Making a drama in which the central character is a premature baby and in which the action takes place in a neo-natal unit proved both emotionally and practically difficult for a Newcastle-based production company.

DIRECTOR Sarah Gavron faced both emotional and practical difficulties making This Little Life, a powerful new BBC2 drama about a mother and her premature baby.

"I felt a big responsibility to the mothers and fathers of premature babies," she says of the 80-minute film produced by Newcastle-based Common Features. At the same time, she was faced with making a film in which the central character was a premature baby, who weighed only one pound and four ounces at birth, and most of the action takes place in a neo-natal unit. The makers built their own unit in a disused hospital in Manchester and, unable to use real babies for most of the scenes, had intricate models made.

"The company spent three months sculpting three different size babies, which they then moulded. It was strange going to the workshop to find giant prehistoric dinosaurs and ghouls hanging there, and then these three tiny premature babies," she recalls.

"They had to create the mechanics inside to enable this tiny baby to clench its fists and cry. Then they turned into puppeteers during filming, with three men, concealed under the unit, working the baby. The actors were responding to the models as if they were real."

Once that filming was complete, Gavron spent time filming premature babies in units in hospitals in Newcastle and Manchester. "We got permission from the parents to come in like a documentary crew, and filmed the babies from time to time. That footage was intercut with the three model babies," she explains.

The emotional impact of the story was more difficult to deal with. This Little Life tells of Sadie, whose baby Luke is born at 23 weeks and given a 25 per cent chance of survival. She stays at the hospital, only leaving when he dies at 113 days - two days before he was due to be born. The film explores her relationship with her husband and the bond she forms with the baby fighting for life.

The screenplay was written by Rosemary Kay, who had two premature births herself. One baby died, the other is now a healthy four-year-old. Her adaptation of her novel Between Two Eternities was awarded the BBC's Dennis Potter Screenwriting Award, set up in 1995 to nurture and encourage new writers. Part of the prize was the chance to develop the script into a film, which Stewart McKinnon, of Common Features, set out to do. The BBC put up £750,000, with the Northern Production Fund and Yorkshire Media Production Agency among others contributing to the budget of just over £1m. Common Features was formed by McKinnon, Bob Davis and Derek Stubbs in 1995. The three have been working together since the early 1980s, through another North-East company Trade Films. Previous work includes two fictional films for Channel 4, Ends And Means and Border Crossing, as well as short dramas and documentaries. This Little Life achieves an ambition of moving towards bigger feature films.

"Making films was one of the key reasons for starting the new company," explains Stubbs. "We've been quite successful in getting money for development, but it's been difficult to get big productions beyond that stage."

This Little Life changes all that. This is a first feature film for Gavron, who won the Royal Television Society best new director award for her film Losing Touch. Once joining the project, she spent time in neo-natal units. "Although there was a script and a book, I felt I needed to get experience of them, to be in those places," she says. "It was around the time of Gordon Brown's baby and I remember thinking that I was beginning to get a sense, in as much as anyone can, of what he and his wife were going through."

Several mothers of premature babies also met Kate Ashfield and David Morrissey, the actors playing Luke's parents, to talk about their experiences. "At the screening in London, the mothers said they felt the film really reflected their experience. They wanted everyone to see because they thought it was a way of understanding what they'd gone through. They are in hospital for months on their own. They come home, sometimes without a baby, and no one has any understanding of it," says Gavron.

The final script was a heavily fictionalised version of Rosemary Kay's own story, inspired as much by other people's stories as hers. "She's very keen that the purpose of the film is to raise awareness. It was a struggle to get made, but we thought it was an important story," she says.

There are hopes that This Little Life will now be screened at international film festivals, and perhaps even at Cannes later this year. Gavron herself is working on another research-based project about asylum-seeking children in Britain. She hopes to shoot this devised piece, following the experiences of these outsiders, in the summer. Common Features has various projects of its own in development. One, for BBC Films, is Year of Liberty, a historical piece set in the world of opera in the late 18th century in Italy and Ireland. A jazz piece and another project with Gavron are being talked about too.

Although filming on Tyneside is always uppermost in the mind, the company doesn't rule out working elsewhere. "Twenty years ago, we started very much in the adrenalin of Channel 4 opening up a new range of opportunities for independent productions," says Stubbs. "The situation was so much better then. There's been more and more contraction of production into the metropolis, although all sorts of efforts have been made to support what there is of the film industry here."

* This Little Life is on BBC2 on Wednesday at 9pm.

Published: 15/03/2003