The Big Picture

Collider’s Perri Nemiroff sits down with the team behind
Babes
at SXSW 2024.
Pamela Adlon, Ilana Glazer and Michelle Buteau discuss making a pregnancy comedy with a massive beating heart.

Babes
focuses on Eden who becomes pregnant from a one-night stand and leans on her married best friend and mother of two to guide her through the process.

Babes is a movie about friendship, and it’s one that’s powered by a real-life friendship.

Ilana Glazer stars as Eden, a woman who watches her best friend, Michelle Buteau’s Dawn, become a mother of two. Soon after, Eden becomes pregnant from a one-night stand and must decide if she’s ready to become a mother herself. Something that gives her the confidence she’s ready to take that life leap? Knowing she’ll have Dawn there to guide her through the process.

In celebration of Babes’ world premiere at SXSW 2024, Buteau, Glazer and director Pamela Adlon all visited the Collider interview studio in Austin to discuss their experience bringing the project from script to screen.

Why Team ‘Babes’ Is a Special One: “These Are Real People”
Image via Neon

Not only are Eden and Dawn best friends in the movie, but Glazer and Buteau have been close friends in real life for decades. Buteau recalled getting to know one another on the stand-up circuit in New York City:

“When you do stand-up in New York, you do like three or four sets in a night. It’s sort of like a blur. It does feel like college where you’re just like, ‘I’m not hungover. I’m not drunk. I’m just doing a lot.’ And so I don’t remember the first time we met, but I just remember energy. You see someone in a green room and you’re like, ‘Oh, I mess with them. I F’s with them.’ So I just remember thinking that you and Abbi [Jacobson] are amazing, and I love what y’all are doing. My head was down in what I was doing, and then we finally came together.”

Just as Buteau immediately sensed shared creative sensibilities, Glazer instantly felt Buteau’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind pull:

“Everybody who knows Michelle loves her. Speaking of going deep in a real and genuine way, she has this magnetism and light that pulls you toward it. Like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and just waddling towards Michelle. She’s just so funny, and I knew that she was the only person who could deliver the comedy and the emotion in this role.”

It seems as though that Close Encounters of the Third Kind pull is as powerful as ever because on Babes, the duo drew in yet another strong person and artist who brings her whole self to the projects she works on — director Pamela Adlon. Buteau gestured toward the other two interviewees and noted:

“What’s so great about everybody at this table right now is when somebody says, how are you, I could tell whether they really want to know or not, whether they mean it, and so these are real people. These are strong women, and they enjoy what they do.”

Pamela Adlon Emphasizes the Importance of Making Choices & Moving Forward While Directing
Image via Collider

Adlon is a highly experienced director. She’s been behind the lens of 44 episodes of her acclaimed FX series Better Things. But, Babes did mark a directing first for her. It’s her feature directorial debut. Why make that leap with this particular script? “I got the script and I loved it. And then I met with Ilana, and it was a Zoom, and I was wrapping Season 5 of Better Things, and I just remember us beaming and smiling and kvelling at each other.”

An interest in the material is of the utmost importance and so is having a creative spark with your collaborators, but Adlon also mentioned another extremely vital quality for a filmmaker to have when committing to direct a project — something to add to the production. Adlon explained, “I knew that I had something to offer to them because they both were new moms, and I am of the old mom kind.”

Adlon being a mom not only well suited the material and the fact that her leads were new moms themselves, but it also heavily influences how she leads a set. In fact, she passed on some advice given to her by Judd Apatow for directing a comedy in New York because her instincts as a mother steered her in a different direction. She explained:

“I remember I texted Judd Apatow before I started doing this movie and I said, ‘Question. I’m gonna direct a comedy in New York this summer. Any advice for me?’ And he said, ‘Don’t be afraid to be an asshole.’ And I was like, I still don’t know that I can do that because I’m a mom, and I’ve always been a mom, like even before I was an actual mom. And so I was able to bring that to them.”

Now that Adlon’s been through the process of directing her first feature film, what advice would she pass on to a new filmmaker based on her own experience? Here’s what she said:

“I think what I learned when I became a director and started running a crew is that when you have the ability to make a decision, everybody else relaxes. So when you make a choice and you can move forward with it, then it makes everybody’s job easier. So I think that’s what Judd meant. It’s what it means to me to guide people and take care of the story and the characters and the details.”

Eager to hear more about the making of Babes, Glazer, Buteau and Adlon’s collaboration, the horror movies that scarred them when they were young, and more? You can catch our full SXSW 2024 interview in the video at the top of this article!

Babes (2024) It tells the story of Eden who becomes pregnant from a one-night-stand and leans on her married best friend and mother of two to guide her.Release Date May 17, 2024 Runtime 109 Minutes Main Genre Comedy