Edgar Wright is back with a fresh take on the action/heist film, like only he can make!

I love that in this day and age of reboots, remakes, reimaginings, sequels, etc., Edgar has come up with something original! “It isn’t easy getting an original film made these days so I have to give credit to MRC and Tri star who financed this movie, because it’s so rare to get an original movie these days – especially in the summer. I think you get a lot around awards times, but I think this summer, there’s only a handful of original movies, so I feel very fortunate that I got to make it. I think you have to work harder to get it off the ground because you have no pre-existing awareness of what it is. It basically does not exist in anybody else’s mind until they see a trailer and you’ve read some reviews.”

In “Baby Driver” the music is just as important as the film itself, so what came first the songs or the scenes?

“The initial spark of the idea was from a song that I used to listen to a lot when I was 21. It’s the first song that’s in the movie, “Bell Bottoms” by The John Spencer Blues Explosion. I would just listen to that song all the time and I would visualise this car chase, and I wasn’t a director at the time but I could just visualise the scene and then I sort of thought, I have to come up with the film that goes with the scene. So then when I actually wrote the script, which I started doing 10 years ago, I wouldn’t write the scene until I had the right song.”

So why is now the right time to have made this film?

“As I said, the original idea goes back 21 years ago, I tried to write it 10 years ago, I finished writing it 6 years ago. I think it was just building up the confidence to do it. I mean, I don’t think it’s a movie I could have made 10 years ago. I feel like I have been building up in confidence to do this.”

Although Edgar wrote the film with songs in mind, he didn’t write parts with certain actors in mind. Well there was one person he always knew he was going to cast.

“The only person that I wrote it for in mind was Jon Hamm, because I knew him. I’ve known him for about nine years, and so I wrote the part of Buddy with Jon in mind. Everybody else, like obviously people like Ansel and Lily and Eisa, are younger, so they weren’t on the scene when I was first writing the thing. And then people like Kevin (Spacey) and Jamie (Foxx), if anything are bigger than I was imagining. They’re sort of, ‘Oh wow, I can’t believe I have these guys to do these parts. It’s amazing’.”

Edgar is of the belief that “the worst crime is to get kind of really complacent.” So does he not like to take the easy way out and just keep making the same reliable films?

“I don’t know. I think in terms of doing sequels and stuff, you know, the films take so long. So say you’ve been working on a zombie film for three years, the last thing I want to do for the next two years is doing another zombie film. So you just want to keep switching it up and doing different sorts of subject matters. That’s not to say that I would never do a sequel. But I think if you have the opportunity to keep doing different stuff, then you should take it.”

So what’s next for Edgar?  “Shadows” is listed as Edgar’s next project on IMDB, is this his next project? “Yeah, don’t believe everything you read on IMDB … It’s something that David Walliams (and I) wrote a draft for but I don’t know if that’s necessarily going to be something that I am working on.”

Whatever he is working on next, I can’t wait to see. In the meantime, we can all sit back and enjoy the thrill and joy that is Baby Driver. It is in cinemas now.