Love, Fear, and Peter Weir

Q: Was he your first choice?

A: I wondered about Mel Gibson. You mentioned earlier about Living Dangerously, which curiously ended with Mel getting on a plane [laughs]. Mel and I talked over the years about doing something else. I called him and asked him. He said, "Look, I'm about to direct my first film, I can't believe the timing." He talked about moving his film, or possibly shooting this film while he was cutting his--but it was an impossible thing. And he asked, "Who else would you use?" and I said, "Jeff Bridges." And he said, "Dammit, that's who I wanted to have in The Man Without a Face." The thing that puzzled the studio was, if Mel was unavailable, why would I move immediately to Jeff Bridges? Why wouldn't I look for someone else of Mel's stature? Of course, it's difficult for me to look at Mel in that way because I worked with him before he became a superstar. I think of him the same way I think of Jeff, as someone who could do this film. The studio heard me out and said, "Fine, but if Jeff plays it you'll have to limit the budget."

Q: How did you do that?

A: [Laughs] It was just a stroke of the pen. Deferment [of partial salary], it's called.

Q: Mel Gibson's career is an odd one, if you look where it started with you.

A: You could understand it up until Hamlet. And then that was such an interesting choice, he did such startling things in it.

Q: Actually, I understand his doing Hamlet. What I don't understand is his doing Air America and Forever Young, and a few others.

A: That's because neither you nor I are in his position. It's like a corporation. I'm thinking of Harrison [Ford] too. It's very hard to understand how you must feel when you have that kind of authority if you respect the public, if you're a democratic kind of artist and get involved in the mass vote. That's one of the difficulties for an artist in America, in this great democracy-- that you have to respond to that applause. To some it's "box office," but to me those cash registers ringing up are really just all those people trying to get through life saying thank you, clap clap clap. When you choose your next piece of material you're drawn toward giving that feeling to them again.

It's very difficult to go against the roar of the crowd. This is a peculiarly "colonial" problem [i.e., the problem of transplanted Europeans]. The Europeans themselves don't have it--for good and ill. On the ill side there's the terrifying elitism that European artists have, a scorn for popular appeal that is repellent to me.

Q: While we're talking about the problems of megastars, is it true that, back when The Mosquito Coast was first being put together and Jack Nicholson was going to be the lead, Nicholson backed out of the deal because he didn't want to go to Belize, where he couldn't watch the Lakers?

A: [Laughs] The truth was that it was mentioned to me that if Jack did the picture, he would want to either fly back to see the Lakers or have a satellite dish. He was not going to be out of contact with the Lakers and we were going to have to factor that into our schedule--which we would have.

Q: So he didn't cause the deal to fall apart?

A: No, by the time the deal was made, Nicholson was no longer available, and I'd worked with Harrison on Witness in the meantime.

Q: Speaking of Witness, that film contains one of the most erotic scenes in the movies--the sequence when Ford dances with Kelly McGillis in the barn. In fact, all of the romantic scenes in your movies have an unusual intensity to them. How do you approach scenes like this?

A: Whenever anyone says to me, "You should read that script--it's very erotic," I say, "Well, then the film won't be." If anyone sets out to do it, they almost always fail. It's something that happens. I don't think I've ever planned it. It's a matter of taking advantage of a situation that seems the right way to go, and then you become aware that this will probably be what is called "erotic." Which is simply another word for tension, a rare form of it. It's not just sexual tension.

You begin and end with Hitchcock [because] it's all through his films. You come to the obvious conclusion that Hitchcock was a very handsome man artistically, a Cary Grant of the spirit imprisoned in a rotund body. From the secret cave this Cary Grant existed in, Hitchcock lived his other lives. By looking at his key pictures you learn a great deal about how a man and woman move around together on-screen.

Q: Of all the films you've made, Green Card is the one I responded to the least, and since it's a good script--you got an Oscar nomination for it--and it's well directed, and Gerard Depardieu is good, I've always blamed my response on Andie MacDowell. Are you happy with her performance now?

A: I'd have to say I'm happy with that performance. And with the film as a whole. It's what I wanted to do. I wanted something completely different from Mosquito Coast. I'd loved making that movie and it was a complete flop in all ways, with the public and the press, and I thought, Well, I'll do something that's accessible. Really, I was just reviving something Frank Capra had perfected, the romantic comedy. It's a film that should be seen at about five in the afternoon. A light snack. And yet it's 18 months of hands-on work, 12 months full time to make something "in the manner of" another filmmaker.

At first I didn't want to do it because there are no more Cary Grants, no more Katharine Hepburns, no more Irene Dunnes. But when I saw a film Gerard was in, I thought, well, if Gerard played it, that would work. So I rewrote it for him. But he was unavailable for a year. I ended up with Disney because I thought it was their sort of material and I did Dead Poets Society because it was something to do while I was waiting.

Q: After I saw 1492: Conquest of Paradise --in which I couldn't understand a word Depardieu said--I wondered how on earth you got him to speak English.

A: Well, first, I think that Ridley Scott had a difficult deadline to get that film ready for Columbus Day, and the post-production suffered. But on Green Card, it was just a matter of spending time together and adapting the way Gerard spoke English to the screenplay and translating everything back into French so that every line he spoke he understood.

Q: Did you use a dialogue coach?

A: No. And we didn't lean on looping. Working with Gerard was a wonderful experience. I had a deep kinship with him, and I felt it before I met him. To a degree, given your reaction to the film, which others have had [laughs], including my own son, this was, as with Nanjiwarra on The Last Wave, a case in which the experience of making the film was where my audience should have been.

Q: I heard that Dead Poets Society did phenomenally well in France. Did the French critics like it?

A: No, the people liked it. The young people.

Q: Did it do well all over Europe?

A: Yes, but it did spectacularly in France.

Q: Do you have a theory about that?

A: Oh yeah. It fell into a particular political climate. It's "post-'68." In its broad conception, Dead Poets supports the individual. Nineteen sixty-eight was all about the community, the group, particularly leftists. Young people who saw Dead Poets hadn't heard very often in their lifetimes the individual point of view put in a poetic way. I believe that the artistic kind of personality is intrinsically individual, by definition. I'm always uneasy with artists who join any kind of cause, because I think, "What a shame," because very shortly their talent will fade.

Once you put talent to the service of any cause, it's diminished, because you inhibit the unconscious from sending its strange and bizarre impulses as to what you should do, and begin to operate from a conscious concern about what will best serve the interests of the group or party. The leftist artists are a graveyard of failed careers or spectacular one-time novels, films or whatever. The artistic personality belongs deeply nowhere. It's the person who goes from court to court and plays before the king but never signs up to any particular group and remains a comment on society. Within France, in Paris, and also to a degree in New York, in contemporary times, the artist joined forces with what was seen as the politically correct way. Dead Poets was not politically correct. Particularly being in an exclusive boys school. But I didn't care if it was a school for WASPs or ants.

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