The Truman Show
Director Peter Weir
In the long process of making The Truman Show (1998), director Peter Weir spent a great deal of time thinking about two boxes — the television set and personal computer — that serve as our technological umbilical cord and feed our insatiable desire to know, or at least to see.
"A chilling phrase, not intended to be, from Bill Gates, that said, 'With the way things are going, you'll never need to leave your armchair, it will all come to you'," Weir explains during a visit to Detroit. This flow of information and images becomes the de facto "extension of what was meant to be the salvation of mankind, which was education."
"The idea that by getting enough information, somehow it will all work out," he continues, "by knowing, somehow, your life will be enriched, or you'll be more secure, or you'll be better off. Whereas, I don't get that reasoning. How do you know the information you're getting is accurate? Somebody's making these programs."
The Truman Show is about the proverbial man behind the curtain, Christof, a media mogul who takes the power of television to a new extreme. Within Weir's film lies Christof's The Truman Show, a long-running, hugely popular, 24-hour soap opera beamed around the world which chronicles the blandly ordinary life of 30-year-old insurance salesman Truman Burbank in all its glorious minutiae. But one fact makes this seemingly innocuous concoction quite sinister: Truman doesn't know he's on television.
From infancy, Truman's life has been an elaborate construct. His hometown of Seahaven is a massive enclosed set and everyone he's ever encountered — family, friends, strangers — is an actor. Truman was literally raised by television. One of the questions Peter Weir began to ask himself, when he first received the screenplay written by Andrew Niccol (Gattaca), was about the global audience for The Truman Show.
"Why did people watch?" asks Weir before answering, "They watched firstly because Truman was a natural star. And secondly, they must be looking, I reasoned, at a way of life that was very different from the way of life that most people were living in the outside world. Even though this was set slightly in the future, I'm just presuming that things are going to get worse. In the difficult lives and polluted cities around the world, they would enjoy watching a sort of ideal community."
The idyllic and conformist planned community of Seaside, Florida, built in the 1980s, stood in for the "terrifying paradise" of Christof's Seahaven. Its retro, small-town design — a central square surrounded by cheery, neo-Victorian cottages (each with its own white picket fence) — perfectly suited the filmmakers' needs and represented visually for Weir "a way of life that has vanished. That's the way it was, or at least that's the myth."
In creating the perpetually sunny, encased environment of The Truman Show, Weir explained, "nothing was real, and everything had to be thought of in a way that this creator of the show, this kind of evil genius, conceived the whole thing."
Christof may be the controlling deity of Seahaven, Weir says, "but I don't think Christof thinks of himself as God, a god. Consciously, he's too busy and has too much to do, but somewhere inside, that's what he's used to doing."
"He's obviously a control freak, par excellence, so he's referred to as a 'televisionary'," he continues, "I think he's highly intelligent, he's not crazy. What makes him scary is that he has a plan for us, really. Which also includes making a vast sum of money, but I think he really sees himself as an artist. And it was very interesting to have, as it were, a villain who was an artist."
Increasingly, through the process of making The Truman Show, Peter Weir began to feel an unnerving kinship with Christof.
"It's a funny thing," he explains, "because I had to think, in a way, quite schizophrenically because I had to, as it were, make The Truman Show, so I had to think like him. So sometimes, I wasn't quite sure who I was on the set, because I would find myself saying, 'Oh, no, Christof would never accept that'."
"I was working for him," he adds with a laugh, "I suppose that's the way to put it."
Peter Weir ended up having a year for pre-production work on The Truman Show because the actor who would embody Truman, an eerily perfect Jim Carrey, had other commitments.
"There was even some talk of recasting because I was ready to go," he explains. "Then I looked around at other names, and I thought, 'No, this part is meant for this man and he's the only one who can do it.' So I waited a year, which turned out to be quite a benefit because Andrew Niccol and I worked closely on the screenplay through numerous drafts and there was more to be done than I conceived. It allowed me to get into very fine detail and I think the film benefits from it."
The Sydney-born Peter Weir, 53, first made his name as part of what was then enthusiastically dubbed "the Australian new wave" with The Cars That Ate Paris (1974), Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), The Last Wave (1977), Gallipoli (1981), and The Year of Living Dangerously (1983). His subsequent work in Hollywood has gone from the extremely serious — The Mosquito Coast (1986), the sublime Fearless (1993) — to the frothy Green Card (1990), but he's also directed two films that are defining examples of their respective genres: Witness (1985) and Dead Poets Society (1989).
"I think I was looking forward to the challenge of this film," says Weir about The Truman Show, "because more than ordinarily, I knew this film had to hit the bull's-eye. It couldn't be a near miss. You weren't going to get any applause for trying because it would just be a ghastly wreck if it didn't come off. I'm not saying everyone will like it, I'm talking about in my own terms. Because it's complex yet, like all films, it has to appear effortless."
"I knew I could never approach this film at any other point in my career," he adds, "Really, I drew on everything I knew."
It's a film that also perfectly captures the zeitgeist of the post-Princess Diana culture still obsessed with attaining and maintaining celebrities, conscious perhaps of the machinations of the media circus but unable (or unwilling) to acknowledge complicity, as consumers, in this vicious cycle.
"The Truman Show touches largely on the loss of differentiation between real and unreal in many instances in our society and particularly children," Peter Weir concludes. "The question's really unanswered, as yet, about how extensive that damage may be."
© 1999, Serena Donadoni. All rights reserved.