NFSA Restores: The Cars That Ate Paris – 'Let's hand it over to the young people'

This is an excerpt from The Cars That Ate Paris, the 1974 debut feature film by acclaimed director Peter Weir.

In the clip, the Pioneers ball is disrupted when the town’s young people show their anger, in retaliation for an earlier scene where the mayor has torched one of their cars. They unleash a storm of demolition.

The Cars That Ate Paris was filmed predominantly on location in the New South Wales town of Sofala, and starred Melissa Jaffer, Chris Haywood (in his feature film debut), Bruce Spence and Max Gillies. Many of those who worked on the film collaborated with Weir on subsequent projects including producers Jim and Hal McElroy (Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Last Wave, The Year of Living Dangerously), composer Bruce Smeaton (Picnic at Hanging Rock) and actor Terry Camilleri, who played a small role in The Truman Show more than 20 years later. 

The film marked a significant leap for Weir from directing documentaries and 16mm shorts for the Commonwealth Film Unit. Cars gained international recognition at the Cannes Film Festival where it premiered internationally in 1974. To publicise the screening, Weir drove a second-hand Volkswagen through the French Alps to be transformed into the film’s now iconic metal-spiked buggy by a local mechanic who then drove it up and down the Cannes Croisette.   

The reception of Cars domestically was mixed, after it screened at both the Sydney and Melbourne film festivals in 1974. But its success at Cannes and later at the Chicago International Film Festival helped establish Australian cinema and Weir on the global stage. Today the film is a cult classic. While lesser known than the rest of Weir’s films, Cars began his exploration of the impact of modernity and consumerism and the struggle for maintaining personal identity, themes that echo throughout much of his later work.

The NFSA restoration of The Cars That Ate Paris premiered at the Sydney Film Festival on 13 June 2024.