Anthony Bourdain may disagree, but Edgar Wright’s action/musical/ car chase movie “Baby Driver” is pretty bad-ass. Whatever your taste may be, it’s hard to deny it’s a technical masterwork featuring some of the best car chase and foot chase scenes in recent memory, not to mention dizzying sequences choreographed beat for beat to entire songs.
Don’t believe us? Listen to “Dunkirk” filmmaker Christopher Nolan chat with Wright about the film, and share his enthusiasm and admiration for the filmmaking behind the hit movie (“the film is so spectacularly directed” he says). You might think it’s the other way around, Wright interviewing Nolan about “Dunkirk,” but it’s a testament to the dazzling filmmaking that someone of the ‘Dark Knight’ director’s stature would be eager to sit down and discuss the many merits of the film.
It’s a fairly technical, process-centered talk, or at least, Nolan clearly appears fascinated with the manner in which Wright made the film and how he pulled off certain scenes. It’s always interesting to hear filmmakers enamored with other filmmaker’s process and work on set, as it can pull back the misconception that there’s only one way to make a movie. And if you really want to dive deep into the way Wright planned his intricate soundtrack to the movie, this is the conversation for you.
Nolan’s genuine curiosity into Wright’s process is refreshing and one strong observation that the director makes about “Baby Driver” is its sincerity when tackling genre, something Edgar says he’s attempted his entire career.
“The previous British [Cornetto] trilogy, they’re all made out of affection. I always bristle when someone calls them sendups,” he explained. “Well, they’re not, because sending up means you’re satirizing something which in some ways makes it seem that you don’t like it, but the zombie films, the cop films, the sci-fi films, I love those. I always see them as valentines. And in this film, the intention was to always make something that, in terms of the heist and action elements, was do that, dead ahead and play that straighter. The violence has no quotation marks… and that was the intention from the start.”
As always, the DGA Director’s Cut talks, which always feature two well-known, and in this case visionary directors, are an instructive listen, so you should give this a spin asap. (By the way, if you haven’t read Wright’s lovely tribute to the late zombie maestro George Romero, you should do so.)
Listen to the thirty-minute conversation below.