Film Edited b Zach Long Edited by Zach Long timeout.com/chicag timeout.com/chicago/film @z_long @z_long Film All the (road) rage


Director Edgar Wright buries the needle in this summer’s action-comedy stunner Baby Driver. By Joshua Rothkopf


BRITISH-BORN FILMMAKER Edgar Wright has made some of your favorite movies—you just might not know it. Shaun of the Dead (2004), the final word in zom-coms, is his. So is the hyperactive cop-movie parody Hot Fuzz (2007). And the video-game–style romance Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)? His again.


“I got offered a couple of franchise movies that people would be shocked that I passed on,” Wright says over the phone from Los Angeles, not explicitly mentioning his departure from Ant-Man over creative differences. But clearly he sees those skipped gigs as a blessing in disguise: “If it’s the choice between doing ‘number three’ in an existing series or having the opportunity to do an original film, I have to grab


[the latter] with both hands,” explains Wright. “It’s my duty to film history.” Wright does that duty honorably with yet another utterly unique comedy. Baby Driver—the zippy tale of an Atlanta getaway-car driver (played by The Fault in Our Stars heartthrob Ansel Elgort) and his attempts to escape the criminal underworld—slayed initial audiences at March’s SXSW festival. And for once, the prerelease buzz is underselling the film: Wright has reinvented the car-chase movie, infusing it with La La Land’s effervescence and a killer soundtrack. “People have a sort of unspoken fantasy about being in a high-speed police chase,” offers the 43-year-old filmmaker, with a chuckle. “I don’t think anybody would actually do it,


Time Out Chicago June 7–September 5, 2017


but everybody thinks about slamming their foot on the accelerator when that police car pulls up with its lights on.” The movie lived in Wright’s mind for almost 20 years. Even more unusually, he came up with his film’s dynamite playlist— from Queen’s strutting cock rock


“Everybody thinks about slamming their foot on the accelerator when that police car pulls up with its lights on.”


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and the Beach Boys’ innocent harmonies to that ultimate driving tune “Radar Love”— before he wrote a single scene. “Music, for me, is a motivator,” says Wright. “I can’t focus unless I have the right mood going. And to make a movie that’s essentially about that—music as both a salve and an obsession— I thought would be fascinating.” Once again mining laughs from the seam between starry-eyed fantasy and the unvarnished truth, Wright has made his most personal film to date, about a daredevil who needs to go his own way. “It’s sort of a vagabond lifestyle,” he says of his job, pausing for a moment of modesty. “If that means I’m a Hollywood director, then great.” he says. “Being okay with reality is the path to happiness.”  Baby Driver opens June 28.


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