The Truman Show (1998)

2. The Truman Show (1998) • Peter Weir (Auteur - Director) • Born on 21 August 1944 in Sydney, Australia to the father of a real estate agent. He attended Vaucluse High School and Scots College before enrolling at the University of Sydney in 1962 to study law. • After a dull year he dropped out and began to work for his father although he refused to sell houses that he did not like himself. • In 1965 he set off to Europe on a long cruise ship. This was to be a strange and formative experience.

4. The Truman Show (1998) • Peter Weir (Director) • The boat had no in-ship entertainment, so Weir and his friends decided to produce shows, which they made using the closed circuit television system on board. • They were inspired by the then hit show, The Mavis Bramstorm Show, an early Australian comedy satire

5. The Truman Show (1998) • Peter Weir (Director) • The making of the sketches on board the ship awakened Weir to his hunger for creative endeavour, and the power of the visual image: ‘I felt a tremendous excitement about what I was doing. Suddenly, this (filmmaking) was very natural to me.’ (Peter Weir)

7. The Truman Show (1998) • Peter Weir (Director) • After Europe, Weir returned home to work for Channel Seven in Sydney as a stage hand and it was here that he gained the experience to go forward and make his first film, Count Vim’s Last Exercise (1967) – a 15 minute satire about bureaucracy. • From here Weir went on and directed his second film, The Life and Flight of the Rev. Buck Shotte(1968) – this reveals the life of an eccentric American preacher and his new religion. • From the success of these shorts Weir moved into television and directed segments for his favourite show, The Mavis Bramston Show

8. The Truman Show (1998) • Peter Weir (Director) • In 1969, he joined the Australian Commonwealth Film Unit which was a prime training ground – he had finally found his destiny and the place to hone his skills. ‘It was like a school. It was the university that I had looked for in 1963.’ (Peter Weir)

9. The Truman Show (1998) • Peter Weir (Director) • In 1970, he directed Michael, part of a three part ACFU production, which won the Grand Prix prize of the Australian Film Institute. • In 1971, he made Homesdale, which won the AFI’s Second Grand Prix. • In 1972, Weir returned to Europe where he wrote scripts and learned his craft on feature film sets in England. When he returned he again directed some more short films.

11. The Truman Show (1998) • Peter Weir (Director) • In 1974, Weir directed his first feature film, The Cars That Ate Paris. The small Australian town of Paris is besieged by a group of hoodlums in outlandishly customised cars (one has porcupine-like spines growing out of it). • It is bizarre and was not a box office success but it was not forgettable and it did gather critical interest, enough to allow Weir to make his next film and first great triumph.

13. The Truman Show (1998) • Peter Weir (Director) • Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) was a breakthrough film. Based upon a successful novella, it concerns a party of schoolgirls who in 1900 vanished without a trace from the famous natural monolith, Hanging Rock, not far from Woodend, to the north of Melbourne, Australia. • A lush period piece, despite the beguiling storyline, assured a warm reception at home and overseas. It was the first real Australian film to gain wide recognition via the box office and it triumphed at local and international film festivals. It quickly became the symbol of the new Australian film industry and made Weir into an international star.

15. The Truman Show (1998) • Peter Weir (Director) • The Last Wave (1977) featured an American icon and film star, Richard Chamberlain, and had international financial backing. • It tells the story of a lawyer (Chamberlain) who becomes involved in the defence of Aborigines and is recognised by them as a spiritual heir to their heritage.

17. The Truman Show (1998) • Peter Weir (Director) • Gallipoli (1981) written by famous Australian playwright David Williamson, and starring the soon to be famous Mel Gibson, tells the tale of a pair of friends who are sports rivals in Western Australia before the ‘join-up’ and are shipped to Gallipoli. • The film is a masterpiece, visually stunning, emotionally charged with a powerful anti-war sentiment underpinning it. It was an enormous success, gaining 9 AFI awards and a bucket load of money.

