Closing our Peter Weir Chapter

A look back at the filmography of the director of The Way Back

IN THIS WEEK’S EDITION:

THE BARDI PARTY REPORT

Our Peter Weir series has come to an end, and I’ve gotta say that I’m sad! It’s been a really rewarding couple of months feeling like I was in good, safe hands. Each week, I had a totally solid, beautifully made, and psychically provocative film to look forward to. That’s not always the case with these series. Nothing Peter Weir ever made is as bad as The Ladykillers, or I Could Never Be Your Woman, or Gigli, or everything Robert Zemeckis has produced in the past 10 years.

Some Weir highlights:

NEW THINGS I LEARNED DURING THIS SERIES

• What Gallipoli was, what ANZAC day is, what they call those cool hats (slouch/digger hats)

• The guy who played Napoleon in Bill & Ted in the guy watching The Truman Show in the bathtub

• The Cars That Ate Paris is not about France

• The intense-looking headmistress in Picnic At Hanging Rock was so obsessed with Rex Harrison that she killed herself

• Linda Hunt won a Teen Choice Award for sitting behind a desk on NCIS

• Tracy Letts is my nemesis

• It is possible to kill someone by drowning them in corn

• It’s cool that Harrison Ford got an Oscar nomination for Witness, but he should have been nominated for The Mosquito Coast

• The phrase “cast for the final color”

• Fearless caused me to go down a research rabbit hole about child safety on airplanes, which I don’t want to write about in this space because this newsletter is already so long, but trust me when I say that it’s really interesting

• What “beat to quarters” means

• David Sims is afraid of Ed Harris

• I own Anne Applebaum’s Gulag and I really should read it at some point

FAVORITE EPISODE

• Hands down, Jennifer Kent on Gallipoli. One of the greatest episodes we’ve ever done.

FAVORITE NEW-TO-ME FILM

• Master & Commander is an obvious answer, so to swerve a bit, I will say that I was pretty blown away by The Mosquito Coast.

MOST CHARMING PERFORMANCE BY A GUY WHO IS ACTUALLY EVIL IRL

• Gotta go with Mel over Gerard here.

BC TEAM WEIR RANKINGS

GRIFFIN

1. The Truman Show

2. Gallipoli

3. Witness

4. Fearless

5. Picnic at Hanging Rock

6. The Mosquito Coast

7. Master & Commander

8. The Last Wave

9. The Year of Living Dangerously

10. The Cars That Ate Paris

11. Dead Poets Society

12. Green Card

13. The Plumber

14. The Way Back

DAVID

1. Master & Commander

2. The Truman Show

3. Witness

4. Picnic at Hanging Rock

5. Fearless

6. Green Card

7. The Mosquito Coast

8. The Last Wave

9. The Year of Living Dangerously

10. Gallipoli

11. The Way Back

12. The Plumber

13. The Cars That Ate Paris

14. Dead Poets Society

MARIE

1. Picnic at Hanging Rock

2. Master & Commander

3. The Truman Show

4. The Mosquito Coast

5. Fearless

6. Witness

7. Gallipoli

8. The Last Wave

9. Green Card

10. The Year of Living Dangerously

11. Dead Poets Society

12. The Way Back

13. The Cars That Ate Paris

JJ

1. Picnic at Hanging Rock

2. The Truman Show

3. Master & Commander

4. The Mosquito Coast

5. Witness

6. Fearless

7. Gallipoli

8. The Last Wave

9. The Year of Living Dangerously

10. Green Card

11. The Cars That Ate Paris

12. The Way Back

13. Dead Poets Society

ALAN SMITHEE

1. The Truman Show

2. Fearless

3. Master & Commander

4. Dead Poets Society

5. Picnic at Hanging Rock

6. Witness

MONDAY FUNNIES BY JOE BOWEN

LET’S CRACK OPEN THE AUSSIER (ONE LAST TIME)

Peter Weir’s Quiet Goodbye

There are many ways one could measure the career high point represented by Peter Weir’s eleventh and twelfth theatrical feature films—1998’s The Truman Show and 2003’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World—but here’s just one: both films netted Weir the BAFTA Award for Best Direction, making him just one of three directors to ever win that award for two consecutive films. (The other two: John Schlesinger for 1969’s Midnight Cowboy and 1971’s Sunday Bloody Sunday and Alfonso Cuarón for 2013’s Gravity and 2018’s Roma.) Despite Master and Commander’s relatively meager box office returns, Peter Weir had, by most accounts, entered the most acclaimed period of his illustrious career, three-plus decades in.

