Peter Weir

Serena Formica

Description

The cinematic output of Australian director Peter Weir has garnered numerous awards and widespread critical acclaim – from his early short films of the 1970s to the Hollywood hits he’s helmed since 1985, including the likes of Witness, Dead Poets Society, The Truman Show and Master and Commander.

Drawing on contemporary concepts from transnational cinema studies, this book investigates Weir’s entire three-decade career, paying particular attention to his journey from his native Sydney, with its largely auteur-driven national cinema, to the multimillion-dollar Hollywood film industry with its many genre conventions. Along the way, the author explores a host of questions accompanying this move, including Weir’s status as a transnational filmmaker and a more generalized discussion of the critically controversial idea of the auteur. Rounding out this volume are interviews with leading Hollywood filmmakers who discuss Weir’s work.

Introduction 

Chapter 1: Migrations and transnationalism in the cinema 

Chapter 2: Perspectives on Peter Weir 

Chapter 3: Australian production context in the 1970s and early 1980s 

Chapter 4: Peter Weir’s four key steps from Australia to Hollywood 

Conclusions

Appendix I: Filmography – Main credits

Appendix II: Films made in Hollywood by Australian directors

Sujets

• Energie & environnement
• Film
• General
• Engineering
• Technology
• General officer
• Sciences et techniques
• Power Resources

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781841507675
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Peter Weir
A Creative Journey from Australia to Hollywood
Peter Weir
A Creative Journey from Australia to Hollywood
by Serena Formica

