By: debbie lynn elias
Peter Weir is a masterful director. With both a brilliant mind and eye, Weir never ceases to inspire awe and wonder within each film. But beyond that, there is always something very thought provoking about man’s isolation and solitude, man versus nature, human nature versus nature. With THE WAY BACK, Weir gives us one of the most heart wrenching, inspiring and courageous stories of survival to grace the silver screen.
In speaking with Weir, I had a chance to probe the mind of the master as to what compels him to tell stories such as THE WAY BACK, MASTER AND COMMANDER, MOSQUITO COAST, THE TRUMAN SHOW. With thoughtful response, Peter believes, “It’s like many things. It’s your childhood, the way you grew and where you grew up. I live at the bottom of the world in Australia. Television didn’t come in until I was 12. So all those young years were spent outside. I went swimming a lot. We lived by Sydney Harbor. I was always in the water and playing imaginative games. It was just a time where, apart from radio, there was very little stimulation. Pictures [movies] on Saturday afternoon. As much as you can be in a kind of urban setting, I was in the elements. And you might add to that mix. I used to watch the big ships going out to harbor. I knew I’d be on one as soon as I could. I wanted to go to Europe. At 20, I was on one. So, I had a sense of distance and I had 5 weeks at sea. At one period, 10 days in the Indian Ocean without sighting land. So I think very early on I had quite a strong contact with nature for someone with a city background.”
Prevailing in a Weir film is always a survivalist theme with those strong elements of nature and man either railing against them or trying to work with them, and expounding on that, as Weir puts it, “[for man] to find his place in the world. As I’ve read, there’s only one story in you and you tell it in different ways. I would guess and take a stab at saying that it has something to do with being of European stock. I’m essentially Scottish and third generation. But still not quite at home [in Australia]. So perhaps my roots didn’t take as deeply as others and I’ve never quite found ‘home’, as much as I love living in Sydney.”
These restless roots of Weir’s lend themselves well to the thematic juxtapositioning of vastness and solitude within a film, something that always requires technical prowess in all areas, but particularly, a skilled cinematographer as Weir’s right-hand. With THE WAY BACK, Weir looked no further than Russell Boyd, his frequent collaborator since 1975’s PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK.
“When [Russell and I] got together again on MASTER AND COMMANDER, there had been a 20 year gap, but it was as if we had never stopped working and the 20 years disappeared. The shorthand that had been established over several films, Australian films, was accessible again.” Using that shorthand and like-mindedness, with each project, “we look at other movies, sometimes for inspiration, as many directors and their cameramen will do. Then, perhaps more importantly, location surveys becomes a time where we spend a lot of time together. Naturally, as you travel about in a film like this, we talk about what we see and compare notes with each other. Once pre-production and shooting begin, “Generally, we have a similar pace, but not always. I drive it, I think. Where Russell comes in is to tell me what time of day we should do that scene. ‘You’re drawn for this location; I understand why. We must shoot in the afternoon. The light will be more evocative for you. Given the idea of the scene. Long shadows thrown by those hills will give the kind of eeriness you’re looking for. Or the approaching dusk, whatever it is.’ He then passes that on to the first [assistant director]. The first then programs that we’re not on that location until that time. It doesn’t work every time, but most of the time. So, [Russell] will interpret it through light and how the light falls. Russell’s always great on exteriors. He knew how to deal – particularly in Australia – with the very high with overhead light, very hard light.”
With THE WAY BACK, ” here was a picture in which he was going to get a chance to demonstrate all of that ability. He really had all of those scenes timed for a certain period of shooting. Sometimes it was awkward and difficult, but you knew it was worth doing because we knew Russell’s calculations would inevitably be right. So that’s his particular area. Framing, no. Although when he operates [the camera] he’s very good with framing. But he tends to leave that to the [camera] operator. He has a great deal to say about who is the operator. Then I’ll work with the operator.”
Depending on a film and its specific logistics, Weir may or may not, storyboard a film. “MASTER AND COMMANDER was, as you can imagine, highly storyboarded because of the logistics and the cost and confined circumstances. And because the departments needed to know what we were doing. CGI had to link it with what we were doing on set. Ordinarily, I prefer not to do it. I’ll do my own sketches, shot by shot, just on the side of the script, and sometimes I’ll have them printed up for everybody. Night scenes, I generally do because you really need to put them up on the side of the truck or something so everybody knows what we’ve got to achieve in the dark. But otherwise I’ll often throw my own drawings out on the day of [shooting]. I love the possibility that you might have a new idea and I look for them and I keep the door open. To that degree, it’s like the script is a living thing that’s being constantly altered depending on the circumstances because it was conceived inside a room under whatever circumstances you wrote the scene. And the day may bring something entirely different.”
