Picasso said that art is a lie that helps us see the truth more clearly. Hamlet, Emma, and Citizen Kane are wonderfully constructed lies so convincing that we speak as if we knew their title characters. Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998) investigates how this strange phenomena occurs. Under what conditions could something authentic arise from artifice–and what does it mean to have an authentic experience anyway? We all say that we’d be better off living in the real world instead of a fool’s paradise–such as the Matrix–but how much do we really believe that? Join us for a conversation about a great work of art that shows how the sausage of art is made.
The University Press of Mississippi offers an excellent series of collected interviews. Here’s their volume on Peter Weir.
Incredible bumper music by John Deley.
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