Peter Weir is one of the most acclaimed filmmakers working today. Yet aside from dedicated cinephiles, his name might not garner much recognition because he isn’t a director with an instantly identifiable style.
Instead, Weir changes his approach with every film to suit the story, leading to a career of wonderfully diverse projects like Witness and The Truman Show.
“There are stylists like David Lynch with a great tradition through the history film and in a sense their films are about themselves,” Weir told Metro. “Whereas I fall more in line the other great strand of directors who are storytellers.”
True to form, Weir’s latest film The Way Back is unlike anything he’s done before, a harrowing journey of prisoners of war escaping the horrors of a Gulag labour camp only to find themselves having to traverse a frost-bitten Siberian forest and the heat-stroke inducing Gobi desert to find freedom.
When asked what drew him to the material Weir explained, “It was a period of history that I didn’t know much about. We know a lot about the German atrocities (the Second World War), but I hadn’t read much about the Soviets.”
