Baby Driver’s Julian Slater talks working with Edgar Wright and the magic of non-musical musicals
It’s an uncharacteristically dull, rainy day in Los Angeles when we speak to Julian Slater, but seeing as he’s just learned of his BAFTA nomination for Sound in Baby Driver, he doesn’t seem too fussed.
‘Thank you!,’ he exclaims when Metro.co.uk congratulates him. ‘It’s really weird, I woke up to it a couple of hours ago. It’s great to be recognised by your peers.’
Considering awards season is currently in full swing, Julian’s still has no inkling as to whether the Oscar nominations will prove as fruitful and, while he might now reside in the City of Dreams, he maintains the self-effacing temperament of a true Brit when it comes to guessing.
‘I can’t even begin to think about that, it’s just totally blown my mind. We shall see.’
The best bit about Julian’s nomination is he utterly deserves it. He was a key part of the meticulous team that created the breathtaking soundscape for Edgar Wright’s wholly original non-musical musical, Baby Driver.
The film follows Baby (Ansel Elgort) as the tinnitus-suffering getaway driver who drowns out the ‘hum-in-the-drum’ with some carefully curated iPod playlists. Indebted to crime boss Doc (Kevin Spacey), Baby only has a couple of missions left to complete before he can get out and start a new life with girlfriend Debora (Lily James) – which proves hard when surrounded by wild card criminals like Buddy (Jon Hamm), Darling (Eliza González), and Bats (Jamie Foxx).
Only… well, we’re still debating as to whether we can even use the word musical to describe this film.
It’s not not a musical, but Baby Driver has had a reputation since its release in June 2017 for being notoriously hard to pigeon-hole, which is precisely what makes it so great. How many films are so original that you can’t quite sum it up in a handful of words?
The thing is, with Baby Driver music doesn’t just punctuate scenes – it’s steals them. It’s a main character as much as Baby is.
‘Someone once called it Car-Car Land, which I think is quite funny,’ says Julian when we beg for his definition. ‘It’s not bursting into song, but there’s very few moments in the film where music isn’t playing to some degree.
‘I think in the same way it’s a very unique and original movie, it’s a very unique and original musical.’
Julian’s collaboration with director Edgar extends all the way back to the early naughties. Julian was working hard on pushing the envelope with sound for British comedies like Brass Eye and The Day Today, of which Wright was a big fan of.
They first worked together in a professional capacity on the film that slingshotted them all to international stardom in 2004, Shaun of the Dead, and he’s been ‘lucky enough to work with him on everything since’.
With Baby Driver, however, Julian’s role in the filmmaking process swelled significantly, allowing him to wear three different hats: Lead Sound Designer (‘I come up with the weird and wonderful noises’), Supervising Sound Engineer (‘I run a team of sound editors’), and one of the mixers. If it sounds intense, that’s because it was.
‘I would definitely say this movie is the very most I’ve thrown myself into it with [Edgar],’ Julian recalls. ‘I had to leave my family in LA to do this in London, so I was a billy no mates for a lot of it. If I woke up early or had a weekend free I’d just go to work. I threw myself into it in a slightly obsessive way.’
The obsessiveness pays off, though. The meticulous nature of the film’s never-ending soundtrack is something that could likely not be achieved without some level of infatuation.
But it’s stressful, being so scrupulous – even more so when you’re not a natural musician, admits Julian. There was plenty of challenging scenes to overcome that involved big bursts of creativity, particularly one scene which sees Baby’s hearing blown out completely by Jamie Foxx’s bad guy, Bats.
‘We wanted to convey deafness, where he can’t hear what Deborah is saying to him, but as the audience we want to hear what she’s saying. That took a lot of different iterations.’
It certainly does help foster creativity when you’ve had a working relationship as long as Edgar and Julian’s. The director, Julian says, surrounds himself with long-term collaborators, which makes it much easier to not only be in sync, but to be completely unafraid in expressing their artistic vision.
‘I have no fear of playing something to Edgar or anyone on his team, there’s no fear of rejection. I’m just really lucky to be able to work with someone who pushes his own boundaries as well as mine.’
Julian reveals that the idea of ‘sonically syncopating real world sounds with the music you’re listening to’ was planted way back in 2010 with Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, during a fight between Michael Cera’s Scott and his love interest’s evil ex Roxie Richter (Mae Whitman).
This idea became so integral to the Baby Driver that when Edgar got round to sending scripts to the cast and crew, it was all on an iPad that, ‘as you turned each page, it would play the relevant piece of music, and then he even had the temp sound effects.’ So, for example, during the scene where Baby jives his way to the coffee shop to Bob & Earl’s Harlem Shuffle, the footsteps played alongside the song in the digitised sample script.
‘When I first read the script, I put it was down and was shaking,’ Julian recalls. ‘I could see what Edgar was trying to achieve. From the moment I turned the first page I knew it was going to be a unique thing.’
As such, the actors would be listening to music constantly on set. Ansel’s earbuds were actually functional, and the other actors would wear ‘earwigs’ – tiny earpieces so they can hear the music, too. And if the scene really required it, the music would be played out loud for the choreography to be performed in sync – for instance, in the film’s infamous Tequila! scene, loud speakers would blast out the song for the actors to fire their guns in time with the beats.
Edgar and Julian were lucky to stumble across the perfect actors when it came to their musical abilities for this film: Jamie Foxx is an award-winning musical artist who previously starred in Ray as blind piano player Ray Charles, and Ansel Elgort performs as an EDM artist under the name Ansolo.
Julian revealed Edgar gelled so well with Ansel because in his audition he proved himself to be such a musical person. But given Ansel’s EDM background, have he and Julian ever swapped engineering tips?
Julian laughs: ‘No, I think he’s probably got that well covered to be honest with you. He has lots of highly paid well skilled people around him. So no, he has not.’
But despite the highly talented cast and crew, and an idea that was truly unique, the fickle nature of the business still left Julian with that looming feeling of the unknown about Baby Driver’s fate in the big wide world.
‘It could go one way or the other. It was released after Transformers 5 and before Spider-Man Homecoming– a lot of these tent-pole movies with existing IPs and I was worried for it.’
But with the work put in by everyone involved, deep down he knew they were on to something extraordinary.
‘I was on the movie for seven months and weekly I would watch stuff and get goosebumps. That doesn’t happen often. I knew what we had was unique.
‘And people were literally blown away by it, from the very first car sequence.’
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