page_title: Baby Driver
section_title: Development
hierarchical_section_title: Baby Driver / Production / Development
caption_attribution_description: English: Edgar Wright at the 2010 Comic Con in San Diego
context_page_description: Baby Driver is a 2017 action film written and directed by Edgar Wright. It stars Ansel Elgort as a getaway driver seeking freedom from a life of crime with his girlfriend Debora. Kevin Spacey, Jon Hamm, Eiza González, Jamie Foxx and Jon Bernthal appear in supporting roles. Eric Fellner and his Working Title Films partner Tim Bevan produced Baby Driver in association with Big Talk Productions' Nira Park. Sony and TriStar Pictures handled commercial distribution of the film. Baby Driver was financed through a partnership between TriStar and Media Rights Capital.
  Wright developed Baby Driver for over two decades. He devised the idea well in his youth, and his early directing experience furthermore shaped his ambitions for Baby Driver. Originally based in Los Angeles, Wright revised the film's setting to Atlanta, integrating the city's ethos into an important storytelling device. Principal photography took place in Atlanta over four months, from February to May 2016. Production involved the planning of meticulously coordinated stunts, choreography, and in-camera shooting.
context_section_description: Baby Driver is a longtime passion project Wright had been developing since 1995, when the writer-director was a struggling 21-year-old filmmaker living in suburban London. He had relocated to London to finish his first professional film, the low-budget western comedy A Fistful of Fingers, and to contemplate his future in entertainment. Wright's repeated listening to Orange (1994), the fourth studio album by the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, provided the impetus for Baby Driver. At first he envisioned a high-speed car chase, which then evolved into a full sequence where the getaway driver dances to "Bellbottoms" in his car before the ensuing chase. Though this was ultimately written into the script as the film's opening sequence, Wright's nascent vision was far from a fully realized project. By the time Baby Driver took definite form, the advent of the iPod, Wright's childhood tinnitus, and his reading of Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia (2007), which explores the neuroscience of music, were forces shaping the project's artistic direction.
  On a £25,000 budget, Wright developed the music video for Mint Royale's "Blue Song" in 2003, featuring a backstory gleaned from his early concept of Baby Driver. The video became an unexpected success, and although happy with his work, Wright was frustrated he had cannibalized an idea he felt had enormous potential. In retrospect, he admits his music video was a significant undertaking because it provided proof of concept for Baby Driver. The release of Wright's first major feature, Shaun of the Dead (2004), was another important catalyst not only for its artistic direction, but for signaling the start of a long-term working relationship between Wright and Working Title producers, who would assist with Baby Driver's development. By 2007, after signing a multi-picture deal with Working Title, and with a clearer vision of the project, the writer-director met with Steven Price to discuss early musical ideas for Baby Driver. The drafting of a story started around the release of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010), but pre-production of the film stalled as Wright's other projects—The World's End (2013) and the then-forthcoming Ant-Man (2015), for which he had already prepared a script with Joe Cornish—took precedence. Work resumed immediately after Wright's departure from Ant-Man, when the studio began assembling their roster of actors and technical staff before shooting. In preparation, Wright spent time with ex-career criminals in Los Angeles and London to develop an accurate depiction of a real-life bank robber's work.
  Wright, lead film editor Paul Machliss, and Los Angeles-based editor Evan Schiff devised a pre-edit of Baby Driver with animatics in the initial stages of production. With Avid Media Composer, Machliss was tasked with syncopating each animatic to the corresponding soundtrack. He and Wright had an existing professional relationship from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and The World's End. In addition, Machliss worked on set providing input for the shoot, which was unusual given that film editors are rarely present at the production set of most films.
caption: Edgar Wright in 2010
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