Filmmakers Living Dangerously

Three years before he came to the U.S. to shoot Witness, Australian director Peter Weir took cast and crew to Asia on behalf of a highly ambitious project, The Year of Living Dangerously. Based on a novel of intrigue and romance by Australian author Christopher Koch, it brought together an international band of players to present a story full of real-world tensions. Weir had previously directed a fascinating tale of mysterious disappearance (1975’s Picnic at Hanging Rock) and a tragic World War I epic (1981’s Gallipoli). Both stories, deriving from actual historical incidents, saw the world from an Australian perspective. By the time he shot The Year of Living Dangerously, Weir had widened his focus to include citizens of many nations. Building on a turbulent era in the modern history of Indonesia, he used the overthrow of despotic President Sukarno by local Communist forces as the backdrop for a story about love, loyalty, and journalism as a profession. (To be entirely accurate, though the film’s vivid street scenes were filmed in Manila, standing in for Jakarta, social unrest in the Philippines caused cast and crew to head back to Australia to complete the shoot.)

 At the center of the drama is Australia’s Mel Gibson, known at the time for his Mad Max films and for his starring role in Weir’s Gallipoli. No surprise—in his role as an Aussie radio journalist on his first overseas assignment, Gibson’s Guy Hamilton proves to be handsome, cocky, and more than a bit naïve. He wants to become an overnight ;journalistic superstar, but is taken down a peg or two by fellow foreign correspondents, including a particularly crass American (Michael Murphy) and some stuffy Brits. And the environment he’s in is not at all pleasant: poverty is rampant; political dissidents are everywhere; daily life is mostly chaos.

 One major compensation arrives when he is taken to an unexpectedly ritzy country club where British expats congregate. There he meets a woman who works at the British embassy. She’s played by Sigourney Weaver who—three years after Alien—has paused her fight against  extraterrestrials in order to take on a romantic role. Her Jill Bryant is smart, convincingly British, and sexy as all get-out. She’s leaving Jakarta soon to return to her homeland, and part of Guy would enjoy going with her.

 Still, there’s his broadcasting career to consider. And there’s also an off-beat relationship he quickly comes to value. Billy Kwan is a pint-sized photographer, apparently half Australian and half Chinese, who frequently works with Australian journalist to cover the local news. Puckish, but with a strong moral code, he claims no loyalty to any particular national ideology. Instead, he cares deeply for his friends and for the underprivileged: out of sheer generosity of spirit he’s quietly supporting a local woman and her seriously ailing child. Billy, who also serves at times as the film’s voiceover narrator, is the emotional heartbeat of the story. And the casting of this role took observers by surprise.  From what I’ve read, Weir considered tiny American actors like Bob Balaban (5’5”) and Wallace Shawn (5’2”), but neither seemed right. Then through happenstance he saw a photo of an American actress named Linda Hunt. Afflicted with hypopituitary dwarfism, Hunt stood a mere 4’9” tall, and had an androgynous look. There’s nothing kitschy about her portrayal of an adult male, though her character is endowed with an otherworldliness that lingers in the memory. That’s doubtless why she beat out some of Hollywood’s finest (Glenn Close, for one) to win the Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1982.