The good times, however, did not roll. The seven years between the release of Master and Commander and the release of Weir’s thirteenth—and final—film, The Way Back, marked the longest gap in the director’s filmography. In that interim period, Weir signed on to a number of doomed projects: The War Magician, a WWII drama produced by Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner; Pattern Recognition, a William Gibson adaptation penned by Children of Men’s David Arata and later Game of Thrones’ D.B. Weiss; and, most notoriously, Shantaram, a globe-spanning crime film starring Johnny Depp.

But Weir was not taken to lamenting these lost films. “If I look back at the … three,” Weir told The Playlist, “I don’t have any regrets. There’s not one that I feel I should have pursued further. I think they were all sort of aborted naturally.”¹ From a certain perspective—and you really have to stretch your neck to see it this way, admittedly—you might even consider this a productive era. “If I can use the analogy of a pilot,” Weir explained to The New York Times, “for those five or six years I was constantly inside the simulator, doing a lot of writing, thinking about how to make a story work on the screen.”²

That work would culminate with The Way Back, a movie with a fifth of the budget of Master and Commander, cobbled together with funding from a non-profit education organization (National Geographic) and an Emirati film studio (Imagenation Abu Dhabi), that grossed about a third of a Blackhat at the domestic box office. If there was anything to rue, it was a bygone industry. “The market,” Weir said in Time Out New York, “is now primarily for children or the films are childish.”³ Weir expanded on these thoughts in The Washington Post: “I am surprised, even amongst acquaintances of friends of my children in their thirties, that ... you revisit childhood by going to the cinema as an adult. I find that quite fascinating, in a way.”⁴ Fascinating does not necessarily mean good, I think it’s safe to say.

Despite the choppy waters, Weir intended to stay afloat. “I could always get out if I wanted to,” he told Time Out. “But in a way, filmmakers never retire. I think you just have to adapt.”⁵ Evolution was easier said than done, though—especially in your late sixties. “At this point in my life,” Weir shared, a little wistfully, in The New York Times, “I want a large canvas.”⁶ Weir’s sojourn in Hollywood may have come to a close, but, in 2011, he was hopeful, despite it all, that there was still more to come: “I remain optimistic, with some reserve, that the wheel will turn.”⁷

In May 2012, it seemed like it might have been: at the Cannes Film Festival, Weir shopped an adaptation of A Visit from the Goon Squad author Jennifer Egan’s 2006 novel The Keep, an Eastern European haunted house story centering on two estranged American cousins. Attached to star were Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rapace.⁸ In November, the German company Integral Film joined the France-based SBS Prods as a co-producer on the project, with shooting set to take place in Thuringia and near Berlin in 2013.⁹ But the project died a quiet death; the large canvas remained unpainted.

Twelve years later, Weir made it official at the Festival de la Cinémathèque in Paris: “I am retired,” even though that was something filmmakers never do. He added, “Why did I stop cinema? Because, quite simply, I have no more energy.”¹⁰

A WEIR COMPANION PLAYLIST

A note from Nate Patterson, our miniseries playlist guru:
Hello fellow music fans! It cannot be denied: Peter Weir loves a luscious synth, and he’s got his boy, Maurice Jarre on the job. Exploring the wilds of Australia on the way to war? SYNTHS. Teaching the children to love poetry? SYNTHS. Heading to Amish country? What could be more fitting than, you guessed it, SYNTHS! And if a sweet, sweet synth doesn’t do the job, classical music always has you covered.

So, some of his scores and used songs are not available on streaming services, but I did my best. If you want anything specific, YouTube and SoundCloud have some good gems… Please enjoy the very ~vibes~ full playlist, and the more friendly best-of, here:

WHAT IS THE TEAM INTO THIS WEEK?

David Sims, Host: “I watched my Dekalog box set, an extremely rewarding and oddly fun experience given that 9/10 of those movies are obviously huge bummers. Here is my ranking of the Dekalogs:

1: V
2: VII
3: III
4: II
5: VI
6: IV
7: X
8: VIII
9: I
10: IX

Ben Hosley, Producer: “It’s getting hot out there friends! And that means it’s pesto season. I LOVE a big ol bowl of penne dressed in that green stuff and some aged pecorino. Major yum. Maybe even some roasted tomatoes and garlic if ya feelin crazy. But damn man it just always hits. And it’s such easy prep and you can make a big batch and keep it in the fridge. And then one hot sweaty night you come home and don’t feel like a whole to do: boil up some noodles, add a few spoonfuls and you got dinner!”

Marie Bardi, Social Media: “I’ve been going through past Pulitzer winners and finalists for Feature Writing. This piece by Joe Sexton for The Marshall Project about the case against the death penalty for Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz really stopped me in my tracks, and this piece by David’s colleague Jennifer Senior in the Atlantic about the institutionalization of her aunt made me cry in the Delta Sky Lounge at the Hartsfield Jackson International Airport over the weekend. You can go through all of the articles here - fair warning, most of them are about heavy topics.”

