Director Peter Weir's movies, which include Picnic at Hanging Rock, Gallipoli, Witness, The Year of Living Dangerously, Dead Poet's Society, and Fearless, tend to be unlike other movies, and unlike one another. His newest, The Truman Show, which stars Jim Carrey as a man who doesn't know he's living in a TV show, fits that bill perfectly.
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Australian director Peter Weir's new film, The Truman Show, is about a man named Truman Burbank, who, at the age of 30, begins to suspect that the neatly arranged life he leads in a shipshape island town in sunny Florida is some sort of elaborate setup of unknown purpose. The truth is more outrageous than he could possibly guess: Truman actually lives on a gigantic soundstage and is the unwitting star of the hit TV program "The Truman Show," which has broadcast his every move to viewers around the globe ever since he was a baby. The people in Truman's life--his mother, his wife, his best friend--are all actors hired by the show's godlike auteur, Christof. And all of them are lying to him.
In short, The Truman Show is not your average summer film. It's funny and poignant with a vividly subversive undertow. It's a tale Kafka might have written had he been born into the couch-potato society now approaching the millennium.
Peter Weir's films have never slipped easily into conventional genres. His first feature-length work, 1974's The Cars That Ate Paris, was a black comedy of '60s-inspired anarchy involving spiked jalopies. Picnic at Hanging Rock (1974) resonated like a tone poem of gently rising hysteria among Victorian schoolgirls. The Last Wave (1977) infused a modern apocalyptic tale with Aboriginal mysticism. Gallipoli (1981) was a lyrical war movie. The Year of Living Dangerously (1983) unfolded a political thriller/love story against the collision of East and West. Witness _(1985) set a cop thriller/love story amid the otherworldly Amish community in Pennsylvania. _The Mosquito Coast (1986) chronicled the downfall of Yankee individualism in a Central American jungle. Dead Poets Society (1989) celebrated poetry and self-expression in a conformist '50s prep school. The movie Weir himself wrote as a deliberately light romantic comedy, Green Card (1990), contained moments of unsettling emotional intensity one seldom sees in that genre. The extraordinary Fearless (1993) was a passionate mortality tale of life after a disasterous plane crash.
As uncategorizable and different from one another as Weir's movies may be, they all have in common a generous, anti-elitist ambition to entertain a broad audience--with a story that carries weight and with emotion that has the power to unnerve. The Truman Show, because it is very entertaining and very unfrivolous, may be the ultimate Peter Weir movie. As he did with Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, Weir has guided Jim Carrey to a less-is-more performance that's a surprise in itself and gives The Truman Show an enhanced ability to set off subversive little explosions in the imaginations of unsuspecting viewers.
Q: Since _The Truman Show _is a sort of seriocomic nightmare fantasy about the ultimate voyeuristic, exploitive television program, it suggests that you take a fairly jaundiced view of the role of media in our daily lives. Is that true?
A: It's a broad question, and I hesitate to answer, because modern life is changing so rapidly. It's so puzzling, particularly to someone like me, who is both part of the media and at the same time, between films, very much outside of it. I do a film every couple of years, and then I drop out and go to a house that's well outside of Sydney and live a very simple life. I only look at a newspaper once a week and see very little television.
Q: What do you watch on television?
A: Documentaries mostly. With commercial television, the problem for me is advertising. Commercials have become so seductive, using so much good music and such clever images. The brainwashing strength of it is considerable. I can't see that that's healthy for a society--you're constantly in a state of mild anxiety about acquiring things.
Q: Your children are grown up now, but how did you deal with TV when they were little?
A: We didn't have one. We had one for the babysitter that we hid in the cupboard. In fact, I remember my son struggling in with this portable set one morning, so excited with this found treasure, saying, "Look what I found in the back of the cupboard."
Q: Your son and daughter watched no TV?
A: We eventually got a television, but having lived in a world of books, music and good movies, they'd developed their own taste by the time television was freely available to them. Now that they've grown up and moved out, neither of them has a television.
Q: So you really distrusted television.
A: Yes, I remember a friend of mine who was in the Children's Television Foundation saying, "Will you join? We want to make better programs for children." And I said, jokingly, "I think that's the worst thing to do. I think we need more bad programs that will drive them outside into the fresh air."
Q: You've said in the past that children need to be bored in order to use their imagination.
A: Not just children. That's what I do in between films. What I mean by boredom is just allowing your imagination to revitalize itself and to engage with life rather than be dictated to by images that stop you from thinking.
Q: So, when you came upon Andrew Niccol's screenplay for The Truman Show, did it strike you as the perfect vehicle for dramatizing every doubt one could have about the age of media?
A: I decided early on that because this material was so pregnant with metaphors, I would to a large degree ignore them. They were always going to be there.
Q: How did you come to direct The Truman Show?
A: After Fearless, so many scripts seemed safe and predictable. The disappointing commercial reception of that film made me determined to do something even less predictable. I thought, Oh well, I'd rather go out in a blaze of obscurity. It became kind of a joke. When people asked, "What are you looking for?" I'd say, "I'm looking for trouble." The one who responded to that was [producer] Scott Rudin. He sent me The Truman Show.
Q: What was your first impression of it?
A: It was, as I'd requested, unusual and original material. I though my usual process, which is to deny it, to say, Well, I'm not going to do this, it's too difficult.
Q: What seemed so difficult?
A: The suspension of disbelief was going to be a huge challenge, because here's a story set not too far in the future and the audience has to go with extraordinary events. The guardians at the gates of logic had to be passed. The easiest way to go was kitschy, but I knew I couldn't do that. And I couldn't do it hyperreal. Yet figuring out how to do it realistically seemed some kind of torturous puzzle, and if you failed, you'd fail in an awful way.
Q: What got you over that?
