Peter Weir - Biography, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Filmography (Read)
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Peter Weir - Biography, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Filmography
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Peter Weir - biography, date of birth, place of birth, filmography, clips, Director, Writer, Actor, Producer.
Born August 21, 1944, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia is an Australian film director, screenwriter, actor and producer.
Early in his career he directed documentaries for the Commonwealth Film Unit. In 1971 he directed the short comedy Homesdale. His first feature film was the low-budget science fiction film Cars That Ate Paris (1974), remounted beyond recognition without the author's participation and subsequently rejected by him as "something terrible."
The mystical tapes Picnic at the Hanging Rock (1975) and The Last Wave (1977) brought us worldwide recognition, after which the attention of the cinema world was almost for the first time riveted to the “green continent”. The genre of these two films is difficult to define. For lack of a better term, they are often recorded in horror films, although the essence is not at all in nightmares, but in "unfamiliar landscapes, inexplicable events, dreams, dreams and myths from which a feeling of restless expectation is born." It was said about the young director that, like Werner Herzog's films, his works "gravitate towards something mystical, transcendental, unknowable", or "appeal to those characters who are on the verge of the real and the possible."
The Plumber (1976), an allegorical TV parable, marked a turning point in Weir's work. In his interviews of those years, he says that he had studied dreams and daydreams quite well; from now on, cinema will become for him a craft, not an art. Weir calls it his goal to awaken in the viewer a sense of amazement, the feeling that a miracle is happening before his eyes. Instead of intoxicating with style and form, the director puts at the forefront the idea to which the performance should be subordinated. In this respect, masters of the forties with their "invisible" directorial manner become his idols. Daring experiments with soundtrack are replaced by the use of rather traditional music by veteran Maurice Jarre.
Weir's Australian period ends with Mel Gibson's historical films Gallipoli (1981) and The Year of a Dangerous Life (1982). Each of them became the largest project in the history of the Australian film industry. Feeling limited opportunities to pursue a career in Australia, the director has increasingly worked in the United States since the early 1980s. Many of Weir's Hollywood films - most notably The Witness (1985) and The Truman Show (1998) - have been critically acclaimed and awarded prestigious film awards, but Picnic at the Hanging Rock remains the mainstream.
