Peter Weir quotes:

Russell Crowe as Capt. Jack Aubrey in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, .. most unlikely.

I loved Sherlock Holmes as a kid, but I remember being disappointed when he'd come up with these simple explanations for these complex mysteries.

The best conversation with Stanley Kubrick is a silent one: you sit in a theatre and watch his films and you learn so much.

I carve stone. I've got hammers and chisels and I carve from sandstone. I just did a big mural of birds and trees.

When I began making films, they were just movies: 'What's the new movie? What are you doing?' Now they're called 'adult dramas.'

Silent films were, I think, more different than we know to sound films. We think of it as simply that we added dialogue and in actual fact I think it was an entirely different art form.

I've become wary of interviews in which you're forced to go back over the reasons why you made certain decisions. You tend to rationalize what you've done, to intellectually review a process that is often intuitive.

Well, there's that girl on the Internet - although this isn't an example of someone who doesn't know they're on - but there's a girl on the Internet who posts one photograph every two minutes from her bedroom.

I'd love to have another film to go on to. I'm in the mood to work. But I have to be patient, you know, to find that particular kind of project. Occasionally I'll write one myself if I can summon up the energy.

It was immediately apparent that it was full of tricky ingredients to balance. In fact, I found it very intriguing. What held me back from saying yes to the producer was that I wasn't sure who could play Truman.

I don't know if there will ever be an ideal way of selling an original picture. Because everything you're doing, you're inventing.

National film industries tend to move in cycles. In Australia right now, we're on a high, a feeling of potential, which as yet shows no sign of flagging. But the word 'industry' is misleading. A small national cinema has no industry in the Hollywood sense.

Normally as a director, you do look at other films and things that are relevant. But with this film, it became impossible because I became so aware of the camera placement.

There's almost a fear that if you understood too deeply the way you arrived at choices, you could become self-conscious. In any case, many ideas which are full of personal meaning seem rather banal when you put words to them.

Well, all these stars have their houses swept quite regularly by people who work in the surveillance security business. They come in and they look for bugs and things.

It doesn't take any imagination at all to feel awed

Music stops you from thinking.

Movies tie things up in an arbitrary length of time, but I have always liked things that aren't fully realised.

I'm not from a theatrical background where people do like to work it out on some stage space.

I enjoyed Jonathan Franzen's 'Freedom.' Would I make that into a film? I think it's better suited to television. That would very much be a dialogue and performance piece, and it would take some very skilful direction - but not my kind of directing. But I thought it was a real literary work.

Id love to have another film to go on to. Im in the mood to work. But I have to be patient, you know, to find that particular kind of project. Occasionally Ill write one myself if I can summon up the energy.

National film industries tend to move in cycles. In Australia right now, we're on a high, a feeling of potential, which as yet shows no sign of flagging. But the word "industry" is misleading. A small national cinema has no industry in the Hollywood sense.

So much of the work is intuitive. The resistance you detect is just that, a kind of evasion, a sense that too much analysis will inhibit creativity.

You can mix in certain sensitivities as a filmmaker.