19. The Truman Show (1998) • Peter Weir (Director) • The Year of Living Dangerously (1982), based upon the Christopher Koch novel it concerns an Australian journalist (Mel Gibson) sent to cover the political turmoil in Indonesia during the Sukarno regime. • Gibson’s character meets up with an English woman (Sigourney Weaver, hot after Alien), and they have a torrid love affair against the backdrop of political intrigue and danger. • The film was beautiful to watch and made Weir a household name.

21. The Truman Show (1998) • Peter Weir (Director) • Weir moved to America and accepted an offer from Paramount to direct a crime thriller set among an Amish community in Pennsylvania. • The film was called Witness(1985) and starred Harrison Ford; it became one of the most critically acclaimed films of that year, a box office hit which picked up no less than 8 Oscar nominations including Best Director.

23. The Truman Show (1998) • Peter Weir (Director) • The Mosquito Coast (1986) followed but it was not a great box office success. The story concerns the eccentric Allie Fox (Harrison Ford) who abandons what he regards as the corrupt society of America to go and live among the simple people of the Mosquito Coast, in Central America. • There he tries to set up a Utopia with disastrous consequences.

25. The Truman Show (1998) • Peter Weir (Director) • Dead Poet’s Society (1989) gave Weir another hit. It starred the charismatic Robin Williams in the part of an inspiring teacher John Keating, a man who urges his students of a uptight 1950s New England private school to ‘seize the day’, and live life to the full. • It proved a great success and bridged the gap between art house and popular cinema.

27. The Truman Show (1998) • Peter Weir (Director) • Weir’s next film, Green Card (1990), was even more successful due to its casting and quirkiness. It brought together American favourite Andie McDowell and French Superstar Gerard Depardieu. • The plot revolves around a Frenchman arranging a bogus marriage with an American in order to obtain a ‘green card’ (work visa). The fake relationship predictably becomes blossoms into a real one for a classic romantic climax.

29. The Truman Show (1998) • Peter Weir (Director) • In 1993, Weir directed Fearless which was about a group of people who survive a plane crash. Among the characters is Jeff Bridges, who believes he has become invulnerable. • He becomes increasingly reckless with his life, until his senses are restored after another near-death experience. Despite some big names and Weir’s style of direction (lyrical images and seriousness) the film was not successful.

31. The Truman Show (1998) • Peter Weir (Director) • After a considerable interval away from the camera, Weir returned and hit the headlines in 1998 with The Truman Show. • A post-modern fantasy about a man, Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey), whose whole life is a ‘reality television’ show. Truman discovers that his life is a fraud, and eventually escapes the show. • This is a powerful film and involves Carrey in one of his very few serious roles. It was another box office smash.

33. The Truman Show (1998) • Andrew Niccol (Writer) • The film is based upon a script written by Andrew Niccol (writer and director of the 1997 sci-fi film Gattaca). • Here he explains his interest in the subject matter: ‘I often felt people were lying to me…I used to think the idea was ludicrously farfetched, but as the 90s media circus became more extreme now I have to wonder…We decided to make Truman a prisoner is paradise.’ (Andrew Niccol)

35. The Truman Show (1998) • Peter Weir (Director) • Weir has since completed Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003), a historical drama starring Russell Crowe which picked up ten Oscar nominations including Best Director and Best Picture.

37. The Truman Show (1998) • Peter Weir (Director) • The Way back (2010) is a war drama film about a group of prisoners who escape from a Siberian Gulag camp during World War II. Weir also wrote the screenplay with Keith Clarke, inspired by The Long Walk (1955), a book by Sławomir Rawicz, a Polish POW in the Soviet Gulag. It was nominate for only one Oscar and lost money at the box office. • Peter Weir is widely accepted as one of the few genuine Australian film ‘auteurs’ (directors with a personal vision and considerable creative control). • Despite the many box office hits he has had, and his long association with major studios, he is taken very seriously as a director whose work is always of a high quality.