Peter Weir

For other people named Peter Weir, see Peter Weir (disambiguation).

Peter Weir
Born	Peter Lindsay Weir
Occupation	Filmmaker
Spouse	Wendy Stites (1966-)

Peter Lindsay Weir AM (born 21 August 1944) is an Australian film director. After playing a leading role in the Australian New Wave of cinema with his films Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Last Wave and Gallipoli, Weir relocated to the USA and directed a diverse group of U.S. and international films -- many of them major box office hits -- including the Academy Award nominees Witness, Dead Poets Society, Green Card, The Truman Show and Master and Commander.

Early life and career

Weir was born in Sydney, Australia, the son of Peggy (née Barnsley) and Lindsay Weir, a realtor. Weir attended The Scots College before studying art and law at the University of Sydney. His interest in film was sparked by his meeting with fellow students, including Phillip Noyce and the future members of the Sydney filmmaking collective Ubu Films.

After leaving university in the mid-1960s he joined Sydney television station ATN-7, where he worked as a production assistant on the groundbreaking satirical comedy program The Mavis Bramston Show. During this period, using station facilities, he made his first two experimental short films, Count Vim's Last Exercise and The Life and Flight of Reverend Buckshotte.

Weir then took up a position with the Commonwealth Film Unit (later renamed Film Australia), for whom he made several documentaries, including a short documentary about an underprivileged outer Sydney suburb, Whatever Happened to Green Valley, in which residents were invited to make their own film segments. Another notable film in this period was the short rock music performance film Three Directions In Australian Pop Music (1972), which featured in-concert colour footage of three of the most significant Melbourne rock acts of the period, Spectrum, The Captain Matchbox Whoopee Band and Wendy Saddington. He also directed one section of the three-part, three-director feature film Three To Go (1970), which won an AFI award.

After leaving the CFU, Weir made his first major independent film, the short feature Homesdale (1971), an offbeat black comedy which co-starred rising young actress Kate Fitzpatrick and musician and comedian Grahame Bond, who came to fame in 1972 as the star of The Aunty Jack Show; Weir also played a small role, but this was to be his last significant screen appearance. Homesdale and Weir's two aforementioned CFU shorts have been released on DVD.

Weir's first full-length feature film was the underground cult classic, The Cars That Ate Paris (1975), a defiantly B-grade style black comedy about the inhabitants of a small country town who deliberately causes passing cars to crash and then live off the proceeds. It was a minor success and proved very popular on the then-thriving drive-in circuit.

Weir's major breakthrough in Australia and internationally, the lush, atmospheric period mystery Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), made with substantial backing from the state-funded South Australian Film Corporation and filmed on location in South Australia and rural Victoria. Based on the novel by Joan Lindsay, the film relates the purportedly "true" story of a group of students from an exclusive girls' school who mysteriously vanish from a school picnic on Valetine's Day 1900. Widely credited as a key work in the "Australian film renaissance" of the mid-1970s, Picnic was the first Australian film of its era to gain both critical praise and be given substantial international theatrical releases. It also helped launch the career of internationally renowned Australian cinematographer Russell Boyd. It was widely acclaimed by critics, many of whom praised it as a welcome antidote to the so-called "ocker film" genre, typified by The Adventures of Barry McKenzie and Alvin Purple.

Weir's next film, The Last Wave (1977) was a supernatural thriller about a man who begins to experience terrifying visions of an impending natural disaster. It starred renowned American actor Richard Chamberlain, who was well-known to Australian and world audiences as the eponymous physician in the popular Doctor Kildare TV series. The Last Wave was a pensive, ambivalent work that expanded on themes from Picnic, exploring the interactions between the native Aboriginal and European cultures. It co-starred renowned aboriginal actor David Gulpilil, whose performance won the Golden Ibex (Oscar equivalent) at the Tehran International Festival in 1977 but was only a moderate commercial success at the time.