Marika Brownlee, Director of Ops: “The Vampire Lestat aka Interview with The Vampire Season 3 started on Sunday! After 2 incredibly long years one of the best shows on television is BACK. Big shoutout to Daniel Hart who wrote like 20 songs for Sam Reid to sing BEAUTIFULLY this season (disclaimer: it is not a musical. Usually, I am not interested in comforting those who “don’t like musicals”, but I would like people to watch this show so they make more of it…) Shoutout to Jacob Anderson who should have already won 2 Emmys for this show, in my humble opinion. Shoutout to Eric Bogosian for being Eric Bogosian.”

Joe Bowen, Checky the Comic: “Power Ballad opened wide last week, and John Carney rarely misses for me. This time you’ve got Paul Rudd as a wedding singer(!) and as usual with Carney the original songs are hot, and there are some beautiful observations on art and success packed into an efficient 98 minute runtime.”

JJ Bersch, Researcher: “Do you know about The Phoenix, the weekly British comics magazine? My daughter can’t get enough of this shit. Every day she gets off the bus, she’s like, did my Phoenix come today? And if it did, she sits down and reads the whole thing in one go. And if it didn’t, she says, but why didn’t it come today… :(“

Alan Smithee, Pseudonymous Editor: “I have now watched all three Antoine Fuqua/Denzel Washington Equalizer movies. And I have to say: sue me, I like it when he equalizes stuff. I’m not totally sure why him kicking bad guys’ asses is, in the context of these movies, “equalizing” anything, but I still like it!”

Nate Patterson, Playlist Curator / Ben’s Personal Trainer: “Honestly, I can’t stop listening to the Nine Inch Noize album. This is an amazing idea, which is a live album, but studio quality. They took their live set of remixes and blended the live transitions with studio recording of the songs and it GOES SO VERY HARD. I was lucky enough to see this tour and they did a perfect job of capturing the energy. Really, a special album.

I have found myself returning a lot to the Feb album Heaven 2, by Lala Lala. This is a great alt/indie album, and I just can’t get enough of Lillie West’s sultry yet shimmery voice. Catchy as hell! It’s great music for hanging out, or taking a drive in the spring. Fun fact: she is the daughter of Simon West, director of Con Air!

And then if you want to get a little weird, I’ve really enjoyed the album Architectonics by Hoavi. It’s like what if a Balinese Gamelan orchestra, but make it techno. Excellent for doing chores, making dinner, or deep listening. The tones! The rhythms! The moods!

And finally, if you haven’t already, please watch the lil’ short film I made for Ben and Congratulations, Buried Jeans, Outside of Denver! There are some clear cinema homages, but no one has pointed out the fashion easter egg in the end credits, so I am hoping one of you will catch it…”

AJ McKeon, Editor: “Hayes has been staying up to watch all the Knicks games and has gotten really into to. So I’ll recommend this hat that comes for him today. From Good Shirts:

(Note from Marie - FEELING REAL VINDICATED RE: SHITTING ALL OVER JAMES DOLAN LAST WEEK, ENJOY SHITSTAIN RUINING GAME THREE TONIGHT)

THIS WEEK ON THE PODCAST

We're talking about a very long walk this week as Alex Ross Perry joins us to discuss Peter Weir's final film, 2010's gulag escape drama The Way Back.

CRITICAL DARLINGS
This week we’re joined by the very liminal Ryan Broderick, proprietor of the great newsletter and host of the podcast to discuss A24’s hit, Backrooms!

MEANWHILE ON PATREON…..

Dead or alive, you’re podding with US! We’re kicking off our Half-Man / Half Machine / 100%-on-Flic series on the films of Robert Cop as we discuss (again) 1987’s RoboCop.

COMING SOON:

WE ARE STILL WAITING ON OFFICIAL ARTWORK, but here’s our schedule for the next few weeks as we tackle PODD-C: The Films of Andrew Stanton

JUN 14 - Disclosure Day (Spielberg) with Marie Bardi
JUN 21 - Finding Nemo with Rebecca Alter
JUN 28 - WALL-E with David Ehrlich
JUL 05 - John Carter with Matt Singer
JUL 12 - Finding Dory with Zach Cherry
JUL 19 - The Odyssey (Nolan) with Marie Bardi
JUL 26 - In The Blink of an Eye with Joey Sims
AUG 02 - Toy Story 5 with Marie Bardi

1. The Playlist, January 25, 2011.

2. New York Times, January 7, 2011.

3. Time Out New York, January 20-26, 2011.

4. Washington Post, January 14, 2011.

5. Time Out New York, January 20-26, 2011.

6. New York Times, January 7, 2011.

7. Washington Post, January 14, 2011.

8. Variety, May 19, 2012.

9. Variety, November 14, 2012.

10. IndieWire, March 17, 2024.