What We Saw On the Set of 'Baby Driver'

Edgar Wright is standing among his crew in a corner of a multi-storey car park in Atlanta. His cast is milling about, waiting to shoot a car chase scene: Jon Hamm in a sharp suit with slick-back hair, Ansel Elgort pacing back and forth on his phone. There's a lot of fumbling behind the camera monitors, multiple conversations, heavy equipment being lugged around. Then a guy's voice pierces through the hubbub. It's not Wright's, but it sounds incredibly authoritative: "IF YOU'RE NOT GONNA LISTEN TO ME THEN GET THE FUCK OUT, OKAY?"

Suddenly there's silence, an atmosphere of anticipation and tension. Then a few moments later: "3…….2……1……ACTION!" A souped-up Subaru screeches into the car park and smoke fumes fill the air. 'Okay, here we go,' I think to myself, 'I'm about to see a Hollywood car chase in action.' But seconds later it's all over. Apparently, a tire busted out.

I'm on the set of Baby Driver, Wright's new car chase caper starring Hamm, Elgort, Kevin Spacey and Jamie Foxx. I've spent most of the day walking around a lot littered with crushed stunt cars, white trucks and huge modernist movie trailers that look like spaceships. All around us are giant tripods, lights and security guys wearing earpieces. I'm filled in on the basics before the shoot. Elgort is playing 22-year-old getaway driver, Baby, the main character in the movie. He's some kind of prodigy, a "Mozart in a go-kart" as Wright puts it. And in this particular scene, he's helping three sharp-suited crooks (played by Jon Hamm, Jon Bernthal and Eiza González) escape the cops following a bank robbery.

They're shooting in Atlanta, the birthplace of trap, home to the World of Coca-Cola museum, and some 4,206 miles from where Shaun of the Dead was filmed. This is Wright's second movie shot on US soil after Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and it's his most ambitious to date. "It goes back almost 20 years," he tells me later. "I heard a song and thought, 'Oh, that'd make a great car chase.'" The song was "Bellbottoms" by The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, and it's one of 35 tunes scattered throughout the movie, which is ambitious because Wright is having every action scene choreographed so it's in time with the soundtrack.

I can't imagine how that works when you're an actor – working in time to a track – so I ask Jon Hamm after the car park scene wraps. "It's pre-scored, which is a strange, unique thing," he says. "I don't know if you were down in the garage, but we had a shot of a car coming through and spinning around and driving and parking and [the actors] getting out of the car – that's all set to a specific song." He leans forward: "I think Edgar's visual vocabulary is second to none," he says, launching into salesman mode. "The way he tells the story through the beautiful marriage of image and sound, I think is going to be a very exciting couple of hours in the theatre." When everyone breaks for lunch, I walk around the movie trailers and catering trucks, hoping to see something interesting. I remember reading that when David Foster Wallace visited the set of David Lynch's Lost Highway he observed Lynch peeing against a tree. Perhaps I'd witness something like that; perhaps I'd have an anthropological view of movie stars in their natural habitat.

I'm not quite so lucky: there are hench dudes carrying poles and a catering team laying out an epic spread. But it is kind of surreal to see Hamm's stunt-double stroll by while the real Hamm piles a mountain of food on his plate; and catch Elgort's stunt-double right behind him, dressed identically. These clones casually walk around us, like the pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Once everyone's food is digested it's time to shoot the next car chase scene, featuring the same actors in the same red Subaru. The car, I'm told, is about to whiz up a ramp, do a 180 skid around the corner of an intersection and speed off out of sight.

I wait on the roof of another multi-storey car park. Down below, police are closing off the intersection, halting traffic in anticipation of the stunt. Everyone is on walkie-talkies, waiting for the signal, waiting for that word again – ACTION! But not much action seems to be happening. I can't see any cameras anywhere, and for a while, it's oddly quiet, that same palpable tension as earlier. Then it happens.

