Hollywood On Line
Sunday 31 May 1998
How Weir Realized "Truman Show"'s World Within a World Take a top Australian director, one of Hollywood's biggest box-office stars and a quirky script by a New Zealander about the ultimate reality-based TV show, and you get one of the most original - and strangest - films of the year, "The Truman Show" (which opens June 5), starring Jim Carrey and directed by Peter Weir. Through his films "Gallipoli," "Picnic at Hanging Rock," "The Year of Living Dangerously," "Green Card," "Witness," "Dead Poet's Society" and "Fearless," Weir has demonstrated his range and become one of Australia's - and Hollywood's - most admired and successful directors. Now he's has taken on his most challenging project to date with "The Truman Show," in which Carrey plays title character Truman Burbank, who discovers that his family, friends and town - in fact, his entire life - are part of a TV show, carefully choreographed by a visionary filmmaker (played by Ed Harris), of which he is unwittingly the real-life star. "It's a brilliant and intriguing idea, and the moment I read the script, I knew it was my next film. I started working on it back in '95," Weir says. So why has the project taken so long? "The delay came in waiting for Jim Carrey, who was booked solid," the director adds. "I couldn't imagine making it without him, especially after we first met and I realized he was ideal casting, this great mix between a sort of innocent, ever-cheerful Jimmy Stewart type, but with this darker edge to him." Fortunately, Weir and Carrey hit it off at their first meeting, held at the comedian's house. Weir arrived, he remembers, "with my arms full of notebooks and sketches and photos. We clicked immediately, and all these ideas came spilling out of both of us. Right there, I knew it was going to work. "I loved the writing by Andrew Niccol, who did "Gattaca," and it was a chance to create a complete world, as if you're doing a colony in space. This town, the people, the clothes they're wearing - it had all been created by the producer, so it was this fascinating world within a world." Even with Carrey committed to "The Truman Show," Weir was the first to admit that turning the script into a believable movie and actuating a world within a world "wasn't going to be easy." At first he even toyed with the idea of shooting on a huge stage, mimicking the film itself, "but I knew the cost was way too much," he says. "What I did initially consider was combining all the back lots in Hollywood, which I toured and photographed, and using different streets and elements. But it was too eclectic, and it would have been too obvious to Truman. So then we began searching for a real location." Weir eventually ended up shooting the make-believe town of Seahaven in the planned community of Seaside in Florida. "Creatively, it was ideal, as it had just the look and feel we wanted," he notes. "But in terms of shooting, it was far from ideal. First, we had a big weather problem. We shot off-season, when the town was almost empty, and off-season is exactly that - very unpredictable weather. "I'd already stipulated that it had to be shot in bright sunshine, while normally you just go with whatever weather you get on that day," he explains. "We couldn't do that, so there were days when we were really scrambling. But, overall, the look of the place couldn't have been better. The skies down there are so blue and the walls of the homes are so bright, that it looks almost surreal anyway, as if each shot has been treated. But that was in fact the reality of the place." The nature of reality, and how movies and television manipulate and frame reality, is a key theme for Weir, along with subverting the movie form. "Usually you prepare by looking at other movies that inspire you or relate to the material you're doing in some way, but with this I found it very difficult to look at any other movie because they just seemed so laughable and absurd," he admits. "You'd see a couple talking intimately in a love scene, and I'd want to scream, 'Can't you see that camera?' "And the more real the movie was, the more absurd it became for me. And that was very interesting, that we've learned this as kids and grown up with this ability to forget that it's all staged. So I found myself thinking through the building blocks of movies and just what it is that we construct. At one point, I got so obsessive with the theme that I thought we actually should conceal all the cameras from Jim and the other actors." Ultimately, Weir didn't go quite that far, but the movie makes great use of unusual camera angles and lenses to suggest the constant Big Brother surveillance of Truman. "When I began on this project, I realized it's full of so many metaphors that I'd be better off just ignoring them," he says. "Similarly, I knew it had to end when he finally walks out of the studio." Weir continues: "So I loved the fact that it's not didactic and that people can take away whatever they want from it. Just when you think you know this world, it opens up again and again. And by the end, hopefully the implications are wider than the apparent weight of the film."

By Iain Blair, L.A. Times Syndicate