Between The Last Wave and his next feature, Weir wrote and directed the offbeat low-budget telemovie The Plumber (1979), it starred Australian actors Judy Morris and Ivar Kants and was filmed in just three weeks. Inspired by a real-life experience told to him by friends, it is a black comedy about a woman whose life is disrupted by an intrusive tradesman; the plot bears a strong similarity to the later Jim Carrey film The Cable Guy.

Weir scored a major Australian hit and further praise form international critics with his next film Gallipoli (1981). Scripted by famed Australian playwright David Williamson, it is regarded as classic Australian cinema. Gallipoli was instrumental in making Mel Gibson (Mad Max) into a major star, although his co-star Mark Lee, who also received high praise for his role, has made relatively few screen appearances since.

The climax of Weir's early career was the $6 million multi-national production The Year of Living Dangerously (1983), again starring Mel Gibson, playing opposite top Hollywood female lead Sigourney Weaver in a story about journalistic loyalty, idealism, love and ambition in the turmoil of Sukarno's Indonesia of 1965. It was an adaptation of the novel by Christopher Koch, which was based in part on the experiences of Koch's journalist brother Philip, the ABC's Jakarta correspondent and one of the few western journalists in the city during the 1965 attempted coup. The film also won Linda Hunt (who played a man in the film) an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.

On 14 June 1982, Weir was awarded a Member of the Order of Australia for his service to the film industry.

Filmmaking in the United States

Weir's first American film was the successful thriller Witness (1985), the first of two films he made with Harrison Ford, a thriller about a boy who sees a gangland slaying and has to be hidden away in an Amish community to protect him from assassins. Child star Lkas Hass received wide praise for his debut film performance; 'Witness also earned Weir his first Oscar nomination as Best Director, and was his first of several films to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture.

It was followed by the darker, less commercial The Mosquito Coast (1986), Paul Schrader's adaptation of Paul Theroux's novel, with Ford playing a man obsessively pursuing his dream to start a new life in the Central American jungle with his family. These dramatic parts provided Harrison Ford with important opportunities to break the typecasting of his career-making roles in the Star Wars and Indiana Jones series. Both films showed off his ability to play more subtle and substantial characters and he was nominated for a "Best Actor" Oscar for his work in Witness, the only Academy Awards recognition in his career. The film is also notable for an impressive performance by the young River Phoenix.

Weir's next film, Dead Poets Society (1989) was a major international success, with Weir again receiving credit for expanding the acting range of its Hollywood star. Robin Williams was mainly known for his anarchic standup comedy and his popular TV role as the wisecracking alien in Mork & Mindy'; in this film he played an inspirational teacher in a dramatic story about conformity and rebellion at an exclusive New England prep school in the 1950s. The film was nominated for four Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director for Weir and launched the acting careers of young actors Ethan Hawke and Robert Sean Leonard. It became a major box-office hit and is without doubt one of Weir's best-known films for mainstream audiences.

Weir's first romantic comedy Green Card (1990) was another casting risk. Weir chose French screen icon Gérard Depardieu in the lead -- Depardieu's first English-language role -- and paired him with American actress Andie MacDowell. Green Card was a box-office hit but was regarded as less of a critical success, although it helped Depardieu's path to international fame, and Weir received an Oscar nomination for his original screenplay.

Fearless (1993) returned to darker themes and starred Jeff Bridges as a man who believes he has become invincible after surviving a catastrophic air crash. Though well reviewed, particularly the performances of Bridges and Rosie Perez -- who received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress -- its unsettling subject matter was less appealing to large audiences than Weir's two preceding films and .

After five years, Weir returned to direct his biggest success to date,The Truman Show (1998), a bittersweet fantasy-satire of the media's control of life, later noted to have predated the reality TV trend begun by Survivor. (Although, in actuality, the reality TV trend really began with MTV's "Real World" in the early '90's.) The Truman Show was both a box office and a critical smash, receiving glowing reviews and numerous awards, including three Academy Awards nominations, for Best Original Screenplay (by Andrew Niccol), Best Supporting Actor (Ed Harris), and Best Director for Weir himself. Again, Weir was again noted to have given his star, comedian Jim Carrey, the chance to prove himself in a serious acting role. The Truman Show also included a link to the very beginning of Weir's directorial career: Australian actor Terry Camilleri, who starred in his first full-length feature, The Cars That Ate Paris, appears in a cameo role.

