Peter Weir Quotes
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Music stops you from thinking.
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I'm not from a theatre background, I'm wary of rehearsals. But what I do like is hanging out together, on location.
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Studios are attracted by making money, and they're also trying to simplify things, going with the genre thing. The gambling instincts of a few years ago where you might make some thousands or a few hundred, it's nothing now.
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If I can't make the kind of film that I want to make, then the hell with it.
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You get very little from the studios anymore, it's all independent. And I think the studio, with the exception of something like The Social Network, a fine film, very interesting, but as for studio pictures, that's it, what else? There was more only a few years ago. So it changes, and I'm trying as much as I can.
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I love stories and I don't like to repeat myself. And I look for new stuff, and as they say it gets harder.
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Well, all these stars have their houses swept quite regularly by people who work in the surveillance security business. They come in and they look for bugs and things.
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Sixty-five days principle photography, five-day weeks, which is the only way I'll work. With my cinematographer Russell Boyd, we take as much time as possible before pre-production, looking at stills. The next most important thing: he will come to me and talk about lenses. And I'll see his plan, which is generally great, and I might talk about how the light will be, handheld or not? I talk very freely, and try not to talk specifically, just talk around it, because it can unlock all sorts of things.
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What we love that 'The Way Back' is not subsidized, it's alive and kicking. And if I can't make the kind of film that I want to make, then the hell with it, I've had a great run. But I'm more concerned with the younger people coming up that want to make this kind of film.
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I enjoyed Jonathan Franzen's 'Freedom.' Would I make that into a film? I think it's better suited to television. That would very much be a dialogue and performance piece, and it would take some very skilful direction - but not my kind of directing. But I thought it was a real literary work.
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You can mix in certain sensitivities as a filmmaker.
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I've done a number of things that get categories closed off in a way, so when I read 'The Long Walk' by Slavomir Rawicz and decided to do film, 'I thought, you know, this is going to be wonderful,' two and a half years, three years, whatever it was.
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The best conversation with Stanley Kubrick is a silent one: you sit in a theatre and watch his films and you learn so much.
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Casting is always critical but in this case, 'The Way Back', I was looking internationally to a degree for an interesting mix of gentlemen, Irish, Polish, Russian and American. Not many people had the qualifications, people who would play the game, particular to this industry. So I had to research amongst the cast. They had to be very very prepared as we had to start shooting as soon as we could, there wasn't any time to talk, and there would only be three or four takes.
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Silent films were, I think, more different than we know to sound films. We think of it as simply that we added dialogue and in actual fact I think it was an entirely different art form.
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I think Ed Harris is a conscious screen actor, so I think it was strong, it was like he put everything together somehow in 'The Way Back'. He likes, I don't want to say the method approach, because that's not really necessarily his way of working, but it was easy to do because of the location. He'd go off by himself, and they would make things.
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I always thought the editor should cut the film and so I'll come in and look at the movie. Just because that's the only way I can really see the ideas of the editor, it's really working together. Yes it's a hierarchy, yes I'm the boss, but I like to see and to think about the idea, and it's about us asking, 'do we have to say that?' and, 'how do we make it there?' So it's advising the editor, it's very give and take, it's very free, but in the end, it's wonderful once you get through the first couple of cuts.
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So much of the work is intuitive. The resistance you detect is just that, a kind of evasion, a sense that too much analysis will inhibit creativity.
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Ed Harris seemed to be as a man, it seems, like a Clint Eastwood, this country is one that has produced more than one of this kind of man that's iconic and enormously appealing to the world, as part of American film culture.
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I'm not from a theatrical background where people do like to work it out on some stage space.
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In 'The Way Back' survivors were all ordinary people, and that's the whole point, that's who I felt these people should be, and they shouldn't be that hero that stands out.
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Russell Crowe as Capt. Jack Aubrey in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, .. most unlikely.
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With war and famine and flood and special effects films, when you do somebody under duress, you have to be really be inventive and the risk of keeping it very simple is you might loose some of the audience because it's not overt, it's hidden, not coming at you. Then you might cut through to some of this numbness and reach something profound and tragic.
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Id love to have another film to go on to. Im in the mood to work. But I have to be patient, you know, to find that particular kind of project. Occasionally Ill write one myself if I can summon up the energy.
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I don't know if there will ever be an ideal way of selling an original picture. Because everything you're doing, you're inventing.
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I've become wary of interviews in which you're forced to go back over the reasons why you made certain decisions. You tend to rationalize what you've done, to intellectually review a process that is often intuitive.
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I became obsessed with the true stuff, and that led to shaping 'The Way Back' screenplay somewhat toward a minimalist style, to avoid free-hanging moments, and to hold the music back, so it would never lead you to an emotion, and to try to make the emotions as real as I could.
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It's spiritual, a man that has a past and regrets, but you can as a director take a shot, and there's something in the eyes and the face, you just can't fake it, you can't teach it, and I think Ed Harris has that quality.
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There's such a deep, conservative feeling in 'The way Back.' You go, 'gosh, we've gotten narrow.' So at the moment I think there's a kind of tension, and it's gold rush fever.
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I love a chance to shoot real locations, because in films in the earlier days before people traveled as much, it was exotic to see a film set in Switzerland, and that area has been taken over by CGI, mostly, and fantasy landscapes. It's unusual to see this much landscape, people say it's old fashioned. So what you're referring to is there was that period in the '50s and '60s when there were epics and you saw landscape.
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