SUBMITTED BY Timbo

November 14, 2003 — Peter Weir, who helms "Master and Commander", has a rich filmography that stresses quality over quantity. MSNBC has a interesting profile of the director that touches on this.

The Australian-born director has yet to unleash an outright clunker. Sure, audiences and critics didn't unanimously embrace the existential musings of 1993's "Fearless" or the blunt tenderness of his 1990 romantic comedy "Green Card." But even those films were earnestly effective in courting universal themes of love, death and displacement.

Terrence Malick and the late Stanley Kubrick come to mind as other directors with a similar reputation for quality over quantity. That said, Weir is downright prodigious by comparison, turning out nine features since 1980, compared to Kubrick's three and Malick's one. But what really marks each of these artists' works is a dutiful attention to detail and a consistent investment in stories and characters rather than push-button celluloid flash.

He knows his way around A-list actors, too, having previously guided Mel Gibson, Harrison Ford and Jim Carrey through career-exploding roles (in "The Year of Living Dangerously," "Witness" and "The Truman Show," respectively). And while Weir's Oscar-winning countryman Crowe certainly hasn't lacked for limelight or thespian heavy-lifting, "Master and Commander" presents a "Gladiator"-caliber context in which the star can be both superheroic and unmistakably mortal. As British naval captain Jack Aubrey -- the lead figure in the Patrick O'Brian novels on which the film is based -- Crowe's brazen machismo is balanced by his character's close relationship with ship's doctor Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany), who tests the skipper's values and priorities when it counts.

Read the rest at the link below.