A: As with other scripts I went on to do, I found I couldn't get it off my mind--it began to haunt me. You know--in daily life, going to the supermarket I get lost in the aisles because I'm thinking about the story, or some scrap of music is played at random on the radio and it seems as if it's from the soundtrack of this film. [Laughs] It's portents--lions whelp in the streets, a two-headed dog is born. And I think, Ah, I have to do this, it's the only way I can get it out of my head.
Q: When did the name Jim Carrey come up?
A: When I called Scott Rudin to say I was interested, he said, "Do you know a guy called Jim Carrey?" He was thinking I wouldn't know, because at that stage Jim was known only for Ace Ventura, Pet Detective. But by chance I'd seen it. And I'd been struck, as I'm sure other filmmakers were, by Jim's innate talent and his utter lack of fear.
Q: How had you managed to see Ace Ventura?
A: I'd seen a poster in the video store, and I liked the look of the guy in it. I sensed the energy I was to see in the film.
Q: You proceeded with Scott Rudin and Jim Carrey based only on Ace Ventura?
A: Really the first three or four minutes of Ace Ventura. From the opening titles it was apparent this man was remarkable. And I thought, How fascinating that he's interested in The Truman Show. To fly this thing I was going to need a highly skilled copilot. Truman couldn't be played in an ordinary way. He'd grown up on a set inside an extensive lie--he would not be like anybody else. Jim has an otherworldliness, and he radiates energy and makes you wake up. In Ace Ventura and then the other things I watched later, he reminded me of the early Beatles. He had that humor and recklessness, plus all that talent.
Q: You were sold fast, based on limited information. But there are some difficult scenes in the movie that require straight acting. You had no doubts about Jim Carrey being able to do that?
A: Meeting Jim was part of the research I had to do. By then he was a star, and I was afraid he'd changed. Success induces fear and caution, and I thought maybe that light had gone out.
Q: The meeting obviously went well.
A: Jim was welcoming and interested in all sorts of things. A thoughtful man. And there was a degree of mystery about him. He was in no sense a conventional Hollywood success story. I was ready to work, but he wasn't available for 15 months, until after he did The Cable Guy and Liar Liar. I wanted to wait for him because he was the only person I sensed could do this.
Q: Dennis Hopper was originally cast as Christof, the arrogant genius-creator of "The Truman Show." How did Ed Harris end up replacing him?
A: I'd cast Dennis Hopper when I didn't have a terribly strong idea of what Christof should be. I liked qualities of Dennis I'd seen in his movies, and he has a very interesting manner about him in person--his legend and achievements are part of his persona when you meet him. But as the months passed, I began to formulate my ideas about Christof more clearly. By the time Dennis came to filming, differences arose. Dennis, being a director himself, was most understanding and gracious.
Q: So Ed Harris came in at the last minute?
A: Yes, and he did the role wonderfully with very little time for preparation. I didn't know before then that he started out in theater, so he has much more range than you might think from the way he's usually cast.
Q: How did you decide on Laura Linney for the part of the actress who plays Truman's wife?
A: I'd seen her in Primal Fear, in which she had an unpredictability--a thing I always look for in the work of actors. She did a splendid audition. I like to play the other part in auditions when the real actor's not available. It gives me a chance to be the character briefly, which is wonderful preparation for directing, and to feel the words in my mouth that they're going to say, which often points up deficiencies. And I learn a lot about the person I'm opposite--I get to look at them in the eyes, in a way I can't if I'm standing back by the camera. I felt she just was the character.
Q: As you were waiting for Jim to get free to do this project, his price jumped from $8 million to $20 million. Did your heart sink?
A: The Truman Show was not going to be typical of the films he'd made. That was my only concern about his price. But then, it wasn't my responsibility, it was the studio's. And he did negotiate down, taking everything into account. He wasn't paid $20 million.
Q: How did you get such a restrained performance from this characteristically unrestrained guy?
A: He'd try a scene broader, then subtler, and we both felt free to explore the humor. He enjoyed the experimentation--because there was no research he could do, no book he could read called I Was Born on a Television Show. We were making it up. As I did with Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, we planned experiments. On Dead Poets Robin and I worked out that he would teach Shakespeare and Dickens to a class for half a day with two cameras running and he would do whatever he wanted. Some of that made it into the film. I did the same sort of thing with Jim.
Q: This was the first time Jim put himself in the hands of a director whose judgment was going to reign. How did you get him to trust you?
A: Jim and I haven't discussed this, so I don't know how he saw it. But by the time he was fully available, I'd had enough time to construct Truman's world--literally and in terms of ideas. It was obvious to him I had done this preparation--I had nothing else to do--and that I was half-crazy with all this _Truman _trivia. I had to be careful not to overwhelm him.
Q: How half-crazy did you go?
A: I wrote an elaborate fictional background to the movie. The movie itself begins in the last few days of the television show "The Truman Show," but for my own purposes, to get my own mind clear, I needed to construct the 29 years of Truman's life that led up to this point. I began with the back story of Ed Harris's character, Christof, and how he created "The Truman Show."
Q: And this stuff is not in the movie?
A: Right. It's just background to explain what Christof was doing with "The Truman Show." Christof was very cunning--he knew there was a moral question about having taken over Truman's life, but like a politician he saw this as being for the greater good of the world. His vanity was such that he believed he was creating the ideal human being, the True Man. And at the same time, he was going to make a lot of money.
Q: How much of the temptation that you know faces any gifted director did you feed into your concept of Christof?
A: Christof's scenes weren't filmed till the end, so I was always talking about him and thinking about what he would do. I began to get this awful feeling that there was a lot of me, or the profession, going into it. Christof is very much a movie director. At one point, I toyed with the idea of playing the role myself. Thank God, I didn't. [Laughs]
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.