Peter Weir learned filmmaking making satire on a Sydney TV station's equipment
Before Dead Poets Society and The Truman Show, Peter Weir was a production assistant at a Sydney television station, borrowing its equipment after hours to shoot odd experimental shorts. He became a leader of the Australian New Wave, then one of Hollywood's most versatile directors, and in 2022 received an honorary Academy Award.
Weir was born in Sydney on 21 August 1944, the son of Peggy and Lindsay Weir, a real estate agent. He attended The Scots College and Vaucluse Boys High School, then read arts and law at the University of Sydney, where meeting Phillip Noyce and members of the collective Ubu Films sparked his interest in cinema. In the mid-1960s he joined ATN-7 and worked on The Mavis Bramston Show, a trailblazing satirical programme, while using station gear for shorts such as Count Vim's Last Exercise, released in 1968.
A university revue opened more doors. In 1969 Weir, composer Peter Best and friends staged a show that Sir Robert Helpmann took to the Adelaide Festival, and the ABC soon commissioned Weir and Best to write a Christmas special. He then joined the Commonwealth Film Unit, later Film Australia, making documentaries and one segment of the three-director feature 3 to Go, which won an AFI award in 1971. A concert film captured Melbourne rock acts including Spectrum, and his final unit project in 1973 let residents of a struggling outer Sydney suburb speak about their lives.
His first significant independent work, the black comedy Homesdale in 1971, included his own final screen role of any size. The feature debut came in 1974 with The Cars That Ate Paris, followed by the haunting mystery Picnic at Hanging Rock in 1975 and the First World War drama Gallipoli in 1981. Those films put him at the centre of the Australian New Wave, a movement running from about 1970 to 1990. The international production The Year of Living Dangerously, released in 1982, was a major breakthrough.
From there Weir roamed across genres in American and international cinema: the thriller Witness in 1985, the school drama Dead Poets Society in 1989, a romantic comedy, and in 1998 the media satire The Truman Show. Master and Commander, a seafaring epic, arrived in 2003, and The Way Back in 2010 was his last feature. Across forty years he earned six Oscar nominations and two BAFTA awards for direction.
Source: Peter Weir
