When “Baby Driver" writer-director Edgar Wright was a guest on The Frame, he talked about being paranoid that James Gunn's music-heavy "Guardians of the Galaxy" would beat him to the punch on songs he planned to use in his musical action film.
After all, "Baby Driver" is fueled by its soundtrack.
But while there's a lot of buzz about the great mixtape of songs that the character of Baby has throbbing in his ears, there’s a whole symphony of sounds sneakily laced within the soundtrack that the average moviegoer may not catch.
Sound designer Julian Slater, who has worked on every Edgar Wright film since “Shaun of the Dead” in 2004, was the culprit. And right from the opening logos, you can tell there’s something unique about the film’s sound. Here are some insights from Slater:
THE SOUND OF TINNITUS
“The sound that we all kind of associate in movies with tinnitus, which is that high-pitched whistle tone — we wanted to try and explore different avenues, so that it didn’t just sound like something that was going to annoy you,” Slater said.
The main character, Baby, suffers from tinnitus — a ringing in the ears — and Slater wove that into the music and the storytelling.
“The tinnitus actually changes in pitch,” said Slater, “depending on the incoming piece of music. So, for example, the Sony logo was pitched down, that is in the same pitch as the tinnitus it goes into, which in turn is in the same pitch as the car squeal brake that pulls up, which then goes into the ‘Bellbottoms’ music cue.”
BREAKING DOWN THE OPENING SCENE'S SOUND DESIGN
More than his tinnitus, Baby is defined by the songs blasting in his earbuds — while he’s driving, while he’s running, while he’s strutting to the coffee shop. With the help of Slater, the whole world around him seems to be jamming along.
“The very beginning of the movie starts with Baby waiting outside whilst his cohorts pull of this bank job,” Slater said. “The movie is laced with lots of audio. .. I call them ‘Easter eggs,’ things that, at a first-time watch or a listen, you wouldn’t maybe grasp that it works musically. The opening track is ‘Bellbottoms’ by Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. And at this point in the movie, he turns on his windscreen wipers, and they are moving in tempo with the music.”
“[Then] we’ve got three burglar alarms that are all happening at the same time. We introduce them one after the other, and they’re all syncopated with the music.”
“We would take each sound as it stood in its own right. We would then tempo-map it, pitch-correct it, play it into the mix, decide if it worked. If it did work, perfect. If it didn’t work, we would then try a different sound.”
THE SOUND DESIGN OF THE "TEQUILA" SEQUENCE
Midway through the movie, there’s a tense meeting that erupts into a gunfight ... all while The Champs’ song, “Tequila,” is playing.
Edgar Wright has been dreaming up this movie for two decades and several years ago he hired an English DJ named Osymyso — who has made remixes using sound and dialogue from Wright’s other movies — to remix "Tequila" using gunfire, with this scene in mind.
Slater explained how Wright used that template when shooting on set.
When Edgar was on the shoot, all the actors knew that the guns had to go [imitates triplet sound] at a certain time. So it was always shot with the playback happening at the same time. Then that’s brought back to the cutting room, and Edgar adjusts the picture where needed. And then we set about replacing those guns ... and then adding on top of that. So the things that you see in sync are the guns going bang bang bang, but then all the ricochets that are happening in the surrounds are also kind of flicking around and all working with the music at the same time.
“It’s very complicated,” said Slater, “but it’s an absolute joy to do. And something like this is all down to Edgar. This was thought out and built into the script, so you can obviously push the parameters a lot further.”
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