Baby Driver has long been a passion project for British director Edgar Wright, who announced his arrival with the cult 1990s television show Spaced. He first thought of the film while working on A Fistful of Fingers, a low-budget cheesy take on classic Westerns. Broke and alone in London, 20-year-old Wright became obsessed with the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion song Bellbottoms, which he used for the opening chase sequence in Baby Driver.
“I just started to visualize this car chase,” Wright said. “I’d think, ‘This would be the perfect car chase song in a movie, but what’s the movie?’”
The idea was put on hold while the director worked on Spaced, starring frequent collaborators Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. After the show ended with a brief run of two seasons, Wright got a chance to test out his idea for the perfect car chase movie with a music video for British electronic band Minty Royale’s Blue Song. Starring Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt, of The Might Boosh, and Frost, the video foreshadowed the tone of Baby Driver, which focuses on the music obsession of a getaway driver instead of the intricacies of the actual robbery. Wright himself described the video as a “dry run for the opening of the movie” because he couldn’t decide what to do with the idea he’d had.
The British director eventually wrote the script in 2010 after speaking to ex-convicts for research and asking them what kind of music they listened to while committing crimes. His resaarch culminated in Baby Driver, which mixes music and chase sequences with nods to musicals rather than action films. The movie opens in India on June 30.