With the stylized precision of much of Weir’s work, one would think there would be little, if any, room for fluidity within the script. Such is not the case. Weir welcomes ad libbing. With THE WAY BACK, there were many scenes that were approached, “Mack Sennett style. ‘Let’s go over there to that interesting outcrop of rock. Let’s try. What could you be doing? What about lighting a fire? Setting up a camp or what about digging for water?’ So, I had a number of anecdotal things that went out because of length problems and the more scenes I had, I found that as interesting as they may be, it dissipated the tension and simply became difficult to watch. It was too onerous.” Unfortunately, unlike with many other directors, these type of scenes don’t even make it as DVD extras. “I never include them. There’s a little kind of ‘Making Of’ with a few bits and pieces. I’m bothered that the scenes don’t have full sound mix. There’s just not enough time to make it sound as good as the movie.”
Equally as important as the cinematography in a Weir film is the sound. With THE WAY BACK, you can hear nuances in the piercing wind with discernable careful balancing of voices. You hear little ice pellets hitting a roof or window; grains of sand swirling or the sound of individual feet slogging through sand or cracking ice. According to Weir, ” [smiling] Those pellets you talked about hitting an upper window. I remember the discussion about it. In this case, I had Richard King as the sound designer, as he was in MASTER AND COMMANDER where he won the Academy Award for it. He’s so good that I have to do far less. We’ll have consultations and he’ll have an option, naturally. But what options! What a mind! And we share a lot of sounds. He knows that I’ll tend to keep music out because obviously a lot of good work can be lost with the orchestra and require a different mix. But I said to him right off with this that, ‘I think music will come in in the last third of the film. It’s more or less suggested. When we want to feel a change, that will be when music enters.’ In fact, I think most of the music comes in after the death of the second person. So, I said, ‘You’re going to be carrying these scenes. Let’s talk about the mood. The mood of the desert, the mood of the forest.’ And we would talk in a way about what we read as children; what did you think first of the forest. And he said, ‘Oh, I’ve got some interesting high wind recording I made in Canada or somewhere.’ He does a lot of field recording and has a good library. But he goes out and does things specifically for the picture. So, it’s a pleasure to walk into the mix with him and know that he’s going to have this orchestra of sound and you can make your comments then, but you always have an option.’
It is rare to find sound buttressing the visual and heightening the emotion and tension, but with a magician like Richard King it’s almost expected. “He’s close to being music sometimes. Take the opening credits and then the titles about what had happened in Poland and then we go to the first scene. It’s all sound effects. He came up with this interesting kind of eerie, sort of creepy sound. He told me what they were and so in mixing them in – and we had a brilliant mixer, Doug Hemphill, and I shouldn’t leave him out of this whole conversation because he then works so brilliantly with what Rich has prepared – so, I was watching them and I turned to the editor, Lee Smith, and said to him, ‘This is just like watching a composer working.’ Lee Smith is also a sound nut and he’s done sound editing on a number of my films. It’s all very like minded. And with this, we thought it just suited my central concept of, if in a way we were to believe – you know, you’ve got to believe what you see on the screen and sometimes it’s more important than others – in this case, as we’re building to the tension of who will survive, and I wanted you to be close to the characters to have picked up enough of them to feel that you wanted them to get through. So, when it came to life-threatening situations for some of them, that you would be very involved. The only way to achieve that was that everything that came before that was as realistic as possible. Not in a documentary fashion but in a kind of theatrical way.”
Perhaps one of the most emotionally devastating and intense, yet inspiring, films made to date by Weir, THE WAY BACK had a profound personal affect on him. “I think I’m still very affected by the interviews I did with survivors and by the accounts I read and by the thought of the millions who perished. That is never far from me. I’m probably picking up a new book or, some poetry I travel with that I’ve written out by hand from various books. Mandelstam, the Russian poet who died in the camps, is one. I’ll look those up sometimes and re-read them. It’s a funny thing about this. When I was in Beliz shooting MOSQUITO COAST, one of the crew members said, ‘You know, my mother is really a peasant.’ He was a local guy. ‘And she’s got no education and she doesn’t believe people have been to the moon. She said, how can that be possible.’ And I said, ‘Well, if you could take her to the moon, she’d believe you.’ And he said, ‘Yes, of course.’ I think sometimes with history that we read in school, it’s in a book, it’s in a black and white documentary, and some part of us doesn’t believe it. So, I think art can do it, whether in books or film. I think that I’ve been exposed to that. I really know [the gulags] happened and that real people, in a far away country to mine, Australia, in the Soviet Union as it was then and in Europe generally, really did go through these things. I am profoundly and forever affected by that and will continue to read on. I think it’s given me the gift of knowledge which I didn’t have when I started. I knew very little. I read Solzhenitsyn as a boy, but not much else. And I was certainly mixed up in the anti-war protests of the Vietnam era and was somewhat skeptical about our own propaganda, were we inventing stuff about the Russians. And now I know. I know the awful truth that this did happen and on a massive scale. One of the great tragedies of the 20th Century. Plus, I learned how to get rid of mosquitoes in Siberia – by boiling bark.”
