Peter Weir: Weir's World

Q: Have you ever acted?

A: I acted in my early short films, but I felt most at home behind the camera.

Q: Everyone in Truman's world is acting 24 hours a day, which is an interesting reflection on late 20th-century life, where half the people around you seem to be acting in some movie of their own all the time.

A: It reminds me of a journalist who told me how popular action movies were when he was covering the civil war in Beirut. He said, "You can't imagine what it's like to sit in a theater watching a Rambo movie or something with a bunch of guys who've got AK-47s between their knees, being thrilled and excited, then all filing back out talking about the movie as they sling their weapons back over their shoulders." You could see it on television--some of them had bandannas a certain way. They were definitely acting. A lot of terrorists have acting in their backgrounds. It was true of some terrorists in the 70s. I read an article that said a disproportionately high number of them were failed actors. It was a kind of street theater.

Q: When did you first come to Hollywood?

A: Sometime in 1976 Warners approached me about directing a vampire movie. Stanley Kubrick had very kindly recommended me to John Calley for the project, which he'd looked at himself.

Q: How did Kubrick come to recommend you?

A: He'd seen my first two films, The Cars That Ate Paris _and _Picnic at Hanging Rock.

Q: Did you know him?

A: No, but sometime earlier I'd written him a fan letter, though I didn't say I was a filmmaker. I was enormously flattered and excited that he recommended me. I was in Hollywood trying to raise money for The Last Wave. Nothing I'd done had been released in America, and there I was having this wonderful meeting about this vampire picture. But I let it go. It wasn't a humorous piece, and I thought, I can't live in the world of this vampire movie for a year. So I went back to Australia and carried on as I had before.

Q: Have you ever become as immersed in the film you were making as you just got in The Truman Show?

A: This resembles the experience of Gallipoli, which involved a protracted period of preparation getting the script right. During that time I went to Egypt, and in the queen's burial chamber in the pyramid of Cheops, where there were walls covered with graffiti from centuries ago, I came across the initials of Australian soldiers from 1915. So I put a scene in the movie where Mark Lee and Mel Gibson climb the pyramid and carve their initials at the top. Then I went to Gallipoli itself. It was a beautiful, sunny day, and everything was burnt into my memory. It made me determined to make the film.

Q: You did substantial reworking of the original script for The Truman Show. What sort of rewriting did you do on, say, Witness, for which you had far less time?

A: Having started in filmmaking by writing my own material-- which I did because I had to, it was not my strongest suit--I've always needed to tailor material so that by the time it comes to shooting it has become mine in a profound way. I used to joke with writers when I started with them by saying, "I'm going to eat your script, it's going to become part of my blood." And I'd ask them to help me. This is the only way I can do it. On Witness I gave my notes to the two writers and it wasn't working the way I've described, so I rewrote it and sent it back to them to "put through their typewriter." They were shocked at what I'd done.

Q: What had you done?

A: I put more Amish ambience in it. And I took out the overt part of the love story--I thought it was rather tacky. I lessened the violence at the end. The writers thought I was so destroying the piece that one of them said to me, to my astonishment, "Don't you want to be walking up the steps at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to get your Academy Award?" On all my other films, there was no problem.

Q: You often use silence instead of dialogue to make emotional points. I'd guess many of your script changes are just deletions of words.

A: On Witness that caused more waves than any other changes. At the end of the movie, when Harrison came to say good-bye to Kelly McGillis, the original script had him explaining why he was leaving and she explained how she was feeling. I cut the two pages and said, "If I've done my job, they should be able to just look at each other." The writers and producer were concerned the audience wouldn't understand, and Jeffrey Katzenberg, who was the head of production at Paramount, flew out to talk about it. Jeff asked me to explain the scene, and after I did, he said, "That'll work."

Q: Let's talk about the scriptwriting process on The Year of Living Dangerously, which, being the adaptation of a novel, presented different problems.

A: It's always difficult to adapt a novel you love. The old cliche is true--it's easier to adapt a bad book because you feel freer to make changes. Every filmmaker dreads the epitaph: I preferred the book. Having said that, I tried to change as little as possible on The Year of Living Dangerously, and that's where the challenge was.

Q: What was the thing you were most concerned about preserving from the novel?

A: The great original creation of the author was the character Billy Kwan. Everything hung on being able to create as fascinating a character on the screen. The solution was to cast Linda Hunt, who gave me a central, commanding performance.

Q: How is it that your 1974 film Picnic at Hanging Rock is now being rereleased?

A: Criterion, which does such a fine, careful job of handling films, approached the producers. I took the opportunity to make a particular seven-minute cut I'd wanted to make twenty-odd years ago. I think this is the only director's cut that's shorter than the original.

Q: And speaking of short, The Truman Show is almost revolutionary these days in being well under two hours.

A: Every film has its proper length, and you find that out in the editing room. It's a struggle. But one aspect of television that is instructive, once you get past the bombardment, is how much information people can take in in a short time.

Q: I know you listen to a lot of music when you're working, and especially when you're not. What are you listening to right now?

A: Mostly classical. In the last two years I've listened to a lot of Arabic music, especially Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. I enjoy the fact that, like Italian opera, you didn't really know the words and you're allowed to think your own thoughts. Other than that, it's just an endless fascination with Mozart.

Q: Were any painters important to you as your eye was being shaped as a director?

A: The first art that had any impact on me was sculpture in Greece, the first country I went to outside Australia. I was 20, and I had no awareness of art. I was floored by Greece and responded to sculpture immediately. It even became a hobby of mine, working in stone. I've got a lot of things in the garden, heads and friezes.

Q: Did you ever consider moving to Los Angeles, or was it always part of your plan to keep your distance?

A: My wife and I did consider it at one time. But we had young children, and we wanted to bring them up Australian. We realized that if we stayed in America they'd be Americans by the time they finished school, so we decided on another approach, which was educating them in Australia and having them travel with us when we did films. That all worked only because I could do postproduction in Sydney--that was built into my contracts.

Q: Your way of life seems to protect your creativity so successfully that it looks designed to do that.

A: It's like anything in life--it doesn't seem to be deliberate initially, but you look back and you think, there was a plan there. But now, of course, Sydney is turning into Hollywood, so you really can't get away from it.

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Virginia Campbell is the executive editor of Movieline.

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