Central to most of Peter Weir's films is the attempt to move beyond the surface strata of behaviour, beyond what is readily percieved, to a realm of experience that is equally 'real' but less tangible. In this sense his work reveals a strong impulse towards the abstract, towards the collapse of the forms of the everyday into a stream of "sights and sounds and colors...closer to music". This impulse generally belongs to the practitioners of a particular kind of experimental film, yet here it is firmly rooted in the methods of traditional narrative cinema. The sense of the strange which is evoked in 'Picnic at Hanging Rock' or 'The Last Wave' is initially a creation of a narrative arrangement that refuses to explain itself, that denies its viewers access to ready-made explanations. Like Tom (Tony Llewellyn-Jones) in the former film, the viewer might dwell on the old way: "There's a solution somewhere. There's gotta be!" But part of the pleasure of these films lies in the way in which they refuse such expectations of an easy satisfaction.

The apparent realism of their fictions is insistently challenged, and enriched, by the intrusion of incidents which disturb a familiar order. Like his characters, the viewers of Weir's films are repeatedly faced with the mysteries of the moment, experiences that refuse to succumb to the kinds of patterns imposed by conventional understanding. The films seems to hover as if on the edge of a dream-world, or a place of nightmares, and while Weir's work since 'The Cars that Ate Paris' certainly cannot be classified in the realm of 'horror' film, at least according to the customary use of the label, nonetheless they share this element in common with them. They are pervaded by the inexplicable, by the sense of awe imbedded in a fleeting glimpse of an unknown terrain, an incursion beyond the looking-glass.

The look which guides the viewer is often that of a character - Michael (Dominic Gurad) as he gazes in wonderment at the "Botticelli angels" in 'Picnic at Hanging Rock', David Burton (Richard Chamberlain), fearful of his vision of 'the last wave', or Archy (Mark Lee) and Frank (Mel Gibson) faced by the floating funfair of the threatening shore in Gallipoli. But the starting point is always the everyday, for without that, the films' 'other' dimension would have no context, no point of entrance for the viewer. The characters who inhabit this territory of the familiar seem to exist outside of psychology, archetypes of the common person, their individual features serving as particular aspects of "the greater whole". Their path through the films leads them towards a confrontation with nothing less than their destiny (the rock, the wave, gallipoli via the pyramids), beyond the repressions of a Victorian education, beyond the comforts of middle-class Sydney, beyond the constraints of an Australia isolated from all but an impression of the rest of the world.

Very conscious. It’s very important for me to be constantly asking myself, in the scripting process or during the shoot, what the audience will understand from this or that, and what it will expect as a consequence. I feel at liberty to play around to the extent that I can control what I want them to know or feel at any given point. And I guess I like to keep them a step behind or to subvert their expectations.

It’s difficult to see things in any broad view like that; but no, I don’t think so. I’ve seen reviews of some of my films which have seen them in terms of black humour, but I don’t think that’s accurate. I suppose it depends on the way you see things. Maybe bizarre or strange, but I prefer words like enigmatic, curious and fascinating. When I think about humour, I don’t break things down into “black” or anything else. I remember the word “sick” being used in a review of a couple of sketches I did in my university days, but that’s a long time ago.

Yes. I have an idea for a comedy I’d like to do. My beginnings in this whole business really where in comedy, as a writer-performer in university revue-type things. I am a great Monty Python fan and I remember John Lennon saying that instead of being born a Beatle, he’d rather have been born a Monty Python. I wouldn’t have minded that. I love their humour. They may not be on the screens this week, but their humour is in the air. I shot a commercial with John Cleese and we struck up a sort of friendship. We talked about doing something together some day.

I do see myself as exercising a control, but I am not sure what that really tells us. I think the word auteur has become devalued and we must put it aside. it was a very useful word during the late 1950s and ‘60s, when the cinema was so polarised, but with the great changes in the 1970s and ‘80s I don’t think it is so useful.

I was broke after finishing Cars That Ate Paris and there was an awful moment when I didn’t know if I could get any work. I contacted the ABC drama department and asked if they knew of me; a guarded “yes” was the answer. So I said, “look, I’ve a couple of short stories I’ve written. I’d like to talk to you about developing them into something.” I got a very quick “no” on that one. They weren’t interested. I don’t know if things have changed.

So , I was very glad when Luke’s Kingdom turned up. I did two episodes and, once I had accepted the terms of the way it was made, I enjoyed it. There were really two directors: the producer, Tony Essex, and the director of the episode. Tony directly controlled the scripting and the cutting room. I think I accepted that as a challenge: to see what I could do, two hands behind my back. And, of course, I had no control over the casting or the music. I think I was successful in certain sequences, but it was Tony’s show. I was able to experiment, however, and Tony encouraged it. He was more a director than a producer and he didn’t care about the budget. he didn’t care about excess and he even encouraged it.

