Ginny and I had the pleasure yesterday of going to the Jacob Burns Center and not only seeing The Way Back, the new film by Peter Weir, but also hearing the great Weir talk about the movie in an interview with Janet Maslin. The Way Back is a fictionalized version of The Long Walk, Slavomir Rawicz‘s 1956 memoir of his escape from a Russian Gulag during World War II. In the film, six prisoners break out of a prison camp, and walk out of the Siberian wilderness, across the Gobi desert, and across the Himalayas. Some of them reach freedom in India. The film stars Jim Sturgess, Ed Harris, Colin Farrell, and Saorise Ronin.
This is the first film Weir has made since the great Master and Commander seven years ago,
although he was attempting to get other projects off the ground in the meantime. He said he is drawn to stories of survival, and to the different “survival styles” exhibited by the various characters. The film is highly naturalistic, and that is one of its great strengths. Weir said he deliberately avoided Hollywood conventions in the storytelling; that often works well for him, but it does lind of leave you with a big chunk of movie that is about walking, pain and hunger. Still, weir made the film he wanted to make, and I always admire that.
After the session, I asked Weir if he thought we would ever see another film based on Patrick O’Brian‘s great Aubrey-Maturin seafaring novels. He said he doubted it. “The film made money but not enough money to justify a sequel,” he said, “and there have not been any technological developments that would lower the costs.” But he said that all of the creative people would have been willing to return to the subject, and with a smile he dangled this small morsel of hope: “Russell Crowe is still working on it somewhere.” Hang in there, Russ baby!