Heist Baby

Siam ah! In Baby Driver, the new film opening this week by Shaun of the Dead director Edgar Wright, Ansel Elgort plays a gifted getaway driver with a need for speed and a thunderous soundtrack. But this is not another Fast & Furious — it’s a musical Fast & Furious. Sorta.

There are heist movies and then there’s Baby Driver, a heist movie not like any other. Baby Driver stars Ansel Elgort (The Fault in Our Stars) as a baby-faced, tinnitus-suffering getaway driver aptly nicknamed Baby who works for a shrewd crime boss (Kevin Spacey as the underworld version of his House of Cards alter-ego Frank Underwood). When Baby falls head over heels in love with a waitress (Downton Abbey’s Lily James), he thinks it’s high time to hang up his spurs. But before he does that, he has to figure out his own getaway, by pulling off one last job…

So far, so straightforward, right? Not really. When you have Edgar Wright, the audacious British director of the ‘Three Flavours of Cornetto’ trilogy (i.e. Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World’s End) at the helm, don’t expect anything straightforward. For starters, the driving — in three major chases — were mostly done for real (look, ma, no green screen!). And two, he had those moments synchronised to the music — more than 30 songs — Baby is listening in his iPod to help drown out the ringing in his ears.

The result: An action movie powered by music, or, for lack of a better term, an action musical, something Wright conceived way back in 1995. To help realise this unusual musical, he enlisted Ryan Heffington, the choreographer renowned for Sia’s ‘Chandelier’ and ‘Arcade Fire’s ‘We Exist’ to integrate the action to the songs. “There might be music, and there might be choreography, but this is not your everyday musical,” says Wright.