By Alex Hudson
January 9, 2003
Lindsay Weir would take his son Peter to Saturday afternoon movies. Together they'd sit in the darkness and watch the flickering images of adventure serials and Westerns. The unspoken bond of shared experience undoubtedly brought the quiet-spoken boy closer to his father.
At night by his son's bed, Lindsay Weir, who sold real estate by day, would create stories of fiction to calm Peter from his adventures in the Sydney landscape. The elder Weir would weave fabulous tales, stories of pirates and the high seas, with young Peter hanging on every word.
Comics and Daydreams
When he wasn't exploring or moviegoing, Peter was losing himself in comics. He preferred The Phantom but he'd read whatever he could get his hands on. Every few years, Lindsay would move the family into a new house, giving Peter yet more places to explore and friends to meet. When Peter was 12, Lindsay moved the family to Vaucluse. Their home atop a hill overlooked Parsley Bay, and Peter would watch the ships sail off to unknown destinations.
At 17, Peter graduated Vaucluse High but contrary to his father's wishes to join him in real estate, attended Sydney University. Intellectually curious, he took literature courses and went to poetry lectures, but found the stripping of the poetic into the academic disheartening (one day a William Blake poem was dissected rather grotesquely). After a year of university, Peter entered the real estate business.
Peter's heart was not in selling land. He tolerated two dull years of it until, at 20, he bought a one-way boat ticket to Europe. Always eager to explore, Peter spent several months in Spain and almost a year in England taking odd jobs along the way to support himself. Around this time, the tidal wave of flower power which galvanized America was washing into European shores just as Peter was crisscrossing the continent. Peter's horizons were expanding; he had a very strong feeling that anything was possible.
Barren Land
Returning to Australia with no specific career in mind, Peter took a job in television, working as a stagehand for Channel Seven. Starting off sweeping the floors, Peter's responsibilities gradually increased to the point where he was producing amateur revues and directing 16mm short films for station events. Without much of a budget or any formal training, Peter taught himself how to shoot and edit film, cutting directly from the original film. After several years of this often nerve-wracking effort for Channel Seven, Peter was never officially promoted, so he resigned, intent on finding full-time film work.
Between 1962 and 1965, no film was produced in Australia. The late '60s and early '70s were scarcely more productive as except for a rare production here or there the Australian film industry was nonexistent. Aware of the anemic film output, the Australian government initiated an Experimental Film Fund to rejuvenate the barren industry through government funding to promising filmmakers. A friend of Peter's suggested to him that he apply for a grant. With nothing to lose, Peter applied.
Birth of a Filmmaker
Under the Experimental Film Fund, Peter Weir was granted the princely sum of $1,912 dollars to make his first film, titled Homesdale. Because of the extremely tight budget, which was planned down to the smallest detail, Weir only had a week to shoot the 50-minute film. Despite the difficult conditions, the experience of Homesdale did nothing to discourage Weir and after a three year respite - he returned to Europe, and wrote - Weir made his feature debut with The Cars That Ate Paris.
Darkly offbeat, The Cars That Ate Paris revolves around the fledgling rural town of Paris, Australia. The people of Paris cause car crashes, then pilfer the remains of the crashes, thereby building their economy with car parts and personal belongings. The few fortunate enough to survive the crashes are either given to the town doctor to lobotomize or coerced into assimilating into the welcoming Paris community.
Arthur and George Waldo are unlucky enough to drive through Paris. Their car is crashed, George dies and Arthur is pressured into staying in Paris. We see Paris through Arthur's ambivalent eyes, as he struggles to both cope with his brother's death and figure out whether his crash was accidental or deliberate.
The Cars That Ate Paris was partially inspired by Monty Python, as Weir had developed an appreciation for the troupe around the time he wrote the script. Less Python absurdity and more Gilliamesque dystopia, The Cars That Ate Paris is a clear forbear of George Miller's Mad Max universe.