Whether it was a very good thing or not I don’t know, but it was his vision and I thought, in accepting the money, I really had to try and execute his intentions. So it wasn’t really me there.

Yes. I thought he’d chosen a great location on the banks of the Turron River out of Sofala. It was a country I knew of course from Cars, which I had shot in Sofala. In fact, I remembered driving to the location with a car full of actors in period costume and passing the rusty wrecks of Holdens in the backyards of Sofala homesteads. It was a pleasure to get back into country to which I had already responded.

But Tony also duplicated a location on Smokey Dawson’s Ranch in Sydney. I didn’t get the same feeling from that kind of scrubby, city bushland on the edge of the city as I’d got from the Turron country. There is something unpleasant about a lot of countryside around Sydney, I think.

They did interest me, particularly in The Last Wave. I think my films are a kind of quest for me even though I don’t consciously think about it when I am making them. When I face questions about unreality, the bizarre, black humour, any of these areas, I feel the labels are often the wrong way around. The great black joke is that we agree on a certain reality that’s to me plainly full of holes, with great gaps of reason.

I don’t know. I think eroticism has been present in my films and it’s an area I find interesting. But I think the subjects of sex is dwarfed by larger questions. I prefer Jung to Freud. I think Freud was a dazzling, original thinker, but I don’t feel his theory was ever tested because it was submerged in a moral debate. It was really never fully explored or talked about, because the key issues were lost in the way moral and religious issues were allowed to interfere.

But I’m more inspired by Jung. For him, sex was a part of the great whole and, in that way, I think sexuality is in my work. I direct with my body: I use my sexuality to direct. I have explored the masculine and feminine in my own personality to direct actors and actresses, and that’s meant they must explore their duality too. In this way I think I’ve gained from Jung. When I talk about him, by the way, I must say I have not studied the major body of his work. I have only read the popular works, those half a dozen volumes he wrote for people like me. But it was enough to find some computability and to expand my mind.

I was never really interested in that side of the film. I didn’t see it as a part of its theme. I remember when I went to London for the promotion, that that was the area which most interested the British critics. Comments ranged from talk of repressed sexuality to the less subtle, talking about lesbianism and so on. But it didn’t interest me. For me, the grand theme was Nature, and even the girl’s sexuality was as much a part of that as the lizard crawling across the top of the rock. They were part of the same whole: part of larger questions.

Perhaps, but that kind of approach is quite foreign to me. The words and analytical thinking, which come from your side of the table, represent something I have unlearned. It is a tool that I was brought up with through my education, something I was trained to use and something I have found I didn’t want to use or live with. I am not trying to imply something mystical, simply that to use words like this, is very distant for me. I think what I have done in my own sort of personality course over the past 15 years is what enables me to make films, or to make them my way, and I think this sort of approach gets in the way. Of course, I sat with Cliff Green and worked things out, and that was a necessary process to get something on to paper, something an audience can understand - a blueprint for the film. Perhaps it would have been easy to talk about this closer to the film, but now, as I am left with a horde of images from that film, it’s only the way I began the film, or began thinking about it.

It’s an interesting part of the balance, but it didn’t interest me then, just as it doesn’t now. In the film, what interested me were other areas: sounds, smells, the way hair fell on shoulders, images - just pictures.

I found it very interesting as an Australian whose origins were in the British Isles, to use the film to sort of wander through the ruins of the class system. And then I went back to that from another angle with The Plumber: to look at class in contemporary terms, to what we might have become in our society where we don’t seem to have such a clear working-class, middle-class, aristocracy thing.

Yes, that is if your interest lies in a clear line between the two. Again I think it comes back to concepts, on the way you see things. A question that is often asked is, “Why are you filmmakers so concerned with the past? Why are you making so many period pictures? What we need are contemporary films that are relevant.” But to me, that just never was the question. Past, present or future - they are all relevant, at least as far as filmmaking goes.

Since I've become aware that I do this, I am attempting to stop. If something becomes self-conscious and you are continuing to do it, you are just acting yourself out.

The Last Wave was, in a sense, that externalising a feeling that came from picking up a head in Tunisia, and the bottle [Eno Salts] that I picked up, among other items, at Gallipoli. But now having done interviews where these things have been photographed and looked at. It is as if for The Year of Living Dangerously I will have to go and collect something in Indonesia, which is absolutely absurd.

Nevertheless, that kind of connection with a story is important for me; a feeling that it is somehow a part of me - that I am part of the process of the film.

