Baby Mama Interview: Michael McCullers

LilSugar — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 08:00:23 -0700

What's a man know about being a baby mama?

A lot if you're Michael McCullers, the father of three who wrote and directed the must see movie that hits theaters Friday.

Having previously written Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me and Austin Powers in Goldmember, McCullers met with Tina Fey and Amy Poehler who he worked with at Saturday Night Live to brainstorm ideas for a film they could work on together. When Fey mentioned that she would like to make a modern day version of the Diane Keaton film Baby Boom, the group developed the idea of a surrogate pregnancy and the story was hatched.

To see how a man was able to delve into the minds of expectant mothers, read more.

Since he had two children at home and another on the way, McCullers had plenty of crazy pregnancy stories to write into the script. His initial drafts of the film were fine-tuned by Fey and Poehler to ensure that their characters accurately reflected the personalities of an expectant yuppie mom and her less classy surrogate.

Knowing that people would question the idea of a man writing about pregnancy and babymaking, McCullers addressed the question directly:

Am I the best person to write and direct that idea, being a guy? Although I am not a baby-crazed woman, I do live with a baby-crazed woman, which helped. My wife is one of these women who knew early on that she wanted kids. At that point we already had two kids and during the course of the movie we were actually trying to have a third and ended up having a baby while the movie was shooting. So I did have a pregnant wife at home [and] it helped me relate, though I didn’t see her very much.

I’m in my 30s and I’ve started to know a lot of women who are dealing with infertility. All of the sudden infertility and who can have a baby and who can’t has become a big issue with a lot of people in my life. And although there is a lot of anger and emotion that comes with that, there is, at least with the people I know, a lot of humor and funny stuff that goes with it.

Given the sometimes derogatory definition of the term “baby mama,” McCullers also discussed his decision to use the term for the movie’s title:

I saw that phrase migrating into the greater popular culture. People Magazine and Page Six and everyone sort of uses the term baby mama now. Its almost [gone] from unwed mother of your child to just the mother of a child. You know, they’ll say Tom Cruise’s baby mama or whatever, in US Weekly and it seems to be entering into pop culture. And I liked the way it sounded and looked.

Source