Paris, like the post-apocalyptic worlds of Mad Max, is extremely remote and cut off from the world. Violence is a prescribed norm. There's a strong sense of a need to replicate society with only spare parts amidst the ruin. Paris is a stand-in for Australia; the Parisians desperate to forge an identity, at whatever cost, are kindred souls representative of Australians' need to create a history. The beauty of The Cars That Ate Paris, like the beauty of Mad Max, is the dream, hopeless as it is, of building something from nothing.
Lost Angels
A complete departure from The Cars That Ate Paris as well as Weir's first film with an adequate budget, Picnic at Hanging Rock marks the beginning of one of the most prolific stretches by a director ever. Based on Joan Lindsay's novel of the same name, Picnic at Hanging Rock accounts the allegedly true (but actually fictional) disappearance of three Australian college girls and a teacher at Hanging Rock, a rare volcanic rock formation, in Victoria Australia on Valentine's Day 1900.
The newfound luxuries of money and time allowed Weir to finally entertain his artistic notions beginning with a thorough search for school girls with the proper Pre-Raphaelite look of the period. Weir's goal was to find faces of innocence, and he found them, in Adelaide. The majority of the 20 girls cast in the film came from Adelaide, with Weir accentuating their serenity with several ingenious devices.
In addition to filming the girls in subdued, monochromatic colors, Weir often shot the still faces of the girls in 32 or 43 frames a second as opposed to the normal 24 frames. Weir would then intercut these slowed reaction shots at specific points in the film, usually dialogue scenes, with the subtle result a reaffirmation of the angelic purity of the girl's faces as well as a perpetuation of the film's overall hypnotic tone. Furthering this trancelike sense of enrapture was Weir's sly use of sound as he extensively used white noise, sounds barely audible or inaudible to the human ear, on the soundtrack. Weir mixed sounds of animals and even slowed down earthquakes with other noises throughout the track of the film, creating an almost subliminally affecting disassociation.
Dream Time
The unmistakable artistry of Picnic at Hanging Rock made the film a success in Australia and worldwide. The international praise garnered by the film brought much-needed attention to the suddenly revived Australian film industry. The unsolved mystery of the story - what happened to the girls - compelled viewers if not confounded them. Picnic at Hanging Rock, above all, solidified Peter Weir as a filmmaker; proving his artistic merit while ensuring him of future work.
Weir's follow-up to Picnic at Hanging Rock was just as enigmatic and impressive. The Last Wave is the texturally rich, contemporary-set story of David Burton (Richard Chamberlain), a Sydney lawyer defending aboriginal youths on trial for murder. To save his clients, David must plunge into the heart of the aboriginal spiritual world, while dealing with disturbingly apocalyptic premonitions in his dreams.
Foreboding with endless atmosphere, The Last Wave is a bookend to Picnic at Hanging Rock in that it explores the Australian as unwelcome invader of a hostile land. More specifically, The Last Wave builds on the central theme of The Cars That Ate Paris: an insider from the main culture forced to become an outsider in a subculture.
The Hero Always Wins
The Last Wave, like all of Weir's films, defies easy genre classification; it exists as an experience. Each of Weir's films is similarly memorable because, more than anything, Weir has a fundamental knack for capturing the sweep of his grand stories. Weir's fourth film, Gallipoli, is a cinematic experience like few others. Prior to making Gallipoli, Weir spent a year studying film, starting with Griffith and systematically covering every major movement and filmmaker in film history, from the early Russian masters to Chaplin to Hitchcock to Kubrick.
The result of this expanded filmic knowledge, Gallipoli is an immaculately crafted ode to youth. The film stars a 26-year-old Mel Gibson and Mark Lee as two runners who befriend each other and go off to war together. Gallipoli features Russell Boyd's lyrical cinematography and Weir's now-refined storytelling ability.
Weir wisely focuses his attention on character and friendship rather than war. The bulk of the film is spent establishing Gibson's compassionate Frank Dunne and Lee's independent Archy Hamilton, so that by the time our heroes finally reach the battlefield, we're not watching a war film, we're watching two human beings stuck in a war. Gallipoli is the crown jewel in Weir's filling crown, with the experience so rewarding, Weir immediately re-teamed with Gibson on The Year of Living Dangerously, another atmospheric, visually charged piece of bravado filmmaking. In total command of his craft, Peter Weir was ready for his move.
