX shots, mostly for clean-up, digital cars, background objects
and combining practical shots.
The studio pressured Edgar Wright to cut the foot chase scene because the movie
was starting to go over-budget. Wright deferred a portion of his directing fee to ensure the
scene was completed.
The studio requested that the scene in which Baby mispronounces the band, T-Rex as "Trex"
be cut from the film because it made the character sound dumb, though Edgar Wright refused.
Edgar Wright generally doesn't allow improv on his sets, though he did make a few exceptions
this time, namely for Jamie Foxx.
In reference to the character of Doc, director Edgar Wright described him as "like one of
those awful father figures who can be great in rare moments."
The song "Easy" by The Commodores was requested for the movie by Ansel Elgort after Edgar
Wright asked him if there were any songs he knew by heart.
The character, Bats, gets annoyed when asked if he knew about Barbra Streisand, though
in reality Jamie Foxx is close friends with her.
During one scene where Baby is flicking through channels a short clip from Blue song by Mint
Royale is shown. Edgar Wright directed this music video and has stated this is where he
practiced the opening scene to Baby Driver.
Quentin Tarantino read the script and told Wright about another song called Deborah by
Dave Edmunds, but the character in the song was a complete b**ch, so Wright opted to just
use the T-Rex and Beck Deborah songs instead.
Bill Pope says the circular shot in the restaurant between Baby and Deborah was tricky to shoot
because it had to end exactly when Kevin Spacey toasts his drink.
Wright didn't want to shoot leafy, woody Atlanta because a leafy freeway makes
you feel like the characters have gotten away or looks too much like Smokey and the Bandit
in the country. So for almost the entirety of the movie they shot in urban areas. The
state of Georgia offered to shut down rural freeways for their use, but Wright wanted
to shoot in the heart of the city.
They did four days of reshoots after two test screenings. The scene in the car
between Baby and Deborah when they kiss, after Doc confronts Baby, was a reshoot, and wasn
t shot by Bill Pope Ken Sang shot it instead, because Pope was unavailable. Audiences wanted
to see a bit more between Baby and Deborah before Deborah makes the decision to leave
with Baby. But during the filming of the shot of them kissing, they had overrun on the location
by an hour so the police were yelling offscreen to tell them to wrap it up.
The scene with Baby and Doc s nephew came from an interview Wright did with an ex-con,
who said he would take a son or a nephew with him to case banks so he seemed less suspicious.
Jamie Foxx had a habit of watching takes back on the monitors next to Wright, and when it
would be a shot of Jon Hamm, Foxx would turn to Wright and say, He handsome. So the line
got added into the movie.
According to Edgar Wright, many people thought that the diner set was a real restaurant and
occasionally groups would enter and sit down to have lunch.
The Tequila scene took three days to shoot and one extra day of second unit, which Wright
shot with stunt coordinator Darren Prescott.
There were also inserts in the diner scene of Jon Hamm holding his fork like he s going
to stab Jamie Foxx s character, but Wright felt it was complicating the scene too much.
But you can still see Hamm holding his fork in the wide shots.
In the editing room, the diner scene ran on for about 90 seconds longer than the song
that was intended for the scene, Something Is Wrong with My Baby, so Wright hit the Genius
button on his iTunes on that song and found Every Little Bit Hurts , which they added
to the scene so music would play throughout.
The short scene of Deborah being stood up at the diner wasn t in the script, but Wright
improvised it during production when he realized the audience (and studio) would need to know
what Deborah was up to at this point in the story.
In shooting the foot chase, Wright says First Unit and Second Unit were sometimes
shooting simultaneously in the same area. Since Ansel Elgort is 21 and 6 4 , Bill Pope
says he had to trade off grips to keep up with him with the camera while he was running.
Wright first met Jon Hamm when Hamm first hosted SNL, at the afterparty. He wrote the
character of Buddy for him at that time.
Doc's car, the Mercedes Benz S550, had to have its computer systems modified for the
chase scenes since the car is engineered to correct itself when it goes out of control.
Edgar Wright initially came up with the idea for Baby Driver while listening to the song
"Bellbottoms" by the Jon Spencer Blues Experience.
According to production designer Marcus Rowland, the 50s themed diner where Debora works was
converted from an abandoned Denny's.
Flea, or Michael Peter Balzary, from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers appears in Baby Driver
and over the production time, both Jamie Foxx and Ansel Elgort grew very close to the musician.
They would hang out at Flea s studio, and are apparently making a record together.
As a British director, Wright wanted to make sure that his script wasn t too British and
to make Baby Driver more of an American crime film, he consulted Joe Loya, an ex-con who
wrote the book The Man Who Outgrew His Prison Cell about his time behind bars.
The only cast remained from the first table reading of the script in 2012 is Jon Hamm.
As for Baby s love interest Debora, Emma Stone was originally supposed to play the character
but turned down the opportunity to star in La La Land. Chloe Grace Moretz was also in
the running, but then dropped out to film The Little Mermaid.
A majority of the on-the-road action in Baby Driver are carried out by the actors
themselves and stunt drivers who perfected the real tricky stuff without the aid of green
screen manipulation and visual effects. Due to this, there wasn t a lot of room for error.
It was important to Wright to ensure that the beats of the car chases and action scenes
were in lockstep with those of the soundtrack. To do that, they had to tediously be at the
locations to measure the roads out before actually driving the car and timing everything.
They choreographed everything to music, instead of the other way around.
During his interview on the Nerdist Podcast, Edgar Wright admitted to putting a bunch of
Easter eggs in this film. He told Chris Hardwick one of the cars has a license plate that's
represents the release date of another one of his films.
Whenever Edgar Wright had Jamie Foxx and Kevin Spacey in the same shot, he would whisper
to a colleague: "Double Oscar shot!"
The tracking shot in the beginning of the movie where Baby gets coffee took 28 takes.
The 21st take is the one used in the movie.
This film is named after Simon & Garfunkel's song "Baby Driver" from their 1970 album "Bridge
Over Troubled Water." The song appears in the film during the end credits.
This is the first time since A Fistful of Fingers (1995) that Edgar Wright is the sole
credited writer on one of his films.
Michael Douglas was considered for the role of Doc. Edgar Wright was responsible for his
casting as Hank Pym in Ant-Man (2015) before Wright left the project.
Ansel Elgort beat Logan Lerman and John Boyega for the title role.
Ansel Elgort had been trained in ballet and other forms of dance since childhood, a skill
which proved to be useful for the musically choreographed action scenes.
Wright was insistent on filming most of the chase scenes in the daylight because it created
an "extra air of collision tension."
Edgar Wright directly reached out to hip hop artists Big Boi and Killer Mike for cameo
appearances in the film
Fellow director and friend of Edgar Wright, Robert Rodriguez, suggested Eiza Gonzales
for the role of Darling.
Over 40 streets in Atlanta were closed over the course of the production to film the movie's
elaborate chase scenes.
One of the red Subaru WRX used in the film was given to Ansel Elgort after he pleaded
with the filmmakers to give him the car after filming had wrapped up.
During the post office scene, the teller at the counter quotes Dolly Parton: "Everybody
wants happiness, nobody wants pain, but you can't have a rainbow without a little rain."
The final heist begins in the rain. When Baby is released from prison, a rainbow is visible
in the background.
When Baby flicks through the TV channels towards the start of the film, the dialogue
from each channel teases what happens in the final heist.
After the first bank robbery, Griff jokes, "If you don't see me again, it's because I'm
dead." His character is never seen again in the film.
The numbers (28071978) on Baby's prison jumpsuit at the end of the film correspond to the release
date of The Driver (1978)
No comments:
Post a Comment