The author of authentic and timeless masterpieces such as Dead Poets Society and The Truman Show hasn’t made a film since 2010
Peter Weir Golden Lion to your career to the next Venice Festival. She had been in the air for a while. At least since the 79-year-old Australian director was celebrated by the Cinemateque Française last March. The author of authentic and timeless masterpieces such as The fleeting moment And The Truman Show he hasn’t made a film since 2010 (The Way Back with Colin Farrell). Self-isolated, peaceful and serene, in his mansion in Australia from where he has only communicated for a few years with a smartphone (before only an old-fashioned telephone with handset and paper letters).
“The Venice Film Festival and its Golden Lion are part of the imagination of our profession – declared Peter Weir, in accepting the proposal – To be recognized for your life’s work as filmmakers is a great honor”. According to him, the reconfirmed director of Venice, Alberto Barberahas, as always, hit the heart of the value of a not entirely obvious choice: “With just 13 films made over the course of forty years, Peter Weir has secured a place in the firmament of the great directors of modern cinema.”
Barbera recalled that at the end of the Seventies Weir “established himself as the main author of the rebirth of Australian cinema by virtue of two works, The Machines That Destroyed Paris and Picnic at Hanging Rock, the second of which he acquired over the years the status of cult film. The international success of the next two films, The broken years And A year lived dangerously, opened the doors of Hollywood cinema to him, of which he quickly became one of the main protagonists, an advocate of a cinema capable of combining reflection on personal themes and the need to address the widest possible audience”. Bold, rigorous and spectacular cinema with a “sensitivity that allows it to deal with eminently modern themes, like the fascination for nature and its mysteriesthe crisis of adults in consumerist societies, the difficulties of educating young people for life, the temptation of physical and cultural isolation, but also the call of adventurous impulses and the instinct of healthy rebellion”.
Rebellion impulses which, especially at the time of The fleeting moment they caused havoc with the public, with tears and handkerchiefs, but which made many critics of the Italian left stiffen, not accustomed to Weirian sentimental praise towards the individual who rebels against social rules and walls that erase his vital, unrepeatable identity and passion. “The protagonist of Mosquito Coast (forgotten, hidden Weir film, to be recovered immediately, before now ed) it’s me,” Weir explained to Le Monde one month ago. “The foreign filmmaker who landed in America as if faced with an unknown world. Let’s be clear, I had no problems working there, but in the contracts I obliged the producers to a fundamental clause: editing films at my home in Australia and don’t stay in Los Angeles all year. I want to remain a foreigner.”
