Following the huge success of his first two feature films as director – the searing BEFORE DAWN and the brutal BAIT – EMMERDALE star DOMINIC BRUNT is back this year with his third full-length movie. We spoke to Dominic and his wife, actor/co-producer JOANNE MITCHELL, about their latest project – prepare for the ATTACK OF THE ADULT BABIES…
STARBURST: Zombies, ruthless debt-collectors… and now Adult Babies! How? Why?
Dominic Brunt: Well, I was hired by a company called Radar Pictures in America to do their next film in Puerto Rico. I got all the visas sorted out and two weeks before, a few problems arose so they said ‘look, we’re going to put this one back a little bit’ – and I’d taken four or five months off work! We already had the idea of Adult Babies and the script was ready to go and a producer we knew really wanted to do it so we thought ‘why don’t we go with that?’ and as I had the time, rather than being a mad rush, it just fell perfectly so we had three and a half to four months to prep it and film it.
Joanne Mitchell: Dominic and I came up with the idea, we went away and worked on the story back and forth and then we gave it to Paul Shrimpton and he did a fantastic job and we were very happy with what he came up with. Because Paul did Inbred – amongst other things – he just suited this type of horror.
DB: I really like Paul’s way of working and I know he can deal with that side of things. It’s more Jo’s story, actually; I did little bits of it but Jo really broke it down scene-by-scene and then we passed it to Paul Shrimpton. He stuck rigidly to the storyline; he changed some of the ending and the dialogue, he put a few jokes in. He brought a fantastic pace to it and a shape that was far better than it had been. He wasn’t just a ‘writer for hire’; putting his dialogue over the top, he very much coloured it in.
So what’s the story behind Adult Babies?
JM: The actual story is about a group of white, middle-aged businessmen who go to this beautiful big mansion in the countryside – almost Masonic, in a sense – which is where they relax and take refuge from the world and their high powered jobs. It’s a very stress-free environment, they’re looked after by nurses and they regress into adult babies. The story kicks off when three intruders disturb their peace and tranquillity because they’re searching for a top secret document that is being held in the mansion and from then on, the chase begins and it tumbles towards this rollercoaster of bizarre and horrifying events, which basically goes from the sublime to the ridiculous. But the babies are determined to make sure that no-one leaves alive!
DB: I wanted to tell a wider story about the banking system and the people in charge; the corrupt politicians and MPs and people in authority who seemingly have the power to tell us and everybody else what to do whereas they’re actually human beings too and more often or not, they are where the stories are because they’re corrupt. I’m sure there are good people in these positions, but they’re still human beings and it’s just a question of whether they should be there to tell everybody else what to do. It’s all to do with poking fun at that, not being too serious, trying to make a political point but putting it across satirically because nobody wants to listen to a political point anymore, certainly not over an hour and a half in a film. So we get to do it within the genre that we love, telling stories in the way that we know with loads of gore and special effects, which I love! Adult Babies is really about bringing very important men down to that level and poking fun at them that way. The imagery of an adult baby is great; once you’ve got the image across that it’s big fat men running around dressed in nappies chased by sexy nurses in suspenders – that image would carry me through an hour-and-a-half of any movie, to be honest with you!
Memories of The Benny Hill Show comes to mind and they really probably shouldn’t…
DB: It’s really dark. There may be humour in there but it’s as dark as anything. It’s very sombre, not farcical in any way, it’s the opposite of any Benny Hill you’ve ever seen so I’d get well away from any notion of it being anything like Benny Hill! It’s pretty gory and pretty serious. It’s not a Shaun of the Dead-type thing. There’s humour in there but it’s not presented as humour, it’s not like comedy actors acting in a comedy way or anything like that. Everyone plays it absolutely straight. In tone, it’s a bit like The Lobster where everything’s very strange and the funny things are ignored; it’s not played for laughs at all.
How difficult was it to find a cast willing to perform as ‘adult babies’?
JM: It wasn’t the easiest thing to cast as you can probably imagine because not many people want to be an adult baby – not that there’s anything wrong with being an adult baby – but it was difficult to entice actors to walk around in nappies all day! But the cast we got were all fantastic and all really up for it, which is so important in an indie film. We’d used Andy Dunn in Bait; he’s a great team player, which is great because there’s quite a big cast in this one, much more so than Bait and Before Dawn. Then we had Sally Dexter on board and when we saw her name we thought ‘we’ve got to have her’ because I know of her. She does a lot of stage work and I really respect her acting so we managed to get her which was fantastic – she loved the script and she’s outstanding in it. We had to go through the auditioning process for the two youngsters; we saw a lot of young actors and it was really hard because there are some great actors out there but for this sort of scenario, as with every film or production, you’ve got to get the chemistry right between the characters, so Mica Proctor and Kurtis Lowe hit it off together, they looked right so we chose them and it all worked out well.
