Moving Ahead with The Way Back

The Australian director Peter Weir,returns to his large canvas with a new film.

It would have been different, said the Australian director Peter Weir,whose new film,The Way Back,is his first in more than seven years,if Id changed professions during those years,or done nothing but read and hang about. But since his previous movie,Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World,he has worked on three different projects that fell through,he said: So if I can use the analogy of a pilot,for those five or six years I was constantly inside the simulator,doing a lot of writing,thinking about how to make a story work on the screen. He paused. As is the purpose of the simulator,you create all kinds of difficulties for yourself to overcome,so by the time of the actual flight youve been through it in a sense.

Its amazing to think that a filmmaker as experienced,as respected and as successful as Weirfour times nominated for a best director Oscarcould have been stuck in that simulator for so long. But,as one of his Way Back stars,Jim Sturgess,put it,Its kind of a scary cinematic climate at the moment. And the weather is perhaps especially inhospitable to the ambitious,adventurous sorts of movies Weir is happiest making. This film,with a relatively modest 30 million budget,had to be produced independently.

At this point in my life I want a large canvas, he said by telephone from his home in Sydney. Its always interesting to look at some important event thats making the characters behave in a certain way. Thats a staple of cinema,and thats how the movies I liked as a child always seemed to me.

This film,which is based on a memoir by the Polish writer Slavomir Rawicz,is about a group of prisoners who escape from a Soviet gulag in 1940 and trek thousands of miles to freedom,across the frozen steppes,across the Gobi desert and finally across the Himalayas: the lucky ones make it to India.

Ive always been fascinated by survival stories, Weir said. Even in circumstances that arent so extreme,the question of what makes anybody keep going is always an intriguing one. What do you live for? I mean,any human being can just give up. You can lie down and die. Theres something we have to have within us to drive us on,whatever it might be.

The movie is completely lacking in sentimentality, Ed Harris,who plays an enigmatic American escapee known only as Smith,said from Southern California. Weir,who spent his early years in show business writing and performing comedy sketches,became a movie director in the 1970s,at a time when the Australian film industry was pretty ragged and caught-on-the-fly realism was practically the only cinematic style available. He introduced fantastic elements into his first movies,The Cars That Ate Paris 1974,Picnic at Hanging Rock 1975 and The Last Wave 1977,but usually without recourse to special effects. He had to use suggestionincongruous details,spooky elisionsinstead. And in some peculiar way the making of those more fanciful films may have sharpened his sense of the importance of visual precision,his highly developed taste for limage juste.

I tend to believe that a myriad of small details,from wardrobe and custom to dirt under the fingernails,will all somehow play their part, he said.

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Relaxed is not,however,a word that springs immediately to mind when youre watching the actors in The Way Back who also include Colin Farrell and Saoirse Ronangrunt and sweat and suffer and drag their weary carcasses through all manner of unforgiving terrain. The film,opened nationwide on January 21,was shot mostly in Bulgaria and Morocco,with a few scenes in India. Its what you imagine making a film was like back in the early days of cinema, Sturgess said.

Its hard not to feel,at certain moments of The Way Back,that the rigours of Weirs meticulous approach to filmmaking,his patience and his doggedness,have both served him well and taken their toll. I wonder what kind of survival mechanism I may have drawn on for this,what tanks of adrenaline I found I had, he said. I think because Id had those other projects that failed to come to light,I was determined that this one was going to happen,and I drew on those reserves of energy.

The Way Back is as stark and unfussy a film as Peter Weir has ever made,and theres a sense in it of an artist moving,step by step,one foot in front of the other,toward the hard-won freedom of simplicity. Really, he said,as a filmmaker you spend all your life working on simplification. Thats what you aim for if youre lucky enough to have a long career. Hes earned his luck. Its good to see him in full flight again.TERRENCE RAFFERTY