Quotes from Peter Weir

Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for

When I began making films, they were just movies: 'What's the new movie? What are you doing?' Now they're called 'adult dramas.'

There was a point of frustration, where I thought I should just take a film, even though I didn't want to. I was impatient with being at home. But I hung on to the approach I've always had, which is to wait for a project that I could contribute something unique to.

I enjoyed Jonathan Franzen's 'Freedom.' Would I make that into a film? I think it's better suited to television. That would very much be a dialogue and performance piece, and it would take some very skilful direction - but not my kind of directing. But I thought it was a real literary work.

I'd love to have another film to go on to. I'm in the mood to work. But I have to be patient, you know, to find that particular kind of project. Occasionally I'll write one myself if I can summon up the energy.

I've become wary of interviews in which you're forced to go back over the reasons why you made certain decisions. You tend to rationalize what you've done, to intellectually review a process that is often intuitive.

I had always been wary of doing any autobiographical movies, truly feeling at home with fiction.

The best conversation with Stanley Kubrick is a silent one: you sit in a theatre and watch his films and you learn so much.

Well, there's that girl on the Internet - although this isn't an example of someone who doesn't know they're on - but there's a girl on the Internet who posts one photograph every two minutes from her bedroom.

National film industries tend to move in cycles. In Australia right now, we're on a high, a feeling of potential, which as yet shows no sign of flagging. But the word 'industry' is misleading. A small national cinema has no industry in the Hollywood sense.

Movies tie things up in an arbitrary length of time, but I have always liked things that aren't fully realised.

Normally as a director, you do look at other films and things that are relevant. But with this film, it became impossible because I became so aware of the camera placement.

I'm not from a theatre background, I'm wary of rehearsals. But what I do like is hanging out together, on location.

I carve stone. I've got hammers and chisels and I carve from sandstone. I just did a big mural of birds and trees.

I loved Sherlock Holmes as a kid, but I remember being disappointed when he'd come up with these simple explanations for these complex mysteries.

I love stories and I don't like to repeat myself. And I look for new stuff, and as they say it gets harder.

It was immediately apparent that it was full of tricky ingredients to balance. In fact, I found it very intriguing. What held me back from saying yes to the producer was that I wasn't sure who could play Truman.

If I can't make the kind of film that I want to make, then the hell with it.

You can mix in certain sensitivities as a filmmaker.

There's almost a fear that if you understood too deeply the way you arrived at choices, you could become self-conscious. In any case, many ideas which are full of personal meaning seem rather banal when you put words to them.

Music stops you from thinking.

Well, all these stars have their houses swept quite regularly by people who work in the surveillance security business. They come in and they look for bugs and things.

Silent films were, I think, more different than we know to sound films. We think of it as simply that we added dialogue and in actual fact I think it was an entirely different art form.

So much of the work is intuitive. The resistance you detect is just that, a kind of evasion, a sense that too much analysis will inhibit creativity.