Peter Weir: Encyclopedia II - Peter Weir - Early life and career

Peter Weir - Early life and career

After leaving university in the mid-1960s he joined Sydney television station ATN-7, where he worked as a production assistant on the groundbreaking satirical comedy program The Mavis Bramston Show. During this period, using station facilities, he made his first two experimental short films, Count Vim's Last Exercise and The Life and Flight of Reverend Buckshotte.

Weir then took up a position with the Commonwealth Film Unit (later renamed Film Australia), for whom he made several documentaries, including a short documentary about young people living in the underprivileged outer suburbs of Sydney, and the short rock music film Three Directions In Australian Pop (1970), which featured rare in-concert colour footage of three major Australian rock acts of the period, Spectrum, The Captain Matchbox Whoopee Band and Wendy Saddington. He also directed one section of the three-part, three-director feature film Three To Go (1970), which won an AFI award.

After leaving the CFU, Weir made his first major independent film, the short feature Homesdale (1971), a black comedy which co-starred actress Kate Fitzpatrick and musician and comedian Grahame Bond, who later became famous as the star of The Aunty Jack Show; Weir also played a small role, but this was to be his last significant screen appearance.

Weir's first full-length feature film was the underground cult classic, The Cars That Ate Paris (1974). This paved the way for considerable success in Australia and internationally with the atmospheric Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), based on the novel by Joan Lindsay. Widely credited as a pivotal work in the so-called Australian film renaisssance of the mid-1970s, the film also helped launched the career of internationally renowned Australian cinematographer Russell Boyd. It was widely acclaimed by critics, many of whom praised it as a welcome antidote to the so-called "ocker film" genre, typified by The Adventures of Barry McKenzie and Alvin Purple.

His next feature, The Last Wave, which starred American actor Richard Chamberlain, was a pensive, ambivalent film which expanded on the themes of Picnic, exploring the interaction between the native Aboriginal culture and the European. It was only moderately successful at the time, but Weir scored a major hit with his next film Gallipoli (1981), scripted by renowned Australian playwright David Williamson. It is regarded as classic Australian cinema. Gallipoli was instrumental in making Mel Gibson into a major international film star, but Gibson's co-star Mark Lee, who also received high praise for his role, has made only a handful of film appearances since. The cumulative high point of Peter Weir's early career was the international production The Year of Living Dangerously which united Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver in a story about loyality, idealism, love and ambition intertwined with political and humanitarian themes in the Indonesia of 1965. The film won Linda Hunt an Oscar for best supporting actress.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Early life and career", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki