5Q’s: SBIFF Award Winner Splits the Difference

Babysplitters offers a decidedly fresh take on the age-old struggle of couples coming into agreement about having children. The film, which had its world premiere earlier this month at SBIFF, dives headlong into unforeseen and decidedly risky territory as two couple who are close friends choose to have a single baby and split custody and caretaking duties. The comedy – which splits sides even more than offspring, especially in an uncomfortable, squirm-inducing extended sex scene – stars Danny Pudi (TV’s Community) and Emily C. Chang (Total Recall, The Vampire Diaries) as one of the married pair. Babysplitters won SBIFF’s Panavision Spirit Award for Independent Cinema at the 34th annual festival, and will screen one more time for free at 7:30 pm on Sunday, February 17, at SBIFF’s Riviera Theatre. (Quiet Storm: The Ron Artest Story, winner of the Best Documentary Award, and In Love and War [I krig & kærlighed], which claimed the Audience Choice Award, screen at 7:30 pm on Friday and Saturday, respectively.)

Writer-director Sam Friedlander talked Babysplitters and beyond over the weekend.

Q. Where did you get the idea for the film?

A. It draws upon personal experience, including conversations I had with my wife and discussions with others about having children, and an amalgam of issues in previous relationships. I wanted to find a fun concept to explore the disagreements in a couple around children and even among couples. I’m 40, and I had watched my friends divide into these camps – those who have children and those who don’t – and they just get polarized more as time goes on.

As strange as it is, I was also amazed that I’d never heard of that concept in a book or movie or anything before.

Me too. I was so worried that someone must have done it before. But I researched and asked all my friends in the business and I couldn’t find anything at all where the idea had been executed.

Did the process of making the movie help you get clarity for yourself in that area?

The characters are going through their own journeys, and there’s a little bit of me in each one – I’m too scared, it looks like fun, and other specific fears. So I wrote each of the characters from a different place within me. Making it definitely helped me. Part of the process of writing the script was to come to terms with what I wanted, and getting past the fears. 

So you’re having kids?

I have one now. We made the decision to see what would happen if we stopped trying not to have a kid. And it happened. So I have a 10-week-old baby. That’s the funny part: I found out my wife was pregnant a month into production. The nine months of shooting, editing and doing post-production almost exactly overlapped with her pregnancy. He was born within a week of when we finished the movie. 

OK, about that sex scene – spoiler alert! – between one husband and the other wife. It was so funny and weird at the same time.

I was thrilled that it played really well with the audience. I think it’s such an awkward thing that makes everybody laugh. Unlike a lot of movies, we didn’t try to go over the top. For the first ¾, I wrote it as how it might happen in the most realistic way as possible. I think that made it so much more awkward and thus funny.