Peter Weir: Breaking Boundaries

The director's first five films share a common theme of boundaries, and what happens when those boundaries get crossed.

In 2022, Australian director Peter Weir officially announced his retirement twelve years after his last feature, The Way Back. “For film directors, like volcanoes, there are three major stages: active, dormant and extinct,” Weir told the Sydney Morning Herald. “I think I've reached the latter! Another generation is out there calling ‘action’ and ‘cut’ and good luck to them.” Weir’s career spanned from the 1970s to 2010. He was a forerunner of Australian New Wave Cinema; after building a new film movement in his home country, Weir would go on to become one of the most acclaimed names in Hollywood with features like Witness, Dead Poets Society, The Truman Show, and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World to his credit.

But before he was a Hollywood darling whose name meant a potential awards contender, we can see a fascinating journey through his early work. Working with lower budgets, Weir cemented himself as a keen visual storyteller who knew how to build an almost Hitchcockian sense of dread mixed with surreal touches and dark comedy. In his first five features, the idea of the homefront emerges as central to the storytelling of his movies, and it’s breaking the boundary of that homefront which leads to transformation rather than simply sending characters on a journey where they come home changed. These kinds of homefronts would recur in Weir’s later movies (e.g. the Amish community of Witness, the prison-as-TV-studio in The Truman Show), but you can see the idea crystallize across his first five features.

Homesdale (1971)

Homesdale | Image via The Criterion Collection

Weir’s first feature, a 52-minute, black-and-white indie, also feels like his most experimental although the surreal touches would recur in later movies. The plot borrows a bit from silent and early Hollywood thrillers like The Cat and the Canary and The Most Dangerous Game. A group of wealthy individuals visit the island hunting lodge belonging to an eccentric musician/butcher, and must then participate in a series of twisted games. While we recently seem to get at least one of those movies every year (e.g. The Hunt, The Menu, the upcoming Blink Twice), Weir shows he’s fully comfortable with the darkly comic touches even if the strangeness of the story makes it difficult for the viewers to get completely on board. For example, a character appears to suffer a Psycho-like shower demise in one scene only to emerge unscathed. The upside to this approach is that like the characters, we too have become untethered from reality, and these kinds of bizarre scenes would have far greater effect in Weir’s future works.

The Cars That Ate Paris (1974)

The Cars That Ate Paris | Image via British Empire Films

Weir continues in a darkly comic vein with his next feature, but it’s also one that builds upon the notion of dangerous boundaries. In this film, the townspeople of the rural Australian town of Paris have a peculiar economy—they cause horrendous car accidents to motorists who have the misfortune of coming their way. They then harvest the scrap from the crash, and if there are any survivors, they’re used for medical experiments. It’s a delightfully macabre premise, but tonally, Weir chooses to underplay the scenario for most of the movie to lend the proceedings a horrific reality. That’s not inherently a bad idea, and it does showcase the community as externally malevolent as we view them through our audience surrogate character, Arthur (Terry Camilleri), a victim they seek to add to the town rather than partially lobotomize in the hospital. However, the film’s climax where a bunch of custom vehicles (made from the parts of crashed cars) come to terrorize the town backfires. Even though there’s nothing supernatural at play, the depiction of these rebel cars feels like it’s out of Maximum Overdrive where humans are now at the mercy of sentient machines. It’s a big finish for a movie that previously tried to play as relatively subdued. You still get the sense of crossed boundaries (both geographical, economic, and moral), but Weir wouldn’t put it all quite together until his next movie.