The Edgar Wright movie Christopher Nolan called “phenomenal”
Christopher Nolan and Edgar Wright might be two of contemporary cinema’s most beloved British directors, but their styles couldn’t be more different. While Wright’s storytelling has focused on nostalgic pub crawls and cult-infested countrysides, infusing action with comedy and quick-paced editing at every opportunity, Nolan is one of the most expansive directors in modern cinema. He takes his time, prioritising complexity and breathtaking visuals.
Though Wright is most beloved in his home country for the Cornetto trilogy, he has previously delved further into bigger-budget, Hollywood-style action with Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and Baby Driver. The latter garnered him some praise from the Inception director despite their seemingly contrasting approaches to action.
While interviewing Wright for the Directors Guild of America podcast, Nolan called the film a “phenomenal piece of work”. Released in 2017, Baby Driver saw Wright at his most serious and stylistic yet, colour-coding his characters in relation to their morality and cutting action scenes to a carefully curated soundtrack.
The film marked a stark progression from the buddy cop antics of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost in Hot Fuzz or the pub fighting sequences of Shaun of the Dead, though it was still infused with Wright’s distinctive direction. Nolan was particularly impressed with Wright’s use of action in the movie, suggesting that it was “spectacularly well directed”.
“All the foot chases and car chases in this,” he stated, “It’s like you really mean it. You really enjoy that. There’s something American about that. The showmanship of this movie.” From the opening bank robbery scene to a memorable chase scene set to Focus’s ‘Hocus Pocus’, Baby Driver saw Wright finding the perfect balance between stylistic and enjoyable action.
Rather than off-setting any sincerity with quick quips and cultural references as in his earlier work, the film saw Wright wholly commit to the action genre. As the director himself stated on an episode of The Director’s Cut, “In this film, the intention was to always make something that, in terms of the heist and action elements, was do that, dead ahead and play that straighter. The violence has no quotation marks… and that was the intention from the start.”
Forgoing comedic relief and genre-blending in favour of intensity, it’s no surprise that Nolan admired Wright’s work on Baby Driver. From the gritty depiction of war in Dunkirk to the contemplation of time in Tenet, Nolan’s filmmaking is always entirely committed to its action and themes. Still, the Cornetto trilogy will always hold a soft spot in the history of British cinema.
Revisit the spectacularly well-directed action opening to Baby Driver below.
