I know everything about dinosaurs! I'm in the movie business," jokes Bill Norton when quizzed about the extinct reptiles, the focus of his latest film, Baby. He hastens to add, seriously this time, "I learned a few things during the making of this picture, but I'm not a paleontologist."
Norton, whose previous directorial credits include More American Graffiti, was contacted by Baby producer Jonathan Taplin in March 1983. The director read the script, liked it and, as he says, "the rest is history." At the time, the screenplay was still undergoing some revisions, although special effects pre-production had already begun under the supervision of Isidoro Raponi and Ron Tantin. The two men, who had previously worked together on Something Wicked This Way Comes, were responsible for the design and manufacture of several cable-controlled miniatures and special "Baby" suits to be worn by small-sized actors.
"Baby is an action-adventure movie with comedy," Norton explains. "It's realistic. It's about real people, and Baby is treated as a real animal. But it has some humor in it. Baby is not a pure fantasy film like, say, The Dark Crystal. One reason why Taplin came to me is that I'm a writer/director. I was, therefore, able to work with other writers in making the script a little better than it was. The characters needed fleshing out. The plot needed straightening out. I 'm not being purposefully vague; it just needed a lot of work. The script went through two other writers, and then I did some work myself, and worked with them. Those subsequent writers — Tim Hunter and Charlie Haas as a team, and David Freeman — were wonderful. They all brought different qualities to the material. I worked with them very closely. At times, I gave them scenes I had carefully written and asked them to put them in. Or I asked them to write scenes I had outlined."
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