Exploring Tom Waits’ unexpected love for ‘Babe: Pig in the City’
American musician Tom Waits rose to prominence in the 1970s, performing sets at the local Heritage coffee house, where he sometimes worked as a doorman. Inspired by folk artists like Bob Dylan and the Beat Generation, Waits started writing his own songs instead of merely playing covers, leading to his discovery by Herb Cohen.
After he secured a record deal, Waits released his jazz-inspired debut album Closing Time, although it failed to garner much attention. However, within a few years, the musician gained some traction with the release of his 1976 album Small Change and 1978’s Blue Valentine.
However, once he’d secured his status as an acclaimed musician, Waits dipped his feet into the world of cinema, soon becoming a regular collaborator with Francis Ford Coppola and Jim Jarmusch. He secured roles in Coppola’s The Outsiders, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, The Cotton Club and Rumble Fish, as well as creating the soundtrack for One from the Heart. With Jarmusch, a key figure of independent filmmaking, Waits appeared in titles such as Down by Law, Coffee and Cigarettes, and more recently, The Dead Don’t Die.
Elsewhere, Waits has appeared in movies such as Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, Martin McDonagh’s Seven Psychopaths, the Coen brother’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza.
Clearly, Waits has an interest in cinema, and he cites some arty classics among some of his favourite movies. In an interview with Criterion, Waits picked out several Federico Fellini films as his all-time favourites, including 8½, Armacord and La Strada. He also cites David Lynch’s Eraserhead and Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter as some of his other go-to picks.
He explained: “Mostly, I straddle reality and the imagination. My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane.” Yet, this doesn’t mean that Waits exclusively limits himself to high-brow works of cinema. He also loves the George Miller-directed Babe: Pig in the City, the movie about a talking pig.
The Roscoe Lee Browne-narrated film followed the success of Chris Noonan’s Babe, which was released in 1995 and earned seven Academy Award nominations. Babe: Pig in the City was released three years later, and despite being popular, it failed to reach the same heights as Babe.
Although it’s no 8½, Babe: Pig in the City has touched the hearts of adults and children alike since it was released in 1998. Evidently, Waits was also charmed by the talking animal, citing the movie as one of his all-time favourites.
He once revealed to The Guardian: “You know what one of my favourite movies of all time is? And if I’m at home with my kids and say, ‘What do you want to see?’, the big joke is, ‘Aw Dad! Not Pig in the City! But I love that movie. I’d see that any time.”
Revisit the trailer for Babe: Pig in the City below.