Harrison Ford Can Act?
In August 1979, Warner Bros. had pursued Weir to direct their $20 million-budgeted The Thorn Birds after Herbert Ross dropped out. Warners brought Weir to America, wooed him, but he ultimately declined, opting instead to focus on Gallipoli. Five years later, Hollywood came calling again. Harrison Ford, impressed with The Year of Living Dangerously, urged Paramount to hire Weir to direct his next project, Witness. Eager to work with bigger budgets on larger canvases, Peter Weir jumped on the opportunity, due in no small part to the fact that Witness happens to focus on Weir's predominant thematic obsession.
Policeman John Book, played by Ford, endures a forced assimilation into a subculture like Arthur Waldo in The Cars That Ate Paris and David Burton in The Last Wave. Book ventures into Amish country to protect Samuel (a young Lukas Haas), who has witnessed a murder in the big city. The culture clash between the belligerent Book and the standoffish Amish comprises the core of the picture with John Book's developing romance with Rachel, Samuel's mother, providing the heart of the film. Triggered by Rachel's tenderness - recall the scenes of her mending John Book back to health - Book opens up, gradually coming to understand, even appreciate, the ways of a reclusive people.
On a $12 million budget, Witness made the then-substantial sum of $65 million. The all-around success of the film - it was also nominated for best picture - allowed Weir to film Paul Therox's Conradian novel The Mosquito Coast. Again working with Harrison Ford, who was loving the freedom of Weir's instinctual direction, The Mosquito Coast is, at least on paper, a dream project. Part Heart of Darkness, part diatribe against consumerism and part man in the mental jungle of deteriorating sanity, The Mosquito Coast contains all the essential ingredients of a masterpiece: stunning cinematography (John instinctually shot both The Mosquito Coast and Witness), stunning acting (Harrison Ford's best work ever), and a tour-de-force screenplay (Paul Schrader) with Weir balancing all of these elements brilliantly.
But audiences had little interest in Harrison Ford against type. Ford's Allie Fox, impassioned about his beliefs, sees his vision of utopia agonizingly turned to folly. Not altogether likable, Allie Fox is a character of complexity; the most extreme of Weir's usually noble dreamers. He loves his family, but he endangers them. He dreams of a better world, but he can't quite make it a reality. Ultimately too depressing for mass appeal, The Mosquito Coast went largely unseen, falling into the oblivion of inexplicably neglected cinema.
Starbuilder
Under Weir's tutelage, Mel Gibson was transformed from Mad Max to dramatic leading man. Likewise, Harrison Ford finally became associated with roles other than Han Solo and Indiana Jones. Weir's career transformation magic worked for a third time with Robin Williams in 1989's Dead Poets Society. As English professor John Keating, Williams gives a performance of subtlety while keeping his histrionics to a thankful minimum.
In the '90s, Weir's winning streak stayed virtually intact, as he directed the light but likable romantic comedy Green Card, the phenomenally underrated Fearless and, most recently, the interesting Truman Show. Again, Weir helped shift the perception of a star, this time, Jim Carrey. Peter Weir's twelfth film is the upcoming Master and Commander, starring fellow Australian Russell Crowe.
Unheralded Master
The opposite of a self-promoter, Peter Weir does not possess love of fame or shamelessness. As a result, Peter Weir is not a household name. Nor is Weir held in the same regard as a Scorsese, Bertolucci, or several other contemporaries, despite the fact that Weir's output is just as challenging, thought provoking and artistic.
Peter Weir has made 12 films in 28 years and staggeringly, nearly all are exceptional. Weir's early films - made on paltry budgets but with huge creativity - reestablished the viability and vitality of his home country's dormant filmmaking capacity. His resoundingly visual sensibility and penchant for artistically sound cinema seems unfailing. A master craftsman above all else, Peter Weir's films work, because the artistry of his craftsmanship never eclipses his stories. The boy from Sydney, humble now like then, grew up to make films that speak of myth and mystery, dreams and apocalypse, hope and failure.
View other columns by Alex Hudson
