As a longtime stuntwoman and co-ordinator with nearly two hundred credits to her name, Alison Reid knows something about keeping a cool head while on set.
But she admits that she was still flustered when one of the stars of her feature debut The Baby Formula — a mock-documentary about a lesbian couple in Toronto who resort to unconventional means in order to start a family — had to stop filming a pivotal sequence because her water broke.
“Initially, Angela Vint’s character Athena was supposed to have her water break in the middle of the Pride parade — the idea was that somebody would put her on the back of a Harley and whisk her away to the hospital, which we thought would be funny,” she said.
“We were rehearsing that scene and then Angela’s water broke in real life. It was an unbelievable coincidence. She had to go to the hospital, of course, and so we shot the Pride sequence without her.”
Such are the perils of filming a film in sync with a performer’s real-life pregnancy. Or rather, two performers’ real-life pregnancies: Reid says that she was inspired to make The Baby Formula — opening next week— only after finding out that Vint and co-star Megan Fahlenbock (who plays Athena’s partner Lilith) had both been knocked up.
“The number one question we get during Q & As is whether Angela and Megan are actually a couple,” says Reid. “People are like ‘they’re really pregnant, so are they also really lesbians?’ In fact, we just won an award for best feature-length documentary in Monaco, and my producer had to email them and say ‘thank you very much, but this is a work of fiction.’”
