Peter Weir

Born on August 21, 1944 in Sydney, Australia’s largest city, Peter Lindsay Weir is the son of a real estate agent. He did not finish his studies at the university, because he preferred to leave the classroom and start working with his father. In the 1960s, he decided to discover new cultures, and began a long journey through Europe eager to meet people whose customs were far from his own. Upon his return to Australia, he begins to work in television. He worked as a production assistant on several series, and made his directorial debut with the comedy Man on a Green Bike ., shot for the small screen and also co-written by him. In 1966, the director married production manager Wendy Stites, who has collaborated with him on a few films. The couple has had two children, one of whom (Ingrid) appeared briefly in one of her father’s films.

After a fragment of the collective film Three to Go , Weir shoots his first feature film, The Cars That Devoured Paris, about two brothers who travel through Australia in search of work. Dazzled by some mysterious lights, they suffer a spectacular accident. Only one survives, who wakes up in a town called Paris, inhabited by bizarre individuals. The film has an unreal and dreamlike tone that the next two works by the filmmaker preserve. RoundPicnic at Hanging Rock recreates the real disappearance of three girls and a teacher who had gone on an excursion to a volcanic area, in the year 1900. Weir also showed off withThe last wave , where a white lawyer tries to clarify the death of an aboriginal drowning after an alarming series of storms and rains. He will find the keys to the matter through disturbing dreams.

AfterThe visitor , a minor film, but very well resolved conceived for television, Weir carried out one of the most ambitious productions of Australian cinema,Gallipoli , co-starring the country’s most emblematic actor, Mel Gibson , who became a starwith this film and Mad Max . History of friendship in times of war, recreates with many means and an exquisite staging a tragic real episode, the participation of Australian and New Zealand troops in the bloody battle of Gallipoli, during World War I. He reprized with Gibson in another war film, co-starring Sigourney Weaver ,The Year We Live Dangerously , about the adventures of a war correspondent in Indonesia.

Peter Weir seems to specialize in films of characters with great ideals, of excessive intelligence, who due to life circumstances end up in an environment totally opposite to them, where they are extravagant. This was Captain John Book, the policeman played by Harrison Ford, inSole Witness , the first Hollywood production directed by Weir. To protect a boy who has witnessed a murder, Book does not hesitate to accompany him to the Amish community where he lives. The Amish are a religious community that lives outside of technological advances, and next to them Book seems like a fish out of water. Even more extreme is Allie Fox, once again played by Harrison Ford , inThe Mosquito Coast , a less rounded film that did not do well at the box office, but with interesting findings. On this occasion, Ford is Allie Fox, an inventor who, tired of the consumerism that prevails in modern society, decides to drag his wife and his son – more conventional than him – to the Honduran jungle.

The best-known case of an extraordinary man trapped in a setting to which he does not belong occurs inDead Poets Club , probably the film with which Weir has managed to move the public the most. To accentuate the quirky character of John Keating, a brilliant literature teacher who teaches in a rigid traditional boarding school, the director chose to hire Robin Williams , known until now for his facet as a histrionic comedian or as the crazy announcer ofGood Morning, Vietnam . Weir makes Williams convincing in a dramatic range for which he was nominated for an Oscar, and he managed to put a serious spin on his career. In charge of a group of adolescent students, Professor Keating manages to teach them to think with unorthodox methods. Another of Professor Keating’s achievements was getting a whole generation of new moviegoers to adopt his motto, ‘carpe diem’, as their leitmotif. Never has a story so close to easy tears been directed with such sobriety.

The actor Gérard Depardieu also obtained an Oscar nomination thanks to Weir , who the same year that he was a success at the box office withCyrano de Bergerac , interpreted under his orders a bizarre French composer, who in order to stay in the United States, a country that is completely foreign to him, reaches a pact with a shy New Yorker, willing to marry him so that they give him the ‘ Green Card’, that is, the residence card. Jeff Bridges ‘ characterinWithout fear, life was absolutely normal, until he survives a plane crash, which causes him terrible post-traumatic stress. From that moment on, she needs to live ‘on the edge’ and expose herself to dangerous situations to recover the adrenaline that his body produced during the accident. This incapacitates him to live his daily life with his wife. The film did not cause the furor at the box offices of other Weir films.

Weir’s big blockbuster was his next job, with his most surreal character, the protagonist ofThe Truman Show . He needed to play the highly exaggerated comedian Jim Carrey , with whom he achieved a true miracle –to a certain extent similar to the one performed with Williams–, recycling him for a more transcendental cinema than his usual crazy comedies. If Truman seems to behave in his gestures and movements like a television character, it is because he has lived his whole life in one, and he does not know it. Since his birth was broadcast live, billions of viewers follow him daily. The characters who live with him are actors. Although the film inveighed against reality television, paradoxically it reinvigorated the genre, inspiring a veritable wave of shows like “Big Brother.”

The most unusual film in Weir’s ‘Hollywood’ career isMaster and Commander. The Other Side of the World , adaptation of a maritime novel by genre specialist Patrick O’Brian. To begin with, because it is the only period film that has been shot there, but also because its protagonist, Captain Jack Aubrey ( Russell Crowe ), is more normal and realistic than the rest of Weir’s heroes. Despite everything, Aubrey manifests a bit of madness in his obsession with capturing the flagship of the French Navy, which is somewhat reminiscent of what Captain Ahab felt, bent on capturing Moby Dick at any cost. Aubrey collides head-on with his friend, Dr. Stephen Maturin, more conventional and up-to-date, who only pretends to dedicate himself to peaceful scientific investigations.

True to his principles, Weir conscientiously prepares his next work, since since 2003 he has not given moviegoers joy. In the end he has found material that he is interested in taking to the movies. This is the memoirs of Slawomir Rawicz, a Russian soldier who launched a complex plan to escape from the Soviet gulag in which he remained locked up. Weir is set to narrate his experiences in The Way Back , which will star Colin Farrell and Ed Harris .