"I'm not so sure I'd go into film today," says Peter Weir. "I might go into television, but I'm not sure about film. We're in the midst of a tremendous sea change in the last 10 years. It's really swung over to being a children's system of entertainment."
Weir was talking about his new survival drama, "The Way Back," following a showing of the film Wednesday night at the ArcLight Sherman Oaks. Hosted by TheWrap's Dominic Patten, it was part of the site's ongoing Academy Screening Series. (Photographs by Jonathan Alcorn.)
The six-time Oscar nominee was quick to point a finger at mainstream Hollywood. "Sometimes it's a long hard slog to get something to the screen. I don't want to knock 'em, but yeah -- let's knock 'em," Weir said.
"A studio take on this story would've been more action-oriented, which I think was one of the approaches when a studio was looking at it, like it was 'The Fugitive' or something. It's another approach, but there are plenty of those films out there."
Eventually, the studios passed, and Weir decided to do it on his own.
Starring Ed Harris, Colin Farrell and Jim Sturgess, "The Way Back" arrives seven years after Weir made "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World" for 20th Century Fox. A grueling survival drama, it's based on Slavomir Rawicz's novel about three men who escaped from a Siberian gulag and walked 4,000 miles through brutal conditions to freedom in India.
Weir confessed that he was initially reluctant to do the film because he questioned the veracity of Rawicz's book. "There is some question about whether the author was actually on the walk. Did he take someone else's story? We don't really know, so there was a time when I thought I wouldn't do it for that reason."
Eventually though, Weir and Levin came to an agreement. "There's not a lot to go on, but if we could find evidence that the walk had taken place that satisfied me, I'd do it."
As a result, Weir immersed himself in research. "When I said I wanted to fictionalize the story, at the same time, I wanted to make everything as true as possible, so there's hardly a detail in the film that doesn't stem from a book or a first-hand account."
Weir also relied on historical advisor Anne Applebaum, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose book "Gulag" is "the current go-to lexicon of the camps," Weir said. "I'd call her up and ask, what do you know about this? Can you put me in touch with someone? So it was just painstaking detective work really, but it was rewarding."
Weir shot the "The Way Back" in three different countries (Bulgaria, Morocco and India) over 65 days. "I had to make every day because we were always moving, so I had to meet those key dates.
