From Harrison Ford's Philadelphia cop hiding out with the Amish in Witness, and Robin Williams' eccentric English teacher at a solemn New England private school in Dead Poets Society, to Jeff Bridges' plane crash survivor who can no longer relate to those around him in Fearless, Weir has consistently taken the perspective of one on the outskirts looking in and made us their confidant.

He's also one of the few directors who consistently tackles thoughtful, challenging material and still makes commercial, profitable movies. His latest, The Truman Show, is his first picture in five years, and arguably his most daring yet. Jim Carrey stars as the title character, the unknowing centerpiece of 24-hour a day television program. Everyone around him is an actor, everything a prop. He's gradually figuring it out.

So as Weir and I sit down at the Four Seasons Hotel in Atlanta, the week before The Truman Show is set to open, I've just got to kick it right out of the box:

All of your films have characters who are isolated in society somewhat, Harrison Ford in Witness and Mosquito Coast. Seems like The Truman Show is the ultimate. I mean, where can you take it from here?

[Laughs uproariously] That's funny! Yeah! Well. Wow. You know … uh … Don't say that, because I'm looking for another script! [laughs] Maybe I'll have to go backwards.

Is this the logical extension? Is this as far as you can go? Have you reached the end of this thematic path? Are there some new themes you'd like to pursue?

Well you know, when you come back down those seven stories or whatever they are, I've always been fascinated to do a love story. I think they are terribly difficult to do. I've touched on them in one degree or the other with Witness and The Year of Living Dangerously and now in The Truman Show. So I think that's fair enough, because the infinite combination, there are as many combinations as there are actors who can play the part. In a way, it is never the same, just like life. And because the romance is such a minefield of clichés and subject of much mocking humor and the daily soap operas, I think I could always be drawn back to that. When there was a story that was particularly startling to occupy me.

As for the sort of reoccurring themes that you mention, there not something I'm particularly aware of, I only am when you point it out. It's kind of boring in a way, to me, to think that I'm making somewhat the same film.

Well, the films are all quite dissimilar. It's just that there's always someone who is set apart.

Yes, that's true.

I'm a big fan of the TV show "The Prisoner," which The Truman Show more than somewhat resembles. Have you ever seen the old British television program?

You know, I missed it in it's original run and heard about it all those years, and got a hold of it in the early stages of The Truman Show. And a lot of the show is dated nowadays, but you could see that it was quite startling for the time. But it didn't hold me in terms of research. The big difference in The Truman Show is that the audience is complicit in TTS, in his deception. Where in "The Prisoner," if the public knew what was happening, there would be this huge scandal. That's why it was so under wraps. But I thought the show was incredibly engaging and very funny at times, and I was interested in pursuing the humorous side of it.

I just saw some similarities in plot, the omnipotent villain, even in set design.

Yes, I believe they used a town in Wales..

A couple things about your direction in the film. You chose to shoot our perception of Truman only as if we are watching the show ourselves. We only see Truman when he is on camera for the viewers at home. When he's out of their sight, he's out of ours too, right?

Right.

I've been reading and talking to some of my peers, and they seem a lot more impressed with his performance than I am. I thought he was a little limited for the role. I see several sequences in the film when he's shot with his back to the camera for key emotional scenes and I'm wondering if that's intentional because he couldn't pull off expressing the inner struggles he's experiencing, or is he turning his back to the people at home because he wants intimacy?

That's true at the end of the film yes. He's turned intentionally. But having people with their back to the camera is a kind of thing I just do sometimes in all of my films. It's generally to reduce the emotion. I don't want to give too much of the film away but [giving away the ending] he's not aware he's on camera at that point, but it occurred to me that if I've been showing the manipulation and orchestration of emotion throughout the movie, then when I do it as a director, it better be different and not in a pretending fashion.

So how much control do you as a director have over an actor like Jim Carrey, who makes so much money per film and can pretty much write a blank check for himself from a studio. Does he take direction? Are you allowed to tell him what to do?

Firstly, dealing with it pragmatically, I have the final cut in my contract, so it really doesn't matter what has occurred in terms of what has or hasn't been shot. I can put it in or take it out. Now, I know I'd be a fool if I went against all advice at a time of test screenings and movie people kept saying "I don't understand this" or "That parts just not working." But still, If I thought it was right I'd just have to go down with the ship and stick with it and I have that contractual right. That's something that's hard won over the years and based on my track record. You have to earn it.

So then you come back through the process from the other end, from the script through. So here was a script by the time it was given to Jim, after a year of work on it, it was very clear and very tight, just over 100 pages of writing, conventionally it's 120. There wasn't any fat on it. He loved it. So did the studio. Then he started adding things as we went along. Sometimes we'd experiment, and I'd let him act bigger, toward his bigger humor. I didn't want to inhibit him. But then he'd look to me and I'd say, in some instances, Jim, It's too much. I mean, as a director, what else can you say? Go again, too much, not enough. The words in the end don't mean that great a deal. It's obviously the concept of casting.

Maybe it's my baggage that I carry from his other movies, but he just still seems rather cartoonish to me.

I don't think that's an unfair observation. We intended that. In other words, I said to Jim in one of our early conversations, and you start to mythologize these things so please forgive me, but I said to Jim, "I think Truman knows. But inside your character you have to just play it like it's a feeling you've had all your life. That you should be performing, that you should be 'on'." So you do come around and see his as this sort of plastic sort of man, except when he's with his friend and when he's with his secrets inside boxes.

