Peter Weir: Interviews PDF
Preview Peter Weir: Interviews
Peter Weir: Interviews Conversations with Filmmakers Series Gerald Peary, General Editor This page intentionally left blank Peter Weir IntervIews Edited by John C. Tibbetts University Press of Mississippi / Jackson www.upress.state.ms.us The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses. Copyright © 2014 by University Press of Mississippi All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America First printing 2014 ∞ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Weir, Peter, 1944– Peter Weir : interviews / edited by John C. Tibbetts. p. cm. — (Conversations with filmmakers series) Includes bibliographical references and index. Includes filmography. ISBN 978-1-61703-897-6 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-61703-898-3 (ebook) 1. Weir, Peter, 1944– Interviews. 2. Motion picture producers and directors—Australia—Interviews. I. Tibbetts, John C. II. Title. PN1998.3.W44A5 2014 791.4302’33092—dc23 2013039761 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available “When I waked, I cried to dream again!” —Shakespeare, The Tempest, III. ii. 152–55 “He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light than his perishing mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all. The painter of this work asserts that all his imaginations appear to him infinitely more perfect and more minutely organized than anything seen by his mortal eye.” —William Blake This page intentionally left blank Contents Foreword by David Thomson ix Introduction: “Unmet Friends”: Encounters with Peter Weir xiii Chronology xxxi Filmography xxxv Peter Weir: Reclaiming a Sydney Boyhood 3 John C. Tibbetts / 2012 Peter Weir: Snapshots in Time 6 John C. Tibbetts / 2012 Peter Weir: Early Days 40 Sue Mathews / 1985 Small Screens and Big Screens: Television and Film 47 Graham Shirley / 1991 The First Features: The Cars That Ate Paris 70 Tom Hogan / 1973 “Weir, Weird, and Weirder Still”: The Riddle of Hanging Rock 79 David Castell / 1976 Years of Living Dangerously: The Last Wave, The Plumber, Gallipoli, The Year of Living Dangerously 85 Sue Mathews / 1985 Interview with Peter Weir 105 Luisa Ceretto and Andrea Morini / 1999 vii viii contents Peter Weir: Master of Unease 111 Terry Dowling and George Mannix / 1980 Towards the Center 133 Tom Ryan and Brian McFarlane / 1981 The Swizzle Stick: Peter Weir and Hollywood Genres 148 Jonathan Rayner / 1993 The Iceman Cometh: Mosquito Coast 161 Digby Diehl / 1986 Fearless: The Poetry of Apocalypse 167 John C. Tibbetts / 1993 Poetry Man: Dead Poets Society 175 Nancy Griffin / 1988 Weir’s Worlds: The Truman Show 183 Virginia Campbell / 1998 This Is Your Life: The Truman Show 191 Eric Rudolph / 1998 He’s Fought His Own Way Back to Work 200 Terrence Rafferty / 2011 “I Am Your Eyes”: Interviews with Russell Boyd, ACS, ASC 204 John C. Tibbetts / 2012 Appendix: Notes on Gallipoli 240 Interview with Executive Producer Francis O’Brien Peter Weir’s Anzac Lecture Additional Sources 253 Index 255 Foreword David Thomson “I’m master in the darkroom, stirring my prints in the magic developing bath. I shuffle like cards the lives that I deal with. Their faces stare out at me. People who will become other people. People who will become old, betray their dreams, become ghosts.” —Billy Kwan, The Year of Living Dangerously In a few years he will be seventy. He does not seem like a movie director. He is not overloaded with himself. He is not always on interview alert. But since 1974, he has made fourteen feature films. He has been nomi- nated for the Best Director Oscar four times, though he has never won. By and large, he lives in the Australia where he was born, and many of his pictures have involved profound journeys, whether it is a gang of school- girls pristine in white going to Hanging Rock in the great heat of Austra- lia or a group of people walking from Russia to India to get out of the way of war. But not every journey is simply physical. In Fearless, The Truman Show, and The Mosquito Coast (at least) the most demanding search is inward, through harrowing ordeal, technological barriers, and alarming violence to the location of the soul. No film by Peter Weir has ever been predictable or expected. The time he takes to deliver a picture seems to demand nothing less than his immersion in a subject. And so, quietly, as it were, or with his characteristic humility, he has stayed away from the busy world of reputations while building the unquestioned status of one of the great directors still at work. His range is always more than we bargained for. His tone is modest, watchful, ironic, and patient. There is no sense of the bursting egotist in Weir. Yet somehow his body of work seems to rival the largest, most un- ruly and energized figures in film history—Abel Gance, Fritz Lang, von Stroheim, Welles, or Kurosawa. By the time he does his next film he is likely to be in his seventies, but who can doubt that that picture will be daring, challenging, and unlike anything anyone has done before? Four- teen films in thirty-eight years does not allow for small talk or routine projects. ix
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