Ethan Hawke reveals that director Peter Weir “lost interest in movies” after a couple of projects that didn’t sound the easiest to tackle.
It’d be hard to find any filmmaker who didn’t wish they had the CV of the wonderful director Peter Weir. His collection of movies includes Dead Poets Society, The Truman Show, Fearless, Master & Commander: The Far Side Of The World and his breakthrough, Picnic At Hanging Rock. But his last movie as director was back in 2010, The Way Back. Since then, the closest he’s come to directing again was Shantaram, which had Johnny Depp attached but ultimate saw Weir walking away over ‘creative differences’.
Ethan Hawke, who was given a huge career break by Weir in Dead Poets Society, has now revealed in an interview with IndieWire that Weir has effectively retired from directing now. And he implies heavily that it was two movie stars that ended his desire to make films.
“He lost interest in movies”, Hawke tells the outlet. “He really enjoyed that work when he didn’t have actors giving him a hard time. Russell Crowe and Johnny Depp broke him”.
Hawke makes the point that for Weir to make the films at the scale he was, he needed “a Jim Carrey or a Russell Crowe”. However, “I think Harrison Ford and Gerard Depardieu were his sort of actors. They were director-friendly and didn’t see themselves as important”.
Weir himself hasn’t commented on this. But also, his absence is keenly felt. You can read Hawke’s full interview here.
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