So he's intentionally acting larger than life?

All that's a very American sort of persona, the salesman so to speak. And that was my theory. And that's why the television audience doesn't look at him as this poor tortured creature. It wouldn't have gone of for 30 years if they had. He appears to be part of the show, but if you're really watching it, you'll see that this is a man in pain, that he has this facade. Which is not untrue of life, I mean half the people in the Western World are smiling and backslapping on the outside.

But it also plays into the solipsistic attitude that today's world seems to have. I'm the center of attention, everybody's watching me…

Yes! Yeah. But for him, it's true! But then again, from the youngest age, children are told to put on a show for the world. I'll meet parents and they'll tell their little children, 'Smile for Peter and say hello,' when they would rather not have anything to do with you. Fair enough, it needs to be taught for politeness sake, but I often find, maybe because I work in the entertainment business that there's a certain amount of exaggerated friendliness in show business.

NO!

[Laughing] That's a good one! Very good.

While we're on the whole business end of the movie business, you're coming out with this picture in early June, is this a type of more thoughtful counterprogramming to say, Godzilla?

Well, I don't think you could do it without an extensive pre-screening program. Word of mouth is hopefully still alive, but it's rarely used by the marketers. There's also too much of a particular kind, to bother with.

Do you mean there's a glut of films in general? Or a glut of a particular genre.

Well … actually, there's no reason to do word of mouth pre-screenings for films if you don't think people are going to go tell their friends to go see it. That's why they don't do a lot of pre-screenings. They think they can get away with it once, for the critics or whoever, and get it out there with a big noise and make all their money in a couple of weekends and get a whole lot of money from video and whatever. But what I most hear from people coming out of movies, at least when I ask them, especially the kids when they're coming out, you ask them "How was it?" and they say, [indifferently], "Eh, it was okay." [laughs] With exactly that kind of intonation, meaning, I guess, we didn't' entirely waste our time or money. It was okay. What more can you expect, it was a movie. Went to a movie. Had some popcorn. Hung out. It was okay.

That's what happens when you put a film through 17 test screenings and have to change it around to this and that demographic. Did that ever affect your film?

Oh no. I mean, we went through screenings, but I controlled exactly what when in and out. I look at it this way, if anybody has a brighter idea than I do, I'm grateful for it. And if it's a particularly good idea, I try to remember them and acknowledge them for it. It's just in interviews its tough to remember.

How hard is it to get films made? I saw Fearless, what, six years ago? But those guys who made ID4 can turn around another $100 million film in two years with Godzilla? Is it difficult finding material that intrigues you? Is it difficult getting money? Do you have a problem…

It's the material. It's that. The money, no. If the budget relevant to the difficulty to the idea. If it involves an actor, like with Paramount on this film, the formula would be unusual material with Jim Carrey and Peter Weir, equals this amount of money we'll go for. So they do calculations, as precisely as they can. And then Jim dropped his fee, and they gave me a very tough line on the budget, which we were able to budge somewhat. Then I knew we wanted to film in Florida, but I was warned the weather was often bad, and that caused some problems, too, because in the story the weather can only be bad when Christophe [the director] wanted it to be bad. Do you associate yourself with Christophe at all?

[laughs] Why are you smiling? Well … yeah, you couldn't help it. [laughs]

Is he a sympathetic character?

Well, there's a real megalomania there, but I never really called it that. I looked at it like more of a vanity. I gave Ed Harris as much as I could, but he really took it somewhere else. The moment he emerged from wardrobe, I think that's very important to him, he was an artist.

Would you be interested in making a film with a female protagonist? All your central characters have so far been male.

Oh yes, of course, very much so. You know who I've met and really like the couple times I've met her and we've both been looking for a script to do together is Michelle Pfieffer. But there's just a shortage of material.

So do you consider yourself a Hollywood director now?

No, I'm an Australian director working in Hollywood. But does it matter? I think the general concept of a Hollywood director is someone who is compromised in some way and under the control by the business end. I clearly don't fit that. If you could give me half a dozen precedents for The Truman Show or Fearless, maybe you could have a point, but I don't believe you can. On the positive side of the Hollywood Film director, there's a tradition of mainstream filmmaking, and it's true I would belong in that. I believe in large audiences. Some subject matter you can't anticipate large audiences.

I look at my Auntie Jean, long since gone, who just liked being entertained, she liked being taken away to another world.

Is this film a satire?

Well, it has a strong satirical vein to it, but I try to use that when necessary and then move away from it. Sometimes satire is interesting but finally turns in on itself at the end. The satirist in the end become corrupted by his very own poisoned pen. It's interesting but not finally enough.

Would you say you're someone who really likes people but isn't too crazy about society.

Certainly, yes to the first part. The second part, well, frankly, I've never fit in anywhere.

You still like coming to America because…

I still like coming to America because it's mysterious. I'm LA, NY so often and there's less mystery there, but when I'm in what you call the middle America, you're never quite sure who you're talking to. When I was in Florida, I met people who were in a motorcycle gang and later opened up a deli, with a nice wife and children. Things change here often, and so do the people. I still haven't figured America out yet, and that might be because the people who live here haven't either, yet.