Film Actors in 'The Baby Formula' were really pregnant during shooting

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Victoria Ahearn
THE CANADIAN PRESS

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TORONTO - Talk about method acting.

In the Canadian comedy The Baby Formula, opening in Toronto on Friday, a lesbian couple both become pregnant with artificial sperm made from the other's stem cells.

Megan Fahlenbock and Angela Vint, who play lead characters Lilith and Athena, were both expecting in real life during the shoot, leaving little room to extend the schedule, says director Alison Reid.

"We started shooting very, very fast," the Toronto-based movie-maker said in a recent interview. "We shot three or four days at a time over the... period of their real pregnancies."

"So our development process of the script and the story was intermingled with our production process."

Reid heard the pair were going to be first-time moms shortly after they starred in her short film Succubus, which has a similar premise. In fact, it was their pregnancies that inspired Reid to make the feature. "She was like, 'Hello! Time to make our feature!' " recalled Fahlenbock, who lives in Toronto with her husband and now 20-month-old daughter, Arwyn. "She basically called her writer and called her friends and the next day we were shooting."

When cameras started rolling, Vint - whose other film credits include Urban Legends - was about five months along. Fahlenbock, whose screen credits include Resident Evil: Apocalypse, was about three months pregnant.

Near the end of production, Reid and writer Richard Beattie had to revamp a pivotal scene in which Athena's water breaks at the Gay Pride Parade.

The change was necessary because Vint's water really did break while rehearsing the segment.

While Vint - who was about 9 1/2 months pregnant at the time - was rushed off to give birth to little Maggie-Anne, the film crew continued to shoot scenes of the parade. The script was re-jigged and she went back to work just a few weeks later.

While the idea of two women having each other's biological babies is science fiction, it's been successfully done in mice, says Reid, whose research included chats with scientists and bio-ethicists around the world.

Rosemary Dunsmore provides the voice of dissent in the film, playing Vint's religious mother who disapproves of her daughter's sexual orientation and the way in which she's having a child (Dunsmore won an ACTRA Toronto award earlier this year for the role).

Reid says she's has been anticipating backlash to the controversial subject of the film, which includes some tasteful nudity, but hasn't heard of any yet.

"We were kind of hoping that some people would pick up on it and speak out against it because that would maybe help with our publicity - and we have no publicity money or very little," said Reid, who made the film with a budget of $275,000. "But so far that hasn't happened."

The film is so far only scheduled to screen at one theatre in Toronto, but Reid says she's hoping to create a TV series based on the characters.

"We'd pick the series up when the babies are toddlers and they're the first stem-cell babies in the world," she said, noting CBC has bought the rights to the film. "You can, you know, imagine back to when the Dionne quintuplets were born and they had a bit of celebrity status - you know, the first test-tube babies - so it would be that kind of a thing."