Fearless

Fearless
Peter Weir, 1993, 122’

A man’s personality is dramatically changed after surviving a major airline crash.

EN

“Cities, like dreams, are built from desires and fears, although the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules absurd, their perspectives deceptive, and everything hides something else.”

Italo Calvino, The Invisible Cities1

 

“In the world we live in, everybody tries to project image. So I tried to create an atmosphere with my cast where they, without knowing it, would allow me to photograph them without any barrier. I'm not talking about every scene - after all, these are professional craftspeople. But each cast member, in one or two or three moments, allowed me to photograph them that way. The great discovery of the cinema, this new art form, is the closeup. No one has yet come up with anything more extraordinary. With a great screen 30 feet across, to see a face, every line, every movement of every muscle, and wonder who is it inside that face? That's what I was getting into in Fearless, thinking, ah, this is the frontier.”

Peter Weir2

 

“‘I think, when we fly, it’s one of a few times in contemporary life where we actually think of death.’ In Fearless Max re-evaluates his life after surviving a plane crash. ‘I wanted to film the crash from the point of view of the passengers,’ explains Weir, who interviewed several real-life survivors from an 1989 flying disaster. ‘All them said, it was unreal. It was so real. It was like a dream. I had to make the crash unreal in order to reach its reality. Then it became, in a strange way, horrifyingly beautiful.’ In Fearless Weir explores the often mystical, even ecstatic, implications of near-death experiences.”

P. Huck3

  • 1Cited by Silvia Tandeciarz, “Some Notes on Racial Trauma in Peter Weir’s Fearless,” William & Mary Scholar Works, 2000.
  • 2Virginia Campbell, “Love, Fear and Peter Weir,” Movieline, September 1993.
  • 3P. Huck, “Call to Weir: ‘come in, oh spinner of tales’,” The Hobart Mercury, 2 June 1994, 29.
screening
De Cinema, Antwerp