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Oscar nominee: 'What we did with Baby Driver had never been done before'

Baby Driver op-ed
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Nominated for two Oscars this year, Julian Slater is the Briton responsible for the game-changing sound of Baby Driver. In the movie, the main character's partial hearing loss sets the tone for each scene, as the audience hears whatever soundtrack Baby chooses to play.

Here, Julian Slater tells Sky News how he worked with director Edgar Wright to make one of the best movies of the year.

I've been lucky enough to work with Edgar in all of his movies, since Shaun Of The Dead.

They are all very sound-intense movies. Edgar's just one of those directors who not only loves what sound can do, but is aware of how it can help the movie.

But Baby Driver was a step beyond that. Edgar made the script with the sound written into its DNA.

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It is part of the story, almost another character.

Baby (ANSEL ELGORT) and Debora (LILY JAMES) jack a car to get away in TriStar Pictures' BABY DRIVER.
Image: Baby's tinnitus gets worse the more stressed he gets

In the movie, Baby is in a car crash as a young boy, which kills both his parents. Because of that he is left with a ringing in his ears called tinnitus.

So music not only propels the whole story forward, but it also keeps him going and allows him to shield from the outside world and cover the ringing on his ears.

What we do with the mix of the movie is, whenever music is not playing, if Baby isn't listening to it on his earbuds or it's not playing in a jukebox, you hear the ringing of his ears in the cinema.

And, with stress-related tinnitus, it grows louder the more stressed Baby gets.

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Learn how to mix an Oscar-nominated movie

So the movie starts with things going great for him and then, in the first car chase, everything starts to collapse. Things start going awry.

And the worse things get - when he is not listening to music - the louder his tinnitus is.

So it's a big plot point.

It's something that I don't believe has been done before. We certainly had no reference of other movies to check in on and see how it was done.

We had to start from scratch and figure out how to do it.

Baby (ANSEL ELGORT) charms  Debora (LILY JAMES) at her work in TriStar Pictures' BABY DRIVER.
Image: Ansel Elgort's Baby and Lily James' Debora at the dinner

We also had to devise how to convey tinnitus, because to have the sound of high-pitched ringing in the cinema - as we discovered - is going to grate on people.

They're not going to like it.

Naturally. It's an uncomfortable sound.

So sometimes it is presented as a high-pitched ringing, sometimes it is the sound of strings in the score or breaks, squeaks from an outside window.

Baby Driver
Image: Julian Slater working on the movie's mixing board

Edgar wrote each scene around each piece of music in the film.

He's had them in his head for a good 10 years and I know he wrote the script around them.

We knew, me and my crew, we had this belief that what we were doing was truly unique and had never been done before.

I certainly think Edgar is a pioneer. He is a genius film-maker and a pioneer of cinema - definitely.

And me and the crew who worked with him are lucky enough to go with him on whatever journey he goes.