When 80-year-old Australian film director Peter Weir was awarded the Golden Lion for career achievement at the Venice Film Festival recently it was perhaps no coincidence that Sigourney Weaver, 74, also received an honorary Golden Lion in the same year.
Weaver says that before she appeared in Weir’s 1982 film The Year of Living Dangerously, she was thinking of concentrating on stage acting, but making the film changed her mind.
“It’s like going to a different universe and I fell in love with film and I have never stopped being in love with film,” Weaver told a festival press conference. “It’s all his fault,” she added, admitting that previously she hadn’t seen an Australian film.
“It’s lovely to think she has that memory,” Weir told me at his press conference in Venice. Weaver also said that at the time she was thinking of 1979’s Alien as a small film.
“She didn’t probably realise what she’d done in Alien,” Weir says. “It probably took a while for that to dawn on her. A small film, ha ha!”
As for shooting The Year of Living Dangerously, which after his sizzling sex scene with Weaver turned Mel Gibson into a sex symbol (there was no sex in Mad Max), Weir recalled that these “were wonderful days and difficult, too, but it wouldn’t have worked if Sigourney and Mel Gibson hadn’t liked each other”.
“She was very interested in learning about the craft of filmmaking and I passed on as much as I could to her. Good memories.”
Palace Cinemas founder Antonio Zeccola recalls screening Weir’s 1977 film, The Last Wave, at his original independent Melbourne Palace cinema.
“When The Last Wave screened Australian films were not completely supported by the Australian media but they were supported by cinephiles,” says Zeccola. “They loved his previous 1974 film, The Cars That Ate Paris, so they went to see The Last Wave, which did strong business for an Australian film at the time.”
With his 1975 film Picnic at Hanging Rock Weir experienced widespread recognition that would lead to his international career, making films including Witness and Dead Poets Society. The latter film provided the breakthrough for Ethan Hawke, who presented Weir with his Venice award. Incredibly, while four of Weir’s films were Oscar-nominated, four for himself as director, he never won although in 2023 he received an honorary Oscar for his career.
He recalls that the idea of making Picnic at Hanging Rock came from the film’s co-producer, Patricia Lovell.
“In those early days it seemed very strange,” he says. “How do you go about making a film of a book, when you have to get lawyers and buy the rights? You know, it was all new, because we were writing our own script. Then I read the book and I was captivated, particularly by the fact that there was no answer, and I realised this would be really challenging for the audience and for me to make the film satisfying, given that it did not have a solution.
“Then I did research, but I was influenced very much by the First World War with those massive explosions where soldiers disappeared and disintegrated. And the phrase, you know, in the telegram was ‘missing, presumed dead’. And then I read accounts of families waiting, hoping that their loved one was in a hospital, perhaps with memory loss. So that became very influential for me, and then I had to create an atmosphere in which you did not want a solution. And so, I played all sorts of games in creating that kind of mystical, enchanted world, or cursed world.”
The film helped launch Australian filmmaking in the ‘70s along with Weir’s career.
“I knew others who were doing films – Fred Schepisi, Bruce Beresford and later George Miller, Gillian Armstrong – so we were all working away,” Weir says. “Fred was the first one to be accepted at the Cannes Film Festival.”
Weir had some luck in Venice where Dead Poets Society and The Truman Show screened. He was also the president of the Venice jury in 1993.
He says Dead Poets Society was very personal for him. Writer Tom Schulman won an Oscar for that film.
“I think he originally set it during President Kennedy’s era,” Weir recalls. “I wanted to move it back earlier into the period of Eisenhower. I was the same age and in that time at a school in Sydney called The Scots College, which was a similar type of school.
“I knew then I could talk to the boys about what it was like to be in such a school, because I had experience. We even had my school jacket with a lion on it sent over to be the jackets the boys wore and I put in bagpipes because we were a Scottish school in Sydney. So, I was to some extent reliving my own youth. And if I’d been in that school in the film, I would have been in the Dead Poets Society.”
Which of his movies is the more important and more representative of his career?
“I find it shifts and changes over the years,” Weir says. “Maybe because I’ve been flying up here from Australia, I’m interested again thinking about Fearless, a plane crash movie that not many people saw because they didn’t want to see that. I’m thinking about what an experience it was to make that film.”
In terms of the advice for finding inspiration he says it’s important “to unplug, to get away from too much information”.
“Go somewhere quiet and into the country,” he says. “Go and work on a merchant ship. Allow your own imagination to develop and not to be too overloaded with information.
“I grew up before television when movies were the big thing in life – just Saturday afternoon for the boys, you know, to go and see the movie serials. They had an incredible impact, because that’s the only image you saw. Then when television came in when I was 12 or 13, it was a golden period of American television, with the westerns, and I Love Lucy and so forth. So, they had an impact on me.
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“Today, I would say, don’t even pick up a camera. I would pick up a pencil and paper and write down ideas, thoughts, little short stories, and I would practice like in a gymnasium, exercising not the muscles, but the mental muscles.”
Budding filmmakers take note from one of the greats.
Helen Barlow is a Paris-based Australian freelance journalist and critic. In 2019, she received the La Plume d’Or for her services to French cinema.
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