Peter Weir Quotes

#1. I'd love to work with the people who really got the film industry going again through the '70s: Peter Weir, Bruce Beresford, Gillian Armstrong, Fred Schepisi.

David Wenham

#2. I always say that in my career as an actress, I've always worked with people like David Lynch or Guy Maddin or Peter Weir who are considered not mainstream directors and that could be because they are like my dad. They are pioneers, and pioneers, by definition, invent something new.

Isabella Rossellini

#3. When I met Peter Weir, we did a movie called 'Master and Commander' together, and that's when I really started to understand the power of acting, the power of directing, finding the emotion in performance.

Robert Stromberg

#4. Peter Weir has just shrugged off an ankle injury

Jock Brown

#5. When I was a kid, it was a little bit exciting working with Peter Weir and Robin Williams, but that faded pretty quickly for me.

Robert Sean Leonard

#6. The experience on that movie ( Dead Poets Society ) was, for lack of a better term, life-altering. Peter Weir has a unique talent for making movies that are intelligent but also mainstream. I've never been terribly successful at doing that.

Ethan Hawke

#7. I feel safe in saying this, and that is that Peter Weir is without a doubt one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. I'd open a door in a movie for him if he asked me to.

Paul Bettany

#8. When I began making films, they were just movies: 'What's the new movie? What are you doing?' Now they're called 'adult dramas.'

Peter Weir

#9. The best conversation with Stanley Kubrick is a silent one: you sit in a theatre and watch his films and you learn so much.

Peter Weir

#10. 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.

Peter Weir

#11. 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.

Peter Weir

#12. National film industries tend to move in cycles. In Australia right now, we're on a high, a feeling of potential, which as yet shows no sign of flagging. But the word 'industry' is misleading. A small national cinema has no industry in the Hollywood sense.

Peter Weir

#13. There's almost a fear that if you understood too deeply the way you arrived at choices, you could become self-conscious. In any case, many ideas which are full of personal meaning seem rather banal when you put words to them.

Peter Weir

#14. Music stops you from thinking.

Peter Weir

#15. It was immediately apparent that it was full of tricky ingredients to balance. In fact, I found it very intriguing. What held me back from saying yes to the producer was that I wasn't sure who could play Truman.

Peter Weir

#16. Well, there's that girl on the Internet - although this isn't an example of someone who doesn't know they're on - but there's a girl on the Internet who posts one photograph every two minutes from her bedroom.

Peter Weir

#17. You can mix in certain sensitivities as a filmmaker.

Peter Weir

#18. Normally as a director, you do look at other films and things that are relevant. But with this film, it became impossible because I became so aware of the camera placement.

Peter Weir

#19. There was a point of frustration, where I thought I should just take a film, even though I didn't want to. I was impatient with being at home. But I hung on to the approach I've always had, which is to wait for a project that I could contribute something unique to.

Peter Weir

#20. It doesn't take any imagination at all to feel awed

Peter Weir

#21. With more time I like to see the actors find something of their own places, so I can get their own ideas before I put mine in. Given they have a better idea more often enough.

Peter Weir

#22. 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.

Peter Weir

#23. 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.

Peter Weir

#24. Movies tie things up in an arbitrary length of time, but I have always liked things that aren't fully realised.

Peter Weir

#25. Russell Crowe as Capt. Jack Aubrey in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, .. most unlikely.

Peter Weir

#26. I'm not from a theatrical background where people do like to work it out on some stage space.

Peter Weir

#27. 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.

Peter Weir

#28. I loved Sherlock Holmes as a kid, but I remember being disappointed when he'd come up with these simple explanations for these complex mysteries.

Peter Weir

#29. I'd love to have another film to go on to. I'm in the mood to work. But I have to be patient, you know, to find that particular kind of project. Occasionally I'll write one myself if I can summon up the energy.

Peter Weir

#30. I carve stone. I've got hammers and chisels and I carve from sandstone. I just did a big mural of birds and trees.

Peter Weir

#31. 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.

Peter Weir