DB: Casting eight men who would be willing to run around in nappies was the toughest challenge! We got Laurence R. Harvey, who just went ‘yeah, of course, I will!’ He looks great in a nappy! But we auditioned loads of people and then we asked directly for a lot of people we’d worked with before like Andy and Charlie Chuck and as Jo says we wanted to get Sally Dexter in anyway, so it was sort of half-and-half between people we auditioned and people we asked specifically to be part of it.
Would you say that Adult Babies is a step up in the scale of your films as Bait was a step up from Before Dawn?
DB: Definitely. The scale of this one is enormous, just bringing in all the different ways of telling the story with animation and Claymation, and I think that’s exciting. It was great because it was all in one location, so it was just a joy to do. I think we realise what we’re doing now and we’ve learned from our mistakes. There was a lot of pre-production because there’s a large cast in this one. It’s set in a massive manor house so we had to find one that we could all stay at and film in every day. We found one about sixty miles away called Broughton Hall, so we managed to live there and eat there as well so we could just get up in the morning and start filming and stop when we dropped. It was a relief because Bait was twenty-six locations and it was a nightmare dragging these massive lorries and seventy-three crew around.
JM: We’ve learned a lot more from doing Bait, which was itself a massive step up from Before Dawn in terms of scope and scale. But even though this is another step up it seemed a lot easier because we’re all reading from the same page now, we all know what we’re about. Dominic knows his cinematographer, he knows his ADs, his camera operator and all that gives you extra confidence, too. You want it to be a happy ship and I think it was and that’s a credit to Dominic as well. As a director, he’s very friendly, he gets on with everybody but at the same time he commands respect as a director and I think he did incredibly well with only three weeks to shoot it in!
There always seem to be ‘themes’ to your films, something a little bit deeper than the usual stalk-and-slash horror fare. Are you keen to make your films ‘about something’ rather than just random blood-letting and cheap scares?
DB: I was asked to do something where there was a monster after a group of kids staying in a house and I said ‘look, this is about a monster getting some kids in a house, the monster doesn’t represent anything, the kids don’t represent anything.’ I wouldn’t be interested in doing a straight story; even from seeing Romero’s stuff very early on I was thinking ‘Yeah, that’s really multi-layered and clever’ and I’d rather intelligently tell a story and put a point across within the genre where the monsters aren’t just monsters and the people aren’t just people and you’re not just telling these awful tales and showing off the next piece of neck being cut. It’s got to be cleverer than that.
JM: It’s the same sort of approach as with Bait and Before Dawn in that we wanted it to be more than just a horror film, we wanted to tell a sort of political story without being wanky about it! I do think this does have that. Running alongside all the ridiculousness of what’s going on, we have a social commentary in the film.
But still with plenty of blood being spilt! How gory is Attack of the Adult Babies – on a scale of one to ten?
DB: I’d say an easy nine; yeah, it’s bonkers. The story’s really twisted, very unusual with some very odd imagery and the tone is very unsettling at times in what people are saying and doing but it’s not spiteful in any way. I’ve never liked films like Saw or Hostel, which look like they’ve come from some perverted 15-year-old’s mind – let’s torture people and kill women! – it’s not like that at all.
JM: I think I’ve said before that Dominic is the king of blood and gore, much more than I am, so he and Paul had lots of fun thinking up those sorts of scenarios and how far they could take them. I think it’ll really appeal to fans of the genre who like that kind of thing. It’s not nasty, though, it’s not torture porn; it’s very tongue-in-cheek.
We’ve still got a while to wait for the movie so how would you sum it up at this point?
DB: It’s about people getting out of their depth and it’s about tradition. It’s about greed and hypocrisy and I would say it’s very British in its outlook and maybe playing on what the world sees as British with its many traditions and the way that white, fat, middle-class or upper-class men rule from afar and these cabals that are running things. Although there are a lot of themes, I think it has its own identity and it does make sense with a very satisfying arc from beginning, middle to end. Without trying to be highbrow at all, we just had fun with it!
ATTACK OF THE ADULT BABIES is released on Blu-ray and DVD on June 11th.