In 2003 Weir returned to period drama with Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, starring Russell Crowe. A screen adaptation from a volume in Patrick O'Brian's blockbuster adventure series set during the Napoleonic Wars, it was well received by critics, but only mildly successful with mainstream audiences. Despite winning two Oscars (for frequent collaborator Russell Boyd's cinematography, and for sound effects editing) and another Best Picture nomination, it made a moderate $93 million at the North American Box Office, considering the production values and the star power of Crowe. The film has continued to increase in popularity over the years and is particularly popular among history and naval buffs. It is frequently cited in film study classes as an example of expert use of special effects blended with labor intensive authentic period reconstruction. The film did much better overseas with $114 million and enjoyed good DVD sales.

Unfinished projects and current work

In 1993 Weir spoke about making The Playmaker, a film based on a Thomas Keneally book, focusing on the theatre profession in Australia at the turn of the 20th century, but this did not see production. In the 1990s, Weir was considered as a director for the film adaptation of Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, but he was ruled out in favor of Jonathan Demme at an early stage, allegedly due to conflicts over the casting of star/producer Oprah Winfrey.

In the mid-2000s, according to The Internet Movie Database, Weir was attached as director of several other projects. He was to direct a film adaptation of William Gibson's 2003 novel Pattern Recognition. He was also attached to a film adaptation of Gregory David Roberts' book Shantaram, starring Johnny Depp; this film is now being made by Mira Nair. Weir's involvement in a possible sequel to Master and Commander was at one stage considered likely. He was also planning to direct two other films: War Magician and Shadow Divers.

Weir is next scheduled to write and direct The Way Back.

Themes and celebrity

Although Peter Weir's films are extremely varied in subject, locale and genre, all are linked by Weir's enduring thematic interest, that of exploring the motivations and behavior of characters who find themselves in isolating and/or unfamiliar situations.

His films typically involve a juxtaposition between macrocosm and microcosm, depicting the transformation of the central character/s following their introduction to a testing situation. This basic mise-en-scene has been variously enacted in Weir's films through dangerous situations (Cars That Ate Paris, Gallipoli', Master & Commander), enclosed, constrictive or repressive social milieux (Homesdale, Picnic, Dead Poets Society, The Truman Show, Witness), foreign cultures (The Year Of Living Dangerously, Green Card, Mosquito Coast), unfamiliar customs (The Last Wave, Mosquito Coast, Witness), or confrontations with a new way of comprehending the world (The Last Wave, Fearless, The Truman Show).

Despite his international success and celebrity, Weir has a relatively low personal profile; he has maintained close connections with his home city and on several occasions he has returned to Green Valley, the suburb where his early CFU documentary was set. There he has been closely involved in programs designed to teach filmmaking skills to disadvantaged young people. In April 2005 Weir returned to Sydney and reunited with the stars of Gallipoli to celebrate the film's release on DVD.

Themes such as forbidden love, clash between two cultures, violence versus pacifism and conformity versus non-conformity, are portrayed with the use of many techniques.

Filmography

Feature films

• The Cars That Ate Paris (aka The Cars That Eat People) (1974)
• Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)
• The Last Wave (1977)
• Gallipoli (1981)
• The Year of Living Dangerously (1982)
• Witness (1985)
• The Mosquito Coast (1986)
• Dead Poets Society (1989)
• Green Card (1990)
• Fearless (1993)
• The Truman Show (1998)
• Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)
• The Way Back (2010)

Short films

• Three to Go (1971) (segment "Michael")
• Homesdale (1971)

TV work

• Man on a Green Bike (1969)
• The Plumber (1978)
• Wayside (2005)

External links

• Peter Weir at IMDb
• Peter Weir Cave (unofficial Peter Weir site)
• Photo of Peter Weir at the 76th Annual Academy Awards
• Senses of Cinema: Great Directors Critical Database
• Peter Weir at the National Film and Sound Archive