Baby talk

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/coproducer JOANNE MITCHELL, about their latest project – prepare for the coming of the ADULT BABIES…

- Paul Mount

STARBURST: Zombies, ruthless debtcollectors… 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. 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?