By Gill Pringle and Tim Byrnes
The film follows Baby (Ansel Elgort, The Fault In Our Stars, The Divergent Series), a young and talented getaway driver for criminals. What makes Baby an incredible driver is he drives to the music he listens to, heightening his focus and reflexes to extreme levels. Baby Driver features a great soundtrack and thrilling stunts, but choreographing the stunts to the soundtrack is a near-impossible task. That’s where Jeremy Fry comes in.
Jeremy Fry has been performing stunts since the beginning of the millennium, with his first credit the Hugh Jackman-starring Swordfish. Since then, Fry has thrown himself (literally) in films such as Master And Commander, John Wick, Jason Bourne, The Dark Knight Rises, and many more. Fry’s specialty is stunt driving, something he’s been doing since before his movie career, and has gone on to teach stunt driving. Fry’s skills and experience made him the perfect choice to coordinate and choreograph Edgar Wright’s high-speed vision.
When do you know what Ansel’s capable of and when you have to step in?
We did a lot of training with Ansel during prep and got a really good idea of what he could do, what he couldn’t do, and then teaching him more. So, we probably had him seven or eight times out there for three or four hours each. We had specific beats that we were working on with him, but in order to get him to be able to do those and feel comfortable was the whole gamut because I could teach him how to do one thing but it’s never just the one thing. It’s always: “Oh, let’s do this and this”. So, we taught him a whole bunch of stuff with focus on a couple of specific stunts. After Edgar and I worked with him for that long, we got a good idea of what he can and can’t do.
You have done a tonne of movies. What made this one so different?
One of the things that’s different about this movie is the concept of setting everything to music, which is the director’s call. Edgar had the whole movie storyboarded and had what they call animatics, so you could pretty much watch the whole movie with these little cartoons that could move, and they’re quite interesting. The problem is a lot of those animatics aren’t realistic. It shows a car doing a 180-degree turn and immediately following this car that’s supposed to be doing 60mph, but really it takes two seconds, and that’s important because in the music you have fifteen seconds to do this one thing to get from here to there including this two seconds of the thing. The problem is that, in reality, that fifteen second beat is eaten up because that whole move is actually twenty seconds to do that one they drew up as only two, for example. So, we went and basically shot a lot of the major parts of the movie in pre-vis and edited them together to figure out what worked, what didn’t work, what we had to change, what we wouldn’t have to change. So that’s a lot different. Pre-vising is normal: going out, shoot some stuff, see what it looks like, see what angles work better than others, see what we can use in the movie. What’s different is tying this all together and making sure it works.
What song was the most complicated, timing-wise?
They’re all complicated. They all have their own little idiosyncrasies and beats. The driving stuff, there is stuff that’s timed-up to the music, but more of the timing is with the fights and some of the gunfire exchanges.
Do you hear the song in your head when you’re driving?
Yeah, unfortunately [laughs].
Is there one song that gets stuck?
Yeah. And I wish I could say I love the song that’s stuck in my head, but…
Which one is it?
“Bellbottoms” by the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, because it’s the opening sequence, it’s the opening chase.
How does Ansel’s skillset compare to all the other actors you have worked with?
Oh, he’s really good. He picks stuff up fast. He wants to be good. A lot of actors it seems to just be more of a hassle or a headache for them. But for Ansel, it’s something he really seems to enjoy and want to do more and more of.
Is Ansel the best of this bunch, compared to the other actors?
Two other actors get in the cars, but not nearly as much. Eiza Gonzalez has been in a car, and she was really good, but I only had her for an hour because she’s had a real small thing, but she was really good. And Jon Hamm, who’s had a lot of training before, so it’s not a great comparison because Jon Hamm is awesome.
Is he the best driver?
I wouldn’t say he’s the best. They each have been trained in different things. Jon Hamm’s stuff was a lot of reversing, a lot of backwards driving, and he was really consistent on hitting his marks. Ansel’s stuff wasn’t really hitting marks. Ansel’s stuff was he’s got to blow through this thing hot. They each did their stuff really well.
Did Ansel tell you that he took his friends out in a car and practiced his stunts that you taught him?
Oh, he chuckled about that; how it was so funny. He told me that he enjoyed scaring his friends with his newfound skills, and with a car that wasn’t his. That’s all I should say [laughs]. He’s a good kid, he’s a smart kid, and he’s a talented kid. He’s doing more than what a lot of talent would be doing. He picks it up fast.
Baby Driver is in cinemas July 13, 2017
