WITH ITS SPEAKING SPERM AND BLABBERING BABIES, LOOK WHO’S TALKING CAME FROM NOWHERE TO BECOME ONE OF THE BIGGEST — AND WEIRDEST — ROMCOMS OF ALL TIME. THIRTY-FIVE YEARS ON, DIRECTOR AMY HECKERLING TELLS EMPIRE ABOUT THE CHAOTIC MAKING OF THE “MOST PROFITABLE PRIVATE JOKE EVER”

WORDS TOM ELLEN

Amy Heckerling ’s first thought was: “Oh no.” It was the winter of 1985, and the Bronxborn filmmaker was eating breakfast at the kitchen table with her husband. Across from them, burbling away happily in a high-chair, sat their baby daughter, Mollie. “She was looking at us, we were looking at her,” Heckerling recalls, nearly four decades later. “Suddenly, me and my husband started ad-libbing things she might be thinking.” As the sleep-deprived new parents amused themselves by improvising their child’s inner monologue, something occurred to Heckerling: “In my mind, I was like: ‘Oh no. This is gonna be my next movie...’”

“Oh no” because the concept of ‘talking babies’ seemed, the director tells Empire, “kinda hokey. Family-oriented and cute —and I don’t feel like that’s me.” This, after all, was the woman who’d made her debut three years earlier with the weed-and-sex-fuelled teen romp Fast Times At Ridgemont High. “I’d rather do A Clockwork Orange than talking babies,” Heckerling says today. “But this was the idea I had.”

That idea, conjured bleary-eyed at breakfast, would become Look Who’s Talking —an ultra-high-concept romcom blending grounded themes (pregnancy, adultery) with goofy slapstick and avant-garde invention ( breast-milk spit-takes! Wisecracking sperm!). On its release in October 1989, the tale of single mum Mollie (Kirstie Alley), her shambling love interest James (John Travolta) and her ‘talking baby’ Mikey (whose inner thoughts are voiced by Bruce Willis) was a surprise mega-hit, netting nearly $300 million against its $7.5 million budget, trumping such other “family-oriented” behemoths as Honey, I Shrunk The Kids and Ghostbusters II at the box office, and spawning two sequels and a spin-off TV show.

The movie also reinvigorated Travolta’s career, handing the actor his biggest hit since 1978’s Grease, and paving the way for his ’90s resurgence. For Heckerling, too, its success was a potent shot in the arm. “I was kind of in the ‘girl ghetto’ [ before Look Who’s Talking],” she laughs. “Making low-budget ‘girl’ movies. I had friends who were boys —John Landis, Harold Ramis, Martin Brest —and their movies made a lot of money. I used to call them ‘boy hits’. I didn’t want to have a ‘girl hit’ —I wanted a ‘boy hit’!”