Baby Driver
Where the DNA of Baby Driver travels
Films that shaped it
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I really love French crime films, especially Jean-Pierre Melville. Films like Le Samouraï and Le Cercle rouge are absolute masterpieces in terms of their precision, their procedural aspects, and the silent professionalism of the characters. We definitely looked at those for the heist sequences in Baby Driver.
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Because it's about a guy who takes pride in his work. And that to me is like something that's really fun to watch in a film. You watch, like, 'The Day of the Jackal,' and it's like literally watching this guy do his job in a kind of dispassionate, step-by-step way, and I find that fascinating.
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With 'Baby Driver,' I definitely wanted to go back to the origins of the genre, films like 'The Driver,' 'Mad Max' (the first one) and 'Bullitt.' The raw, practical car stunts in the original 'Mad Max' were a huge touchstone for us.
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Certainly in terms of the DNA of the film, and this is why Baby Driver is not a remake, but more kind of like a spiritual successor in some respects. Walter Hill’s The Driver (1978), I love that film. It’s a very clean, simple premise. It’s got a very cool driver and a very cool detective. It's almost like a zen B-movie, and that film, if you watch it, it really informs Baby Driver in terms of the clean lines of the concept.
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If you look at something like ‘Mad Max 2,’ there are very little lines of dialogue in it. All the character and all the plot is revealed through action. [...] That's a huge lesson from a lot of action movies, that I still learn from.
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And then there are films that I've watched countless times that are influential in my work, like Raiders of the Lost Ark. I wouldn't say that Baby Driver is a straight-up action film in the same way, but it takes inspiration from the way that Steven Spielberg shoots action.
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I’m very excited by the fact that I’m able to get to make a movie and be influenced by the things that I was influenced by growing up. It’s like, it’s not really a direct homage to something, but you know, I think it’s like if you like ‘Back To The Future’ or ‘Smokey And The Bandit’ or ‘The Blues Brothers’ or ‘Risky Business,’ or even some of the more sort of genre movies like ‘Point Break’ or ‘Heat,’ I think you’ll like this film.
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I saw Police Story probably five or six times in the theater when it first came out in England. It was my favorite movie for a year. That movie blew my mind. For me, being a kid of the 80s, I grew up loving Jackie Chan. ‘Police Story’ and ‘Project A’ were huge influences on me. And even in ‘Scott Pilgrim,’ I tried to do a lot of practical stunts. In ‘Baby Driver,’ it was all about that.
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I also went back to movies that I really loved where the main character loves movies, and that’s something that really informed Baby Driver. Whether it’s 'Ed Wood' or 'Boogie Nights' or 'The French Connection', those are all movies where the main character is really obsessive about their chosen craft.
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As well as films that had really great driving in them, I was thinking about films that were really tightly wound, almost like a piece of music, and very kinetic. Things like ‘The Bourne Identity,’ ‘Run Lola Run,’ and even ‘Reservoir Dogs’ have this feeling of a clock ticking down.
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I guess movies like 'City of God', 'Pulp Fiction', 'Goodfellas'... films that have a propulsive energy.
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There’s a movie called Kung Fu Hustle which I’ve always liked, and that’s obviously a big influence on some of the action comedy in it.
