The Hands of Bresson

A pioneering figure of the new independent Australian cinema in the 1970s, 66-year-old Sydney native Peter Weir (The Truman Show) gravitated to Hollywood in the mid ’80s, found success with a handful of well-crafted studio pictures (Witness, Dead Poets Society), and never really looked back. At least that’s how it might appear after a cursory glance at his unusual oeuvre, which encompasses everything from 1975’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (an oneiric film awash in foreboding, in which a small-town community disintegrates after a group of elite-school girls eerily vanish en masse during a lunchtime hike) to the rollicking high-seas adventure of 2003’s Master and Commander (about the friendship of a British captain and a man of science in the Napoleonic Wars era). Weir may have forsaken the interior horror of early work like The Last Wave, wherein a lawyer representing Aboriginals is afflicted by disturbing visions and revelations, but his interest in human responses to other kinds of awakenings—grief and trauma in the case of Fearless, for instance—has remained consistent.

Click here to read the rest of my interview at Filmmaker.