Where to begin with Peter Weir

At a glance, Peter Weir’s career is a paradox. He was a key figure in the 1970s Australian New Wave (alongside Bruce Beresford, Gillian Armstrong, George Miller and others), before moving to Hollywood and making some of the most recognisable mainstream studio movies of the 1980s and 90s, including Dead Poets Society (1989) and The Truman Show (1998). Yet, especially during this American period, his approach is classical to the point of invisibility. There is no recognisable signature or specific style carried over from picture to picture. 

Look closer, however. He is a Trojan horse, smuggling philosophical concerns into tried-and-tested commercial genres. His films pulse with the otherworldly and the metaphysical. Themes of transcendence, the sublime, mysticism and the uncanny recur. He has also spoken of the medium itself as engaging with the collective unconscious, and of Carl Jung’s perspective on archetypes as the origin of humanity’s most enduring symbols, patterns and myths.

Weir has also been highly selective about projects, making just 14 full-length films in 50-plus years and retiring altogether after the World War II survival drama The Way Back (2010). Yet among those 14 is an embarrassment of riches.

After moving to Hollywood, Weir’s first American film, Witness (1985), saw the director elevate an initially boilerplate cop script into genre-cinema poetry. The first act sees Harrison Ford’s stern Philadelphia detective John Book investigating the murder of a fellow police officer in a train station bathroom, which was witnessed by an Amish child. When Book is temporarily absorbed into the closed-off world of Pennsylvania’s Amish community, it’s like going back in time. It could be 1785 or 1985. Here, the sacred and the profane become a battleground.

The romantic dance to Sam Cooke’s ‘Wonderful World’, the barn-raising sequence, the tense showdown, and one of the most electrifying kisses in modern American cinema – Witness beautifully pares back genre excesses and melodramatic elements to the bone, affording the story breathing space to explore an environment that shuns outsiders. Yet it keeps the thriller structure going rather than using it only as a springboard, while also giving Ford a chance to deliver an understated take on the American lawman vulnerably stripped of his authority. Book’s tragedy lies in the inescapable need for justice and restorative violence, which will condemn him as unable to belong to a gentler, simpler way of life.

After Witness, compare The Mosquito Coast (1986), his second collaboration with Ford. Weir gave the 1980s star two of his most unusual roles and allowed him to play against type both times; it’s fascinating to see Ford play around with his screen persona.

In The Mosquito Coast, Allie Fox (Ford) is a boomer fed-up with America. An inventor by trade, he packs off his whole family to live in the Central American jungle. There, he builds a machine to make ice. Ford plays this dangerous character as a charismatic antihero; this manic and increasingly mean-spirited man is a world away from Han Solo and Indiana Jones. Ford excels as a troubled Weir protagonist, self-destructively and wilfully destabilising his life, alienating his loved ones and doing so with the zeal of a prophet.

Now it’s time to go Down Under to Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), the film that launched him – and the Australian New Wave – internationally. An adaptation of Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel, it’s framed cheekily as a true account of a Victorian era mystery involving the disappearance of schoolgirls on a trip to a local beauty spot. The film’s carefully calibrated orchestration of soft lighting, hypnotic tone, panpipe score, dreamlike atmospherics and lack of narrative resolution (the disappearance is never explained) casts a spell that’s proven enduringly enigmatic.

Among his other Australian features, The Last Wave (1977) is the closest Weir gets to making a horror film. After accepting a case defending a group of First Nations men accused of murder, a Sydney lawyer (Richard Chamberlain) begins to suffer terrifying visions of a coming flood, which are tied to First Nations spiritual beliefs and prophecy. An eschatological nightmare, The Last Wave tends to get overlooked among better known works, but it’s another key entry dealing with events beyond rational account.

Gallipoli (1981) sees two long-distance runners (Mel Gibson and Mark Lee) sign up to fight in World War I. As ANZAC soldiers, they are shipped off to Egypt and then the Dardanelles. With Gallipoli, Weir expanded his canvas and gave his homeland its definitive national war film, tackling themes of the loss of innocence, the emergence of an Australian identity questioning its loyalty to the British Empire, and the ideal of mateship. The devastating last shot is a freeze frame modelled on Robert Capa’s celebrated Spanish Civil War photo.

Weir teamed up again with Gibson straight away for another of his portraits of outsiders in The Year of Living Dangerously (1982). Here Gibson plays an Australian radio news reporter covering the 1965 Indonesian political crisis. Weir’s final Australian film, it exemplifies the director’s invisible style. On the surface, it’s a conventionally told love story set in a time of political strife. Thematically, it rests on moral confusion, clashing realities and a protagonist in a world where he doesn’t belong (much like Witness’s John Book). The relationship between Gibson’s Guy Hamilton and Sigourney Weaver’s British embassy worker Jill Bryant sweats up the screen. Their kiss, set to Maurice Jarre’s score, is hotter than the tropics. 

From the high-profile American period, you should proceed to Dead Poets Society, an ode to education and inspiring teachers, then Fearless (1993), The Truman Show and the 2003 nautical period epic Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. In Fearless, Jeff Bridges is soulful as a middle-aged man undergoing a profound psychological change after surviving a plane crash. Dead Poets Society, The Truman Show and Master and Commander share a thematic thread: males living in carefully controlled environments (boarding school, a reality TV show and a British navy ship respectively).

Early 1970s Peter Weir is a lot funnier and weirder than people might expect from a director later associated with mystical imagery and Hollywood dramas. However, a penchant for dark-tinged humour is a throughline. Homesdale (1971) is an absurdist featurette about the customers and staff in a guest house, and the documentary Whatever Happened to Green Valley? (1973) starts as a media satire then becomes something more warm-hearted, with a deadpan Weir starring himself as a TV news reporter investigating everyday life on a Sydney council estate. In the dystopian The Cars That Ate Paris (1974), the first film in Australia to shoot with anamorphic lenses, we get a glimpse of how he would approach nature and landscapes as liminal, sometimes gothic, spaces – in this case, a small-town whose residents deliberately cause car crashes. 1979’s The Plumber, a funny and biting class-conflict saga hinging on a tradesman obsessed with a put-upon female academic, was made for television and released theatrically abroad. These spiky early works are all well worth exploring as the idiosyncratic beginnings of Weir’s remarkable career.

Finding Your Way: The Films of Peter Weir plays at BFI Southbank from 30 March to 30 April.

The Cars That Ate Paris + The Plumber are out on BFI Blu-ray in a new 4k restoration on 25 May.