Peter Weir's world ( article )
Rick in Oz
Weir's world
July 24, 2004
There are two sides to director Peter Weir - and both have to be in balance
before he will embark on a film, writes Mary Colbert.
Was it serendipity? Travelling by train from France to Italy, en route to a
film festival in Taormina in Sicily, I shared a compartment with a
restaurateur on his way to an international wine expo in Milan. Lubricated
by a bottle of potent red, we pondered the similarities of the two events.
The comparison took on immediate resonance in the beautiful mountain resort
of Taormina where Peter Weir, the director of Master and Commander: The Far
Side of the World, was speaking as a guest for the festival's 50th
anniversary.
"Films are like wine," Weir observes. "Some are meant to be drunk in a year,
others you put down into the cellar to ferment [for later]. I'm fascinated
to see how they mature."
Asked to select a film as centrepiece for his masterclass, Weir was about to
subject one of his older vintages to the taste test. On this occasion, he'd
decided to bypass celebrated signature movies such as Witness, Gallipoli,
Dead Poets Society or The Truman Show and uncork instead, internationally at
least, a sample from a less high-profile crop: The Year of Living
Dangerously.
The adaptation of Christopher Koch's novel, which was inspired by the 1965
political uprising in Soeharto's Indonesia, was shot in 1982 amid threats by
Islamic fundamentalists to disrupt production. "It's our neighbour and there
have been great changes and upheavals there among the Muslim population so
the themes were again relevant," Weir says.
A valid reason for a revisit but the explanation, coming from a filmmaker
known as the existential cinematic poet of his generation, left one feeling
short-changed. Where was the mystical Peter Weir of films such as Fearless
and The Last Wave?
Like a mind-reader, a relaxed Weir, liberated from marketing mechanisms and
obligations to plug a film, in the tranquil, casual ambience of a lazy
Sicilian hot summer's day, dropped a bombshell: there are two Peter Weirs.
They are not a product of hallucinatory drugs, twisted family history or
double-vision but the yin and yang of the director's creative psyche.
Weir attributes the genesis of this double identity to a life-transforming
daydream he once had during a period of artistic doldrums early in his
career. In this dream, his search for enlightenment led to a meeting on a
mountain top with the great, wise "master guru of directors", who said: "You
must care and not care at the same time. Caring too much blocks your
unconscious, not caring frees that part of your mind."
Pivotal in the evolution of the twin Weirs was a book much admired by the
director, Jean-Claude Carriere's The Secret Language of Film. "He talks a
great deal about the struggle between the left and right side of the brain;
the conscious, logical part of the mind and the uncontrollable,
unconscious," Weir says. "Each must be allowed their play."
In this context, The Year of Living Dangerously is appropriate. With its
stark motif of the Wayang, the Indonesian shadow puppets, it represents -
visually and poetically - the underpinning of Weir's artistic philosophy and
process.
Hasn't he, like a puppet-master balancing good and evil, the conscious and
the unconscious, poetry and reality, with fine brush-strokes worked in
shades of ambiguity that imbue his most powerful films with their mystical
life force? As expressed by the book and film's key tragic figure,
Chinese-Indonesian photographer Billy Kwan: "In the West, everything is good
or bad. In the Wayang, there are no such clear divisions."
"Yes, I like to work in the shadows," Weir admits. "It is a preference that
has generated problems in the United States, where Picnic at Hanging Rock
and the satire of The Truman Show allegedly left many underwhelmed. At the
end credits of a studio test-screening for Picnic of Hanging Rock, Weir
recalls an executive's frenzied outburst: "We put a man on the moon, for
God's sake! We're used to explanations. What happened to those goddamn
girls?"
The synchronicity and balance between the complementary sides of his
artistic psyche have become Weir's creative glue and bedrock.
"The films that I have declined that the other Peter liked, did not match
some shadow in my being," Weir explains. "Until the conscious and
unconscious match up, I cannot do it. It's something in my creative being
that must match the DNA of the offered material and when we have a match
both Peters will agree to go ahead."
A Hollywood studio movie can particularly test this premise. There are many
traps on a studio picture, Weir says, but the main question is how to retain
your individuality under pressure.
"You must never take on such a film unless it is deeply part of your
creative DNA," he asserts. "I've seen others get into trouble because they
took it for ambition, or a famous actor. For me there is no difference in
that creative love affair between the independent picture and the studio
picture. But the studio will put the heat on."
During a crisis on Master and Commander, the studio wanted him to go one
way, he inclined in another direction. They suggested trying both ways.