In this particular incident in Tunisia, we had stopped at some Roman ruins and I had a kind of premonition. The driver was tooting the horn of the car to make us hurry back, but I delayed. I am glad, because I found a little piece of stone with three parallel lines on it. I pulled it up and it was a hand, a fist attached to a head - about the size of a doll's head. It was a marble figure of some sort, cut from some sort of relief. I later got it dated at the University in Sydney.

I then wondered what was the experience I had passed through, and found myself thinking of it happening to a lawyer or a journalist - someone who dealt with the rational, and with "facts". I let that thought hang about for a while and joined it with some other thoughts I'd been having. A pattern formed and a story began to emerge around that of a lawyer who stumbled across areas of the irrational or the unreal.

I think there are all sorts of other things, too. It may have been important at one point, but I like to feel I am moving in other areas now. We mentioned comedy earlier, and in talking to John Cleese we threw around a couple of ideas and a couple of funny situations. So the search for this story is apparently not following that kind of route.

But the area of creativity is obviously one that can be approached by various avenues. You have to leave yourself open. Just as people jog to keep their bodies fit, there is the equivalent mentally. You must somehow have a set of some sort of exercises. I am not talking about some sort of transcendental meditation, because that's not really worked for me, but you must, somehow, have your mind open like a child. Obviously that is not easy.

I think it was the latter, because there was so much I didn't understand about the Aboriginal people. I still don't understand and I did not want to draw conclusions on their behalf. Also, I had to use the English language when talking with tribal people, and that further opened up the danger of false conclusions.

In talking with them, I had to talk about my character, of course, and what I felt. I had to do that in a particular way to try and get round the language, communication problem. With the tribal people, I did that in a very aggressive way; I had to. The tentative approach just didn't feel right to me; the sort of approach at the "white man's burden" level. I had to come in as an equal, somehow, and that was very difficult.

I also knew that if I thought about it too much, I would never start anything. So I came in talking about what I felt was my own "missing link" and feeling. I tried to explain my attitudes to my own past and the kind of things that I'd felt on finding the Roman head.

I went to meet Nanjiwarra in Darwin. I just steamed in there, not really knowing what the result might be, but just taking a gamble, an intuitive guess, that I was in the right direction. We communicated rapidly, and I learnt things that I wouldn't have through another process.

I have loved a number of his films and, yes, there are areas where our paths have crossed. But in other areas we diverge. His treatment of sexuality or sex is different from mine or is more predominant. He uses that as a part of his tension. I use other systems. It's like waving at someone in the distance and sharing a smile. But that's about as much as I know about him.

Th ending is still a problem for me.

Both elements were involved, but I think I have to be honest and say that I didn't find the solution to the problem of how to end the film. there is no ending and I was painted into a corner. I have seen it happen with other filmmakers dealing in this kind of area. You can't end it. You can try to be clever, and I tried a couple of other endings that I did stop short of any wave, but they were just too neat. The ending just plagued me, and it was an extremely unhappy period. Part way through the film we broke over Easter. I remember a terrible few days wrestling with this ending and pretending I had found a solution to it. But I certainly had no plan I failed to execute.

No. It's just the last chapter is missing. I just have to leave it; don't look back.

It's something that comes and goes. I mean, I'd say that, as of this moment, I am not interested, but these things don't go away, they are presumably part of your make-up. They come back when you have worked through it.

Yes, I think they are an essential part of civilisation and it's given us particular problems as displaced Europeans who chose, for some extraordinary reasons, to leave our myths behind. I think our films in this period are, at times, an attempt to rediscover them or to reinvigorate them or even to create them, as the Americans have done. I think that part of their mythology can be seen on the screen. They didn't invent it, but they plugged into something. In this context, the ending to The Last Wave becomes less important to me. It was in the centre of the film that my interest lay, in coming close to something and failing to achieve it. I think if I did the film today, I would make it less extravagant from the "disaster" element and stay in the law court.

No. I think you can look at it in a number of ways. I think it was dealing with some very powerful truth, in fact, I was working out while making the film. I don't mean like working out a personal problem, but the chemistry of the people involved and the material we were dealing with became more interesting than the script itself. There was a highly-charged atmosphere.

As most people know, that's true of any film set, given that the material has some potential in it, and this was particularly true with The Last Wave. I have never had one quite like that and others would have taken the material in different directions. But having Nanjiwarra and Gulpilil in the city, dealing with that material produced tensions that were quite extraordinary. And all I could do is try and hold on to it.

It was very exciting, far more interesting than the rules for constructing a dramatic story, even though it may have led me away from finding a satisfactory conclusion for the film.

No, it wasn't that so much as being in a period where I had no project ready to go. I had this short story and needed some money.

Yes, I didn't think there was enough in it for me.

In the end I couldn’t let it go.