The sound of an engine revving. The red Subaru appears from behind a building and is zipping up the ramp below me. As it gets closer I can see all the actors in the car, Elgort in jet-black Ray-Bans pretending to drive like a pro. Wright is there too, strapped to the bonnet with a giant camera. He's clutching a walkie-talkie and is wearing a cowboy hat that, against all odds, stays atop his head as he straddles the car.

It's all over in seconds. I feel like a spectator at the Tour de France, seeing a cyclist whizz past in the blink of an eye after holding my spot at the fence for hours, despite very much needing a piss. Later, after shooting the last scene of the day, I meet Wright under a stormy Atlanta sky in another parking lot with some other journalists. He walks slowly towards us, the very picture of exhaustion, a look on his face that says, "I really don't wanna speak to you jerks right now." In fact, he seems to have been in a foul mood all day, grumbling round the set.

In under ten minutes he briefly but politely answers questions about Jon Hamm ("he's amazing at the action stuff"), song rights ("we had a great clearance person"), Prince, who died during filming ("when somebody told me I just couldn't believe it") and things that are too tedious to transcribe here.

It's the same with the other scenes I'm shown, and the cliché of how much work goes into every single second of footage on every single movie hits me. It's why filmmakers like Kevin Smith get so profoundly pissed at movie critics when they dismiss his movies with a few strokes on their keyboard, even if those movies are genuine pieces of shit.

Before I see the final film I call up Wright in LA for a last interview. Now the stress of making the film is over, things are different; he is totally different. For the first time I hear the charming British director I'd seen on TV with the shaggy hairdo, in full I'm-here-to-plug-my-movie mode.

I say how calm and composed he looked on set, walking silently among cast and crew. Was he actually freaking out on the inside? "I'm not freaking out. I'm definitely not a shouter, but I definitely can get anxious or sulk." I ask if his anxiety levels were higher on this one, with the logistical nightmare of closing down intersections and working in the street. "I think every movie is the same level of anxiety. With location films like The World's End and Hot Fuzz and Baby Driver, you're out in the elements, so I think there's an element of that which is thrilling."

Still, he admits, he was in an especially low mood during the Atlanta shoot: "I reached a point in the middle of Baby Driver where I was at my lowest, and usually I realise it's just sleep deprivation – irritability, malnutrition and sleep deprivation. I ended up being on set for 20 hours and getting four hours sleep. I was absolutely in an incredibly bleak mood." Surely, though, it was a bit of fun, being strapped to the front of the car, wearing a cowboy hat. He says that, in another scene, "I was strapped to Jon Hamm's car for like half the night, and once you start doing massive doughnuts and huge skids around parking garages, the place just starts to fill up with blue smoke… one time I was like, 'I literally think I'm gonna faint, because I've just had enough of driving backwards at 50 miles an hour.'" His final thought on the film? "It's as fun to watch as it was painstaking to shoot." When I finally catch the full thing, it is indeed fun, in a pulpy sort of way, like a high-octane movie you'd watch with your dad on ITV2 – 113 minutes of screeching tires, sharp suits and Elgort's quietly smug I'm-the-best-there-is face.

I also see what Wright and Hamm were trying to explain. The music in some scenes is meticulously synced to the action, gunfire synced with bursts of snappy snare drum. It's a strange effect at first, one of those stylistic flourishes that only Wright – known for his quickfire editing and kinetic camerawork – can get away with.

Mid-movie, I start to recall all the tedious waiting around on set, actors scrolling on their phones in between takes, stunt-doubles milling about – the banal stuff you don't see in the final polished product. This, I start to think, this is how movie stars must view their own films. Like, imagine Jon Hamm sitting down in front of Baby Driver. He's staring up at the screen, in the darkness, seeing himself wielding a gun, thinking: 'Oh yeah, that was the day the catering guy asked me to sign a Don Draper photo for his wife.'

That's sort of why I now see two movies: the one that takes place in front of the camera, and the one that takes place behind it. Sometimes the latter is the more interesting film, but not with Baby Driver. Car chases are better viewed after post-production have worked their magic.

@OliverLunn