The Venice Movie Competition will fete Australian director and screenwriter Peter Weir (Useless Poets Society, The Truman Present, Grasp & Commander) with its honorary Golden Lion at its forthcoming eightieth version.
Accepting the distinction, Weir mentioned: “The Venice Movie Competition and its Golden Lion are a part of the folklore of our craft. To be singled out as a recipient for a lifetime’s work as a director is a substantial honor.”
Born in August 1944, Weir was one of many pivotal figures within the Australian New Wave cinema of the 70s. He started his profession in 1969 when he took a job with the government-funded Commonwealth Movie Unit as a director. Weir struck out on his personal in 1973 and directed his first function movie, the comic-horror The Vehicles That Ate Paris (1974), which he additionally wrote. He received a global viewers with Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), adopted by The Final Wave (1977), for which he additionally co-wrote the screenplay. The World Warfare I drama Gallipoli (1981), primarily based on a narrative by Weir and starring Mel Gibson, received eight Australian Movie Institute awards and burnished Weir’s worldwide popularity. His final Australian manufacturing, which he co-wrote in addition to directed, was The Yr of Residing Dangerously (1982), a drama set in Indonesia across the time of the overthrow of President Sukarno and starred Gibson and Linda Hunt.
In 1985 Weir directed his first Hollywood movie, Witness, for which he obtained his first Academy Award nomination for finest director. The film additionally earned the Oscar for finest authentic screenplay and finest modifying. Weir continued to earn acclaim with movies akin to Useless Poets Society (1989) and The Truman Present (1998). Each movies premiered on the Venice Movie Competition. Weir then directed Grasp and Commander (2003). These three films all earned Weir Oscar nominations for finest director. His different movies included The Mosquito Coast (1986), Inexperienced Card (1990), Fearless (1993), and The Method Again (2010).
“In his movies, Weir combines reflections on private themes and a necessity to succeed in as huge an viewers as doable,” Venice head Alberto Barbera mentioned. “Regardless of the range of the matters he addresses, it isn’t troublesome to find a continuing in his daring, rigorous, and spectacular movie opus: a sensitivity that enables him to cope with extremely up-to-date matters, akin to a fascination with nature and its mysteries, the disaster of adults in consumerist societies, the difficulties of training younger individuals about life, the temptation of bodily and cultural isolation, but additionally the lure of adventurous impulses and the intuition for revolt. Celebrating a style for storytelling and innate romanticism, Weir has bolstered his personal function within the Hollywood institution, all of the whereas preserving his distance from the American film business. Witness, Mosquito Coast, Useless Poets Society, Fearless, The Truman Present, and Grasp & Commander are the foremost levels of an inventive profession that has conserved its underlying integrity, all the way in which contained in the industrial success of the films he has made.”
The 2024 Venice Movie Competition runs August 28 – September 7.