PIGS MIGHTFLY
WHEN THE NOMINEES for the Academy Awards were announced in February 1996, more than a few people were surprised. Among the contenders for Best Picture – alongside Apollo 13, Braveheart, Il Postino and Sense And Sensibility – was an Australian film about a talking pig. In fact, Babe had scored an impressive seven nominations.
One person who wasn’t surprised was Babe’s director, Chris Noonan. “I thought, ‘Well, this is good, but nothing more than I expected,’” he remembers with a laugh. “I had to act surprised when they were announced, but it was an act, because I was expecting those and more.”
Noonan had to believe in Babe – the film had been such a huge part of his life for close to a decade. “When something takes as long as it did, you have to be sustained by your belief, and my belief in the story and its power was unshakeable.”
It was Mad Max filmmaker George Miller who first saw the potential in the polite little pig. He was on a Sydney-to-London flight, unable to sleep, when he tuned in to one of the plane’s audio channels and heard a woman laughing over a children’s book called The Sheep-Pig .
When Miller landed in London, he bought the book. Soon afterwards he bought the film rights from farmer-turned-author Dick King-Smith, who lived in a tiny village near Bath and used one finger to type out his stories on an old manual typewriter.
Noonan had just finished directing a teenage Nicole Kidman in the 1987 Kennedy-Millerwhen Miller introduced him to . “George came up to me with a book and he said, ‘Do you want to have a read of that?’” Noonan remembers. “I was very moved by it so I got back to George and said, ‘I’m interested in making a film of that,’ and he said, ‘Yes, so are we.’”
