In a promotional interview for his documentary, “The Last Movie Stars” produced by HBO, Ethan Hawke evokes the immense filmmaker Peter Weir, who has not done anything for ten years, and unfortunately does not seem to be coming back anytime soon. ..
In promotion for his documentary The Last Movie Stars, broadcast on HBO, Ethan Hawke evoked the cruel absence on the screens of the great filmmaker Peter Weir, who has not produced anything since The Roads to Freedom, released ten years ago. year.
An absence that Hawke, who had toured with him in The circle of dead poets, explains by the difficult past experiences with Russel Crowe on Master & Commander, and an aborted project with Johnny Depp.
“I think he lost interest in making films” he comments; “He really enjoyed that job when he didn’t have actors giving him a hard time. Russell Crowe and Johnny Depp broke it. He’s such a rare person these days, a popular entertainer .
He makes mainstream movies that are artistic. To have the budget to do The Truman Show or Master and Commander, you need a Jim Carrey or a Russell Crowe. I think Harrison Ford and Gerard Depardieu were his kind of actors. They were pro-directors and didn’t see themselves as ‘important’.”
Released in polite and total indifference – to put it mildly – on December 31, 2003 here, de facto torpedoing its theatrical career, a heavy failure at the worldwide Box Office with just over $211 million on the clock on a budget of $150 million is an understatement that Master & Commander more than deserves serious reassessment. A very painful failure for Peter Weir, who will take several years to recover.
As for the evocation of the collaboration between Johnny Depp and Peter Weir, Ethan Hawke is quite evasive. In fact, the two were set to work together on a movie announced in 2004, Shantaram. Depp played a young Australian escaped from prison who was rebuilding a new life in the slums of India, before leaving to fight the Russians in Afghanistan.
Weir eventually left the project, officially for “divergent artistic views”. A formula that is always a bit of a catch-all, which sometimes masks, and badly, great tensions on the films.
“My successes have been accidents” said the six-time Oscar-nominated filmmaker. “I am completely incapable of devoting myself to projects cut for the Box Office, to infantilizing scenarios, to stories of costumed vigilantes.
At the time of their release, Mosquito Coast or Second State were just films among others. Today, Hollywood classifies them as ‘adult dramas’, and it almost makes me feel ashamed of having made porn. It really hurts…