"Gentlemen, this is not a debating society," Weir replied. "Think of me as a
doctor. You have cancer and I'm a specialist telling you how I will operate.
If I do it your way, you will die."
According to Weir, "Many studio executives are very intelligent, many are
lawyers used to arguing the case for the murderer. You just have to trust
your convictions. I neither make films solely for the audience, nor solely
for myself. I make them to communicate an intense feeling that has
completely absorbed me.
"Really, films choose you, not the other way around," Weir says. "More
importantly than the script is the idea; which can be fully formed, be a
notion, an emotion. I've had it every way."
It helps if the script is great but he believes you can get through with a
great idea and great casting. The director's task during the latter is like
the work of a detective in the missing person's bureau. "A lot of people
come forward claiming to be that person and the detective director has to
decide which is the real missing person."
Weir's greatest casting coup was Linda Hunt as Billy Kwan in The Year of
Living Dangerously, a performance that earned her an Oscar for best
supporting actress. "The feminine sensibility was intriguing and
unpredictable," Weir says. "Dangerous. Living dangerously," he adds with
proud relish.
Weir works without safety nets in casting; the subconscious twin prevails.
Not for him grand screen tests and casting through video monitors. He needs
the direct feel of the interaction with the actor. "I tend to look into
their eyes, not the camera," Weir says.
He dislikes rehearsals, preferring to get to know his actors in a more
spontaneous way. "I find it becomes too worked out, too logical. I'd rather
go for dinner, for a walk, talk about anything but the story."
The role model, again, comes from Carriere's book in which the author
describes working with Spanish director and father of cinematic surrealism,
Luis Bunuel. "I love their ritual," Weir enthuses. "They would begin in the
morning by telling each other their dreams of the previous night. They'd
talk through the morning, take a little siesta in the afternoon, in the
evening meet for a drink, telling another story, any story - true or
fiction. This exercises the narrative muscles of the storyteller."
Weir's artistic soul is nourished by other art forms, particularly music and
painting. "I became very interested in still-life painting. Take vases of
flowers, for instance. You see so many - with no effect. Then looking at the
works of Cezanne, Van Gogh, I feel my knees go weak. What have they done?
Isn't it a two-dimensional artefact? What is it and can I put it into film?"
A favourite source of inspiration is French artist Henri Matisse. "He talked
very eloquently about the process of creation, the belief that it's possible
for a strong feeling to be transmitted to an inanimate object through love.
In the latter part of his life, he refined his work to the kind of beautiful
but profound simplicity to which I now aspire."
Music is oxygen to Weir. He cites Australian poet Gwen Harwood as a strong
influence. "I love the quote that 'words can never say, as music can, the
unsayable grace that leaps like light from mind to mind'."
He plays music throughout the shoot, setting tone and mood, allowing it
subconsciously to seep through to cast and crew. Much of it ends up in the
films and it provides another language to articulate ideas and feelings,
particularly to actors. "Sometimes I can't put into words the feeling for a
character but I'll tell them it's in a particular piece of music."
A fluidity, a reckless spontaneity, pervades the Weir sets. "If I was an
architect, I couldn't just do the plans; I'd have to be the builder, too.
Because, like a script, the construction needs to evolve organically. If you
don't like where you planned the window, you need to be able move it - just
like changing a scene that's not working. The film is alive - and, as
Matisse said, style is just a tool. We must never become its prisoner."
Weir, more than any other filmmaker of his vintage, has been a cinematic
explorer and voyager of genres and styles, his "compass" driven by an
insatiable curiosity. Occasionally, he admits, one can flounder. "Sometimes,
on a Friday night, you find yourself in a multiplex; the swirling crowds,
the garish colours, the shrill trailers, the vulgarity of it all. And you
think how can I make films for these people? How have I survived?
"You really can't think too much about it," he says. "I think they're
actually hungry for something - they just don't know what it is. It's
probably art. So how do you get to them?
"The change in audiences, particularly under 25s, is happening so rapidly
that we don't know where it's taking us. It's a very different sensibility;
they're not interested in linear narrative in the same way, they're less
bothered if the ending's bad or there's a lack of good film-making craft.
They're barraged all the time by information, much of it marketing-driven.
"Even in the front line of troops today, as I am, in a way, you understand
less and less," he says. "These are anxious times, and the movie industry is
made more anxious by constant monitoring. You get it weekly: 'the patient's
looking good', 'the patient's in decline'. We know too much. It's better to
remain calm and focused. And let the muse descend."
From Sunny Oz, Rick :)
Proud Keeper of the talented & beautiful Halle Berry.