Long, long before he directed The Truman Show this year, Peter Weir filmed Picnic at Hanging Rock in 1975 on a budget of less than $500,000. The eerie and atmospheric film became a worldwide hit.

The movie, about the unexplained disappearance of four schoolgirls during an idyllic Valentine Day’s romp in turn-of-the-century Australia, places the viewer in the middle of an unfolding — and ultimately, unresolved — mystery. Its popularity signaled the breakthrough of Australian films into foreign markets, films ranging from Mad Max to Breaker Morant.

But there were eight or nine minutes of footage that Weir never liked.
“I always squirmed whenever I saw it come up,” said Weir about a romantic interlude that follows a scene in which two lads find one of the girls, dazed and amnesiac, on the rock. “There’s a kind of potential that’s never realized between Irma, the girl who’s found, and Michael, the young man who finds her. The intention was that [the interlude] gave the story some breathing space because of the intensity of the atmosphere created by the disappearance.”

Earlier this year, Weir finally got to cut the interlude.
Based on a 1967 novel by Joan Lindsay, the film is considered pure fiction. But like any good mystery set in an actual place (Hanging Rock is located about 45 miles northwest of Melbourne, Victoria, in Australia), the tale has taken on the proportions of a legend or ghost story. Some say the girls fell down a bottomless crevice; others say they were overcome by some mystical element of nature. Others say it never really happened. The film has only heightened the debate, transforming what was once an obscure picnic spot into a place for pilgrimages.

“The power of the piece lay in not knowing,” Weir says. “Just like you don’t what happens when you die.”

Weir once asked Lindsay about her own view of the incident (or non-incident). When she offered to tell “the Truth,” Weir replied, “No, keep it to yourself. I love a good mystery.”

— Michael Bergeron

The rereleased director’s cut of Picnic at Hanging Rock unwinds this weekend at the Museum of Fine Arts, 1001 Bissonnet, 639-7515. Screenings are on Friday, September 4, and Saturday, September 5, at 7:30 p.m., and Sunday, September 6 at 7 p.m. General admission is $5.

This article appears in Sep 3-9, 1998.