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Peter Weir

A genre-chameleon of sorts, Peter Weir’s affecting, distinctive films have deftly moved from ethereal drama to sci-fi to epic to thriller to comedy, and back again, always conveying a sense of wonder. One of his directorial trademarks is his use of close-up, what he calls “the great discovery of the cinema … no one has yet come up with anything more extraordinary,” to convey the range of human emotion. His work in Hollywood has earned him six Oscar© nominations, but some of his Australian films (Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Last Wave, Gallipoli, The Year of Living Dangerously) remain among his most haunting and moving. “I like films that are unsettling, unpredictable, and have tension.”