Cinematical

Time has a way of making certain movies disappear, while others remain classics forever. Does anyone today remember Gordy, the other talking pig movie that came out just a few months before Babe in 1995? Director Chris Noonan, who received a Best Director Oscar nomination for Babe, does.

"I knew the director of that film," says Noonan during a recent visit to San Francisco, where he sat down for a chat with Cinematical. "I didn't know he was planning a talking pig movie. He told me that he was very interested in what I was doing, and he'd love to see a script. So I sent him a script of Babe, just as a sort of colleague-friendly gesture, well before we shot it. And then Gordy came out soon after. And I haven't actually spoken to him since then."

The Australian-born Noonan, 54, has been a filmmaker since day one. He won a prize at the Sidney Film Festival for a short film he made at age 16. He was one of the first to attend the Australian Film and Television School, along with other future filmmakers like Gillian Armstrong and Phillip Noyce. He began by making short films and documentaries, then worked his way to television and TV movies. Babe was his theatrical debut.

And now, eleven years later, Noonan has returned to the big screen with the new Miss Potter, his first film since... Babe.

"I'm just very picky," says Noonan. "It's sometimes quite daunting to follow a success," he says. "It's easier to follow a failure. You're bound to improve on a failure, but after a success, it's quite possible you'll disappoint people who liked your first film. So I was quite fearful of what to choose and it took a long time to find something that moved me and interested me as much as this did."

Miss Potter is mainly a biopic of Beatrix Potter, the famous English author of the Peter Rabbit books for children. Unlike most biopics, however, this one has a brisk, cheerful feel -- much like Babe itself. Living in London at the turn of the century, Potter (Renée Zellweger) is in her thirties, unmarried and living with her parents. But she's happy when working with her creations, which come to life on the page in glorious hand-drawn animation. Two brothers in charge of a local publishing house pass her work on down to their youngest sibling, Norman Warne (Ewan McGregor), anticipating failure. But the book is a huge success, as are its successors. And publisher and author fall in love.

The story has quite a bit more to say, but viewers will no doubt remember the more old-fashioned moments, like the joyous Christmas party or a kiss on a train platform or the simple power of a story well told -- and especially those delightful cartoons.

Noonan says that an earlier draft had Potter's creations coming to life, jumping off the page, emerging in the room in full three-dimensional CGI glory and talking to Beatrix. "I think that would have been far too much," Noonan says. Noonan instead chose to go with the more old-fashioned, hand-drawn animations that stayed squarely on their pages and did not talk.

"I was very keen to have animation in it, but also very keen not to let it become a gimmick," he says. "It's Victorian England, and she doesn't talk about herself all the time. An artist expresses their psyche through their art. And this was a way of getting into Beatrix's thoughts without an endless monologue of what she was thinking and feeling."

Noonan says he had a difficult time finding anyone who still worked in cell animation, but he found the perfect match in Alyson Hamilton, who grew up in England's Lake District (where Potter spent the last part of her life), grew up on Potter's books and considered herself an aficionado. "She's an extraordinary looking woman too. Her hair's in dreadlocks and she has piercings in her lips. She's the opposite of what you'd think of as an aficionado of Beatrix Potter's works."

Although Noonan made a much-beloved classic out of a talking pig picture, those talking animals in that early draft of Miss Potter were not the reason he became attached to the project. Rather, Cate Blanchett, who was the first to say "yes" to the film, recommended him to the producers. Blanchett jumped when another film to which she had committed was funded and greenlit before Miss Potter was. So Noonan and the producers went through a list of names and decided on Zellweger. Since the project had been floating around for more than a decade, Zellweger had already read it and was already interested.

"It would have been an interesting film with Cate, a very different film, but an interesting one," Noonan says. "There's something a little bit world weary about Cate. Renée is a great actor, but also she promises fun."

Noonan seems relieved that the wait and the choosing is finally over, not to mention that he will have more, different kinds of work to choose from now. "I've been offered every talking animal picture that's ever been made since Babe, including Babe II," he says. He admits that he was not particularly fond of the Babe sequel, claiming that it "tried to top the original." That's the nice thing about Miss Potter; it doesn't try to top Babe. It just nestles nicely alongside.