There are three things I can tell you before you going to see “Baby Driver” next weekend: believe the hype; Edgar Wright directs the shit out of it; and don’t watch the trailers. While it’s not a comeback movie for Wright, it is a massive bounce back after a very public exit from Marvel‘s “Ant-Man.” However, it’s clear the filmmaker didn’t lose any his vibrant filmmaking voice in the process, and in fact, “Baby Driver” proves his skills have never been sharper. In a way, it’s almost a blessing that “Ant-Man” didn’t happen because maybe we wouldn’t have “Baby Driver” (at least not at the moment).
However, ever since Wright’s exit from the Marvel movie, he’s kept quiet about what actually went down. But now he’s opened up on Variety‘s “Playback” podcast, and essentially, once “Ant-Man” wasn’t going to be the film he envisioned, his interest diminished.
“I think the most diplomatic answer is I wanted to make a Marvel movie but I don’t think they really wanted to make an Edgar Wright movie. It was a really heartbreaking decision to have to walk away after having worked on it for so long, because me and Joe Cornish in some form — it’s funny some people say, ‘Oh they’ve been working on it for eight years’ and that was somewhat true, but in that time I had made three movies so it wasn’t like I was working on it full time,” Wright explained. “But after ‘The World’s End‘ I did work on it for like a year, I was gonna make the movie. But then I was the writer-director on it and then they wanted to do a draft without me, and having written all my other movies, that’s a tough thing to move forward thinking if I do one of these movies I would like to be the writer-director. Suddenly becoming a director for hire on it, you’re sort of less emotionally invested and you start to wonder why you’re there, really.”
Indeed, if you’re moving in one direction only to have a studio coming in and try put another script in your hands to shoot, it can’t be a great situation. And who would want to see any movie directed by Wright that he wasn’t passionate about?
In fact, Wright’s crew felt the same way, and he reveals the team he would’ve worked with on “Ant-Man” also left the movie, and came with him to make “Baby Driver.”
“The good thing that came out of it is I got to kind of move on to [Baby Driver], which was a script that I had already written. And maybe one of the ironies about it is I had thought in the back of my head, ‘Well if the Marvel movie does well, maybe I’ll have enough muscle to get Baby Driver made,’ and so it’s ironic I guess that I didn’t make that movie and got ‘Baby Driver’ made, and with a studio, which for an original movie is very rare,” Wright said. “And the other important thing for me is almost the entirety of my crew who were gonna do that movie sort of left in solidarity, so it was really important to me to get another film going so I could kind of re-employ them all. So the funny thing about ‘Baby Driver’ is it pretty much features all the [Heads of Department] who were gonna do the other movie with me.”
One can only wonder what “Ant-Man” would’ve been like with Wright and his team behind it….
“Baby Driver” opens on June 28th. Listen to the full conversation with Wright below. [via JoBlo]