Only when I saw it come out on television with the commercial breaks and the small screen. There was a sense of some sort of loss.

I always think of it as a companion piece to Homesdale and Cars.

Yes.

Well, the U.S. to me now, after so many trips and so many projects that weren't right, has really come down to almost a group of people. I have a number of friends there now, in the business mostly, and I would like to work with them or use them in various capacities. But I feel, at the moment, that it is right for me here. Australia is the most exciting filmmaking country in the world. How long it will last I don't know. These things fade, as film history teaches us.

So, my interest is here now, though if I had found something particularly exciting in the U.S., I would probably go. But it wouldn't be going over for a oncer and then coming back.

I don't think that's a good example because the McElroys [producers] and I were just extremely naive. Those were very early days and we thought we were in with the right people, and we weren't. We just got ripped-off. But even if they hadn't done what they did with the cut, the film still wouldn't have worked. So I am not worried about that.

I think it's just that they are choked with craft over there. There is just too much refinement, too many filters, too much processing of material. Talk about losing the art! They sure have the craft in great quantity, but if I hear that word "development" again I think I will just cancel the ticket. It's great to put the script through the punishing process they invented, but there is a time when you have to make it or drop it, and both those decisions they will defer as long as they can - to the detriment of the projects.

Yes.

Yes, it was a great idea of David's, linking the two failures.

Yes, I think this is evident from the fact that we are going into another one. We had disagreements, but there were only one or two instances where we walked away thinking maybe we won't get over this one. The film and the ideas involved were bigger than we were, so we could always meet again under those terms.

There are similarities but only superficial ones. The tone is very different. I love the music of Vangelis and had planned to use him for some time, and there he is on the soundtrack of Chariots.

Apparently, but at it's heart I don't think so. Its source came from a visit to Gallipoli in 1976, which was the period when I was also working on The Last Wave. So I think you have to look at it as within the same period. I feel it's my most successful film because it has stripped away the cleverness and tricks with a process of refining and simplifying, which I think I began in The Plumber.

I think that's something that I have learnt. It's such a long apprenticeship you have to serve in films.

Yes, but I disagree with an aspect of what you have just said. I do think the more you show, the less real it becomes.

I think we know Frank. He was a survivor and a type one can still observe today.

I saw a headline in the paper today saying, "Americans claim neutron bomb will prevent war". So what does "anti-war" mean? Everyone is anti-war. I think the term was invented in some publicists office. When the war happened, it happened. I didn't really care why it happened. I have heard too much about that. I did it at school and never believed a word of all the explanations of how it happened. My interest was not in the causes of war but in the men who went.

Both, I think. Quite often I have been surprised to find that music which gives me inspiration during the shoot just doesn't work with the cut. So I have to put it aside; it has served its purpose. In the case of the pan pipes in Picnic, Bruce Smeaton and I were looking for the appropriate sound and the closest I ever got was some Celtic music of Alain Stivel's. But it wasn't right. Then Jim McElroy walked in with this beautiful and appropriate music and said, "I’ve got it." He'd heard it on television and there it was; he was right.

Yes. It struck me as very funny. I also liked the music very much. But it's funny how you change with things. At first, my response was purely a visual one - all the people in those clothes by the water - and that pleased me. But as we played the Mozart on the day of filming I just drifted into some other area. I thought, what beautiful music, and who cares about what happened to some British culture and who cares about the point of the British in Australia or the Europeanness in our landscape. Suddenly it was too obvious and nothing compared to that piece of music.

This obviously happens as you are directing. You drift into other areas. You forget trying to be clever. I constantly try to strip myself of cleverness, because I think that old adage is true: that while mastering your craft you lost your art. So many first films have such vigour, energy and originality, yet later works often gain in craft and lose that fire.

Yes. I think it's something that's come naturally to me and it's something I know will just happen. But I don't know how.

The scene you mention came from the description of a veteran, a man called Jack Tarrant who came in as a reinforcement. He said "How can I possibly describe it to you? It was a hospital ship and it had its red cross and green lights on. I can't think of the words to describe it. It was just not what we expected." And that was enough of an inspiration. I was so grateful for the experience that came through what he said. He had given it to me.

Evan Williams' description was very apt, I think, for it was exactly how I thought of it.

I love sound. I work with it constantly. I feel it's the final creative stage that a director has at his command. I have always worked with Greg Bell and Helen Brown, who are a great team. We have very inventive sessions which can change the tone and mood of a scene.

They are constantly experimenting , mostly with familiar sounds. They like to work at replacing the natural sound with some other kind of sound: It's part of the secret of creating that atmosphere when a footstep, in fact, is being created by something either electronic or inconsequential - crushing a packet of chips or something. It gives the sound an edge. But you'd never pick it.