Ilana Glazer on importance of Babes: "We’ve been erased in our story"
The Broad City star co-writes and stars in the new pregnancy comedy.
New film Babes makes a raucous comedy out of the experiences of pregnancy – and its star Ilana Glazer reckons it's about time more stories like this were told from a mother's perspective.
The film – which Broad City star Glazer also co-wrote – follows events when their character Eden unexpectedly becomes pregnant after a passionate one-night-stand, and must lean on her friend Dawn (Michelle Buteau), who is a mum of two young children, for support.
It finds plenty of comedic moments from both the challenges and joys of pregnancy and childbirth, and speaking exclusively to RadioTimes.com, Glazer spoke about how the film addresses the "erasure" of mothers from similar films in the past.
“I'd like to guide other people with different perspectives in telling their version of this story, because it's like, it's so crazy," they explained.
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"We have seen this story told through Seth Rogen's eyes in Knocked Up, Hugh Grant's eyes in Nine Months, [then] Three Men and a Baby with Paul Reiser, Ted Danson or something [the film actually starred Danson, Tom Selleck and Steve Guttenberg].
"And it's just like, huh, you know, that's not who's experiencing this? And that's... it's funniest through, you know, somebody who's closest to this absurd experience. And the absurdity comes from the erasure of it.
"And I think that's why so many mums are communicating now online through social media being like, can you believe this? We've been erased in our story, we've been not able to tell it."
They continued that in the future, they'd like to see more stories focusing on similar subjects but through the lens of an assortment of different families.
"It's so interesting to me," they said. "I feel so privileged to live in New York and be a part of a community with so many different kinds of families. So I'm interested in that, too."
Glazer was pregnant when they were writing the script and explained that during the writing process with Josh Rabinowitz – whose partner was also pregnant at the time – they created a list of everything that was happening to them.
"It was so funny, and so absurd. And we realised that we hadn't seen these jokes in movies before – we hadn't seen them told this way," they said.
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But they added that as much as it's a film about pregnancy, the entire creative team soon realised that at its centre Babes was also about friendships – and how they develop and alter at the onset of pregnancy and motherhood.
"The bones of the story that revealed themselves to us was how friendships change, and how painful it can be, but also exciting to make space for new friendships within old ones that have been running at the same speed for so long," they said.
"And you can really grow closer in a truer way if you let them change. So that for us became the thread that we could really carry all these hard comedy moments on."
Babes is now showing in UK cinemas.
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Authors
Patrick Cremona is the Senior Film Writer at Radio Times, and looks after all the latest film releases both in cinemas and on streaming. He has been with the website since October 2019, and in that time has interviewed a host of big name stars and reviewed a diverse range of movies.
