Peter Lindsay Weir

Peter Lindsay Weir, born in 1944, Australian motion-picture director, many of whose films depict rational society as a fragile artifice. Born in Sydney, Weir attended the University of Sydney but left without graduating to work in his father’s real estate business. He then quit that job in 1966 to travel in Europe. After returning to Australia, he worked in television as a stagehand, and during the late 1960s and early 1970s made several short films and documentaries.

Weir’s first feature-length film, The Cars That Ate Paris (1974), was a comedy set in rural Australia. It was followed by Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), a mystery story set in 1900 about the unexplained disappearance of three girls while on a picnic near their boarding school. The film’s deliberately brooding pace and mystical overtones made it a commercial and critical success and established Weir as a major figure in Australia’s film industry.

Weir enhanced his international reputation with The Last Wave (1977), which dramatizes the conflicts between white society and Aboriginal culture in Australia; Gallipoli (1981), a World War I drama; and The Year of Living Dangerously (1983), a romance set in Indonesia in the mid-1960s. In Witness (1985) a wounded police officer from Philadelphia hides from his enemies in rural Amish country. In Mosquito Coast (1986), based on a Paul Theroux novel, Harrison Ford plays an obsessed inventor who takes his family to live in the jungles of Central America. Dead Poets Society (1989) concerns an inspirational teacher and his students at an exclusive prep school.

Weir’s success continued in the 1990s. Green Card (1990) is a comedy about two people who marry only so that the man can become a United States citizen, but then they fall in love. Fearless (1993) is about the survivors of a plane crash. The Truman Show (1998), a satire on celebrity and corporate greed, portrays a man who gradually becomes aware that he is the star of a television show and that everyone he knows is an actor playing a part. Weir then wrote and directed an early 19th-century naval adventure, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003), adapted from the novels of Patrick O’Brian. Weir was nominated for an Academy Award for best director in 1985 for Witness and again in 1989 for Dead Poets Society.