BABY BOOM

The TARDIS lands on a spaceship. It was very, very hard to shoot. We used real babies! I like to do things that I’ve never done before and sometimes that’s quite hard, with such a long career as mine.

-  DARREN SCOTT

Tell us about “Space Babies”.

So I was very happy to be doing science fiction and working with Russell, and with babies who were high on the call sheet. I think some were about one-and-a-half years old.

Is there a CG element to the babies?

Yes, there’s a slight CG element to it. But that happened after I left. It was all worked out by fantastic people who took on the very tricky job of figuring out how to make the babies actually talk. So I had to just point the camera at the babies.

What was the most “out there” moment of filming for you?

Just literally shooting the babies in the spaceship. It was a real puzzler. In America, when I work, I get less time to figure stuff out, but in the UK we were given enough time to really, really think about it properly. But nothing prepares you for being on set with 12 real babies all acting differently.

Which there was no avoiding really – there was no way of getting around that. So that was the most challenging. What you did when one started crying and you thought, “Right, get his mum in… That’s our lead. He’s crying. We can’t have them crying!” All skills that you rely on as a director working with actors normally just didn’t apply. So it was hard.

Let’s talk about “Boom”.