intellect Bristol, UK / Chicago, USA
First published in the UK in 2012 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2012 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright 2012 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover designer: Holly Rose
Copy-editor: Macmillan
Typesetting: John Teehan
ISBN 978-1-84150-477-3/EISBN 978-1-84150-767-5
Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1: Migrations and transnationalism in the cinema
Chapter 2: Perspectives on Peter Weir
Chapter 3: Australian production context in the 1970s and early 1980s
Chapter 4: Peter Weir s four key steps from Australia to Hollywood
Conclusions
Bibliography
Appendix I: Filmography - Main credits
Appendix II: Films made in Hollywood by Australian directors
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Gianluca Sergi, Associate Professor at the University of Nottingham, for his suggestions during the research stages of this book and for making me believe that it was possible to interview Hollywood filmmakers.
I would like to thank all the academic staff of the Institute of Film and Television Studies of the University of Nottingham; in particular, Roberta Pearson, Sharon Monteith and Mark Gallagher for the guidance they have provided during the writing up of this book.
I am very grateful to the filmmakers who have agreed to being interviewed despite their busy schedule. I especially thank Peter Weir for his kindness, time and interest towards my topic; Russell Boyd for his time during several e-mail exchanges; and Philip Steuer for his availability during the Christmas holidays. I am also grateful to James and Hal McElroy for allowing me to use Picnic at Hanging Rock s stills.
I wish also to mention my colleagues at the University of Derby; in particular, I wish to thank Teresa Forde and Felix Thompson, for their enthusiasm and constant support. Importantly, my gratitude goes to my editors, Melanie Marshall and Jelena Stanovnik. I would not have been able to finish this project without their continuous support.
A big thank you to all my friends in Rome and Nottingham - who are too many to mention by name - for listening to my ideas and for their suggestions, feedback and enthusiasm. A particular mention must go to my friend Laura, for her passion of all things cinematic.
A very special mention goes to my family, for the support received during the writing up of this book. In particular, I wish to thank my mother for sharing with me her love for Hollywood classics and my father for encouraging me to watch film noirs and spy movies very early on. Last, but absolutely not least, special thanks go to Iestyn, for bearing with me during the most challenging times of this project.
Introduction
After all, this was Hollywood . This was a town that the whole world talked about.
They thought about Hollywood. Their dreams were painted here.
Paul Zollo 1
Welcome to Hollywood. What s your dream? Everybody comes here.
This is Hollywood, the land of dreams.
Some dreams come true, some don t. But keep on dreamin .
This is Hollywood. Always time to dream, so keep on dreamin .
Pretty Woman (1990). Dialogue transcript 2
Go thou to Rome, - at once the Paradise
The grave, the city, and the wilderness
Percy Bysshe Shelley 3
For [Rome] was the theatre of the world in its spring glory.
It was the school of man where he passed from infancy to maturity.
Charlotte Eaton 4
A young upper class intellectual living in Europe between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would complete his classical education by taking the Grand Tour. 5 Compulsory destinations were the countries of Mediterranean Europe, because there Western civilization was born. The homeland of arts and humanities, these countries offered to the young intellectual of the period the contemplation of Roman and Greek heritage, and the beauty of Italian Renaissance masterpieces. As Shelley and Eaton recite in their poems, Mediterranean Europe was the natural destination of the first culture travellers of the modern era; it was the place to complete one s education, because it was considered the site where the very idea of education was born.
The fatal attraction of Southern Europe on the young intellectuals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries bears some similarities with the fatal attraction for Hollywood on the filmmakers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. If Southern Europe was the compulsory destination for the first, Hollywood is the place of reference of the latter. Since the early decades of the studio system, Hollywood has attracted and hosted numerous filmmakers who have moved from their native cinematic contexts to America.
In this book, I am focusing on the migration of a contemporary filmmaker to Hollywood, Australian director Peter Weir, who moved professionally to America in 1985. Which are the factors that account for the differences and similarities in Weir s filmmaking in Hollywood and Australia? I am aware that Peter Weir does not stand out because he made this career choice, but the case is interesting precisely because he is part of a larger phenomenon involving Australian filmmakers in recent decades. Weir s career, in fact, mirrors that of a group of young Australian filmmakers who moved to Hollywood during the 1980s, such as directors Fred Schepisi, Bruce Beresford, Gillian Armstrong and, in the late part of the decade, Philip Noyce, and cinematographers Russell Boyd and Don McAlpine. These filmmakers had emerged in the 1970s, when Australian cinema was experiencing a revival after a prolonged period of crisis that had deep roots.
If is true that Weir s migration has to be studied within the larger phenomenon of Australian filmmakers migrations, it is also true that the latter ought to be considered as part of a trend that has characterized cinema because it is very dawn. Every decade since the beginning of cinema, in fact, has witnessed migrations to Hollywood. In the 1920s, German filmmakers such as Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau and Ernst Lubitsch migrated to Hollywood attracted by the economic and technological possibilities offered by a rising studio system.
In the 1930s and 1940s, the systematic persecution of Jews during the Nazi regime resulted in the migration of filmmakers, such as Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder and Fred Zinnemann. In the early 1940s, the economic possibilities offered by the studio system - and the problematic situation of the British film industry during the Second World War - urged Alfred Hitchcock to move to America. Twenty years later, the Soviet invasion of Eastern Europe provoked the passage to Hollywood of, among others, Czech director Milos Forman. The reasons that led to these migrations of the past and their repercussions over both the cinematic contexts of origin and Hollywood have been investigated by scholars. 6
Importantly, filmmakers (and actors ) moves to Hollywood are not a phenomenon confined to the past: on the contrary, they are an ongoing and increasing phenomenon. Filmmakers migrations to Hollywood continued into the 1990s and 2000s, and involved filmmakers of different continents. In 1997, the handover of Hong Kong to China provoked the passage to Hollywood of several filmmakers, such as Ang Lee (who was already a Taiwanese migr ) and John Woo. More recently, the Italian director Gabriele Muccino made his first Hollywood film, The Pursuit of Happyness (sic) (2006), starring Will Smith. In Mexico, an inhospitable climate at home gives top movie talents little choice but to cross the border to chase their dreams , 7 as Alfonso Cuar n, Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro Gonz lez I rritu have done. 8 Migrations to Hollywood have indeed become a global phenomenon. In other words, we are witnessing an unprecedented circulation of labour (and technology) across and between film industries . 9
Filmmakers migrations reflect an increasing global flow of people that concerns all levels of society and depends on factors that are historical (the end of colonialism), political (the end of the Cold War and more recently the enlargement of the European Union), economic (the growth of China and India) and technological (the burgeoning growth of mass communication). In the last fifteen years, theories on transnational migrations have been applied to the discipline of film studies. 10
Despite increasing academic interest, I have identified an anomaly, because on one hand, these theories are not applied to actual case studies of contemporary migrant filmmakers who have made their move to Hollywood, and, on the other hand, contemporary migrant filmmakers are often only considered within the context of their original national cinema. An example is Peter Weir, who has been studied within the context of Australian national cinema, but scholars have overlooked the fact that Weir is also part of the Hollywood film industry, and have not investigated his status of transnational director.
The focus on filmmakers moves to Hollywood is more prominent in film journals that occasionally feature interviews with such filmmakers. However, they have neither the scope nor the aim to frame the discussion within the broader context of transnational cinema. This book addresses this anomaly, and begins to fill this research gap by applying theories on transnational cinema to the case study of Peter Weir.
Although migrations to Hollywood have been a stead