Peter Weir Quotes (21 Quotes)

National film industries tend to move in cycles. In Australia right now, we're on a high, a feeling of potential, which as yet shows no sign of flagging. But the word "industry" is misleading. A small national cinema has no industry in the Hollywood sense.

It's a brilliant and intriguing idea, and the moment I read the script, I knew it was my next film. I started working on it back in '95,

I had been offered a couple of things but had turned them down, ... They weren't my kind of films. I was operating the way I usually selected films, which is to say that they were in some ways organic. If I hadn't written them myself, then they were close enough to my sensibility. Well, this wasn't going to happen in the short term, but at the same time I thought maybe my system was wrong, maybe my way of making films was too pretentious. So I called my agents and said, Could you just get me a go picture' You know, one of these green-lit films. Along came three films, and one of them was Witness.'

Well, there's that girl on the Internet - although this isn't an example of someone who doesn't know they're on - but there's a girl on the Internet who posts one photograph every two minutes from her bedroom.

At one point, I got so obsessive with the theme that I thought we actually should conceal all the cameras from Jim and the other actors,

Well, all these stars have their houses swept quite regularly by people who work in the surveillance security business. They come in and they look for bugs and things.

Music stops you from thinking.

Why build New York Why build something that's known instead of having an idealized setting Nevertheless, the script absolutely intrigued me. It was most untypical of Hollywood.

Russell Crowe as Capt. Jack Aubrey in Master and Commander The Far Side of the World, ... most unlikely.

Normally as a director, you do look at other films and things that are relevant. But with this film, it became impossible because I became so aware of the camera placement.

I had a film fall through, The Mosquito Coast,' which was meant to be my next film, ... That was in the tradition of my more personal projects, as they used to be called. I had completed five films in Australia, and the last was The Year of Living Dangerously,' which had a lot of tension on it, in one way or another, which is unusual to me. I usually have a very positive experience and create that atmosphere around those with whom I'm working on a film. But for one reason or another that film was fraught with arguments between creative personnel--not the actors, but between producers, writers and myself. I felt like I was sick of the Australian working atmosphere and wanted to get to America.

There's almost a fear that if you understood too deeply the way you arrived at choices, you could become self-conscious. In any case, many ideas which are full of personal meaning seem rather banal when you put words to them.

I've become wary of interviews in which you're forced to go back over the reasons why you made certain decisions. You tend to rationalize what you've done, to intellectually review a process that is often intuitive.

The original version of the screenplay was much darker, and portrayed the central character as more of an Everyman. It was also set in Manhattan.

I was struck by the Amish aspect of the film, ... As my first American film, I could go to a country within a country, and that would seem to me a better landing spot for me, as an English-speaking foreign director. I don't think I would have done it if, instead of the Amish community, it had been the Italian community in New York. I would have felt too inhibited and thought that the territory of other filmmakers.

So much of the work is intuitive. The resistance you detect is just that, a kind of evasion, a sense that too much analysis will inhibit creativity.

Then the producer said, Do you know Jim Carrey And I thought, My God, what an interesting idea

On one of the surveys for The Mosquito Coast,' which had stalled, I was in Belize waiting to go across a river, and there was a punt coming toward us, the very punt we would take across the river, ... I thought they were coming back from a fancy dress party, but it was too early in the morning. Then someone told me they were Amish They got off the punt looking like they were in makeup and wardrobe from an 18th Century production. That was a tremendous hook for me.

I'd love to have another film to go on to. I'm in the mood to work. But I have to be patient, you know, to find that particular kind of project. Occasionally I'll write one myself if I can summon up the energy.

It was immediately apparent that it was full of tricky ingredients to balance. In fact, I found it very intriguing. What held me back from saying yes to the producer was that I wasn't sure who could play Truman.

I don't know if there will ever be an ideal way of selling an original picture. Because everything you're doing, you're inventing.