Vinyl and cassette culture are well represented in the movie, but the click-wheel iPod is even more romanticized than those formats. Since you’ve been mulling over this movie for a long time, did the extinction of the iPod change how you approached Baby’s listening habits?

Not really, I kind of figured he would be stuck on that. If he grew up with that, it’s almost like his version of vinyl. If you think of Ansel Elgort’s age, he was seven when the first iPod came out [in 2001], which is enough to make anybody feel old. And if he's been stealing cars since he was 12, he's going to have inherited a lot of other people’s iPods. I thought that was kind of interesting, ’cause I thought if he stole cars, the main thing you end up with is a collection of sunglasses and a collection of other people’s listening devices.

Do you miss the original iPod?

I still use it! I have one in my pocket as we speak. Somebody from Apple came to see the movie, and when I told them that I still use the iPod, they looked at me like I was insane. They said, “Do you have Apple Music?” I said, “Yeah!” They said, “Oh.” I said, “I just like the iPod—having a hard drive with everything.” I realize that it’s going to die soon and I’m going to have to buy another one on eBay. It's a funny thing with technology where a company is trying to phase out different ways that you do stuff. If I was them, I would bring it back as an option.

How did these songs enter the movie’s universe for you? Would you be hearing them in the wild and you’d think, “This should be in Baby Driver,” or was it more like you were sitting at a desk and thinking them up as you typed out a draft?

I've been thinking about the movie for a number of years, so for quite a while I've been thinking, “This is a good Baby Driver song.” The Damned one [“Neat Neat Neat”]—that’s a song that I’ve loved for a long time, and I’ve never heard in a movie, so I thought. Also, a lot of the songs in the movie had some interesting things happening structure-wise—tempo changes, breakdowns, loud and quiet bits. I’m always trying to find songs that have sections like that. When I actually sat down to write the movie, had earmarked about 10 songs: Jon Spencer, the Damned, the “Tequila” cover, “Hocus Pocus” [by Focus], Blur [“Intermission”], the Barry White song [“Never, Never Gonna Give Ya Up”], the Queen song, and some others.

I'd actually started to break down the songs with a DJ friend of mine, Mark Nicholson, whose nom de plume is Osymyso. I'd say, “Can you help me put sound effects into this song?” He’d make a version of it that has all of the sound effects—he dubbed car noises, police sirens, and gunshots. I'd heard that [Button Down Brass] cover of “Tequila” on a compilation, which has this dueling drum solos. I thought that would be an interesting thing for a gun fight. Before I'd written a word, I said to Mark, “Hey, could you dub gunshots onto this drum solo so I can map it out?” Then I wrote the scene, did storyboards, and edited the storyboards to the music, so then you can have an animatic. Then we would literally make everyone learn how to fire to their little drum parts. It's kind of an insane thing to go through with people, but it totally works. It's like, “Okay, so your bit is this: ‘Bam ba-bam bam bam.’ And your bit is this: ‘Da da da-da-da.’”