The Venice Film Festival will fete Australian director and screenwriter Peter Weir (Dead Poets Society, The Truman Show, Master & Commander) with its honorary Golden Lion at its forthcoming 80th edition.
Accepting the honor, Weir said: “The Venice Film Festival and its Golden Lion are part of the folklore of our craft. To be singled out as a recipient for a lifetime’s work as a director is a considerable honor.”
Born in August 1944, Weir was one of the pivotal figures in the Australian New Wave cinema of the 70s. He began his career in 1969 when he took a job with the government-funded Commonwealth Film Unit as a director. Weir struck out on his own in 1973 and directed his first feature film, the comic-horror The Cars That Ate Paris (1974), which he also wrote. He won an international audience with Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), followed by The Last Wave (1977), for which he also co-wrote the screenplay. The World War I drama Gallipoli (1981), based on a story by Weir and starring Mel Gibson, won eight Australian Film Institute awards and burnished Weir’s international reputation. His last Australian production, which he co-wrote as well as directed, was The Year of Living Dangerously (1982), a drama set in Indonesia around the time of the overthrow of President Sukarno and starred Gibson and Linda Hunt.
In 1985 Weir directed his first Hollywood film, Witness, for which he received his first Academy Award nomination for best director. The movie also earned the Oscar for best original screenplay and best editing. Weir continued to earn acclaim with films such as Dead Poets Society (1989) and The Truman Show (1998). Both films premiered at the Venice Film Festival. Weir then directed Master and Commander (2003). These three movies all earned Weir Oscar nominations for best director. His other films included The Mosquito Coast (1986), Green Card (1990), Fearless (1993), and The Way Back (2010).
“In his films, Weir combines reflections on personal themes and a need to reach as vast an audience as possible,” Venice head Alberto Barbera said. “Despite the diversity of the topics he addresses, it is not difficult to discover a constant in his daring, rigorous, and spectacular film opus: a sensitivity that allows him to deal with highly up-to-date topics, such as a fascination with nature and its mysteries, the crisis of adults in consumerist societies, the difficulties of educating young people about life, the temptation of physical and cultural isolation, but also the lure of adventurous impulses and the instinct for rebellion. Celebrating a taste for storytelling and innate romanticism, Weir has reinforced his own role in the Hollywood establishment, all the while keeping his distance from the American movie industry. Witness, Mosquito Coast, Dead Poets Society, Fearless, The Truman Show, and Master & Commander are the major stages of an artistic career that has conserved its underlying integrity, all the way inside the commercial success of the movies he has made.”
The 2024 Venice Film Festival runs August 28 – September 7.
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