“The Way Back” is the Australian director Peter Weir’s first film in more than seven years. Three different projects that he had worked on in the past few years fell through.

It’s amazing to think that a filmmaker as respected and as successful as Mr. Weir could have been stuck for so long.

But the climate is perhaps especially inhospitable to the ambitious, adventurous sorts of movies he is happiest making. (This film, with a relatively modest $30 million budget, had to be produced independently.)

“At this point in my life I want a large canvas,” he said from his home in Sydney. “It’s always interesting to look at some important event that’s making the characters behave in a certain way. ”

Mr. Weir’s previous movie, the turbulent seafaring yarn “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World,” was certainly that kind of picture, and “The Way Back,” though quieter, is no less consequential.

Based on a memoir by Slavomir Rawicz, a Polish writer, the film is about prisoners who escape from a Soviet gulag in 1940 and trek thousands of kilometers to freedom: the lucky ones make it to India.

“The question of what makes anybody keep going is always an intriguing one,” Mr. Weir said. “ You can lie down and die. There’s something we have to have within us to drive us on.”

It’s a grander statement than any in the new film itself.

“The movie is completely lacking in sentimentality,” Ed Harris, who plays an enigmatic American escapee, said. Another of the film’s stars, Jim Sturgess, confirmed that the director didn’t want the huge moments that so often disfigure the triumph-of-the-human-spirit sort of movie.

“When I first read the script,” Mr. Sturgess said, “I’d come to a scene and think, ‘This is a place to use my acting chops.’ But in shooting, that somehow became false .”

Mr. Weir introduced fantastic elements into his first movies, “The Cars That Ate Paris” (1974), “Picnic at Hanging Rock” (1975) and “The Last Wave” (1977), but usually without special effects. He had to use suggestion - incongruous details, spooky elisions - instead.

And that may have sharpened his sense of the importance of visual precision. It is clearly evident in his World War I epic “Gallipoli” (1981) and “The Year of Living Dangerously” (1982), about a revolution in Indonesia. His actors appreciate the effort. “

He’s so concerned with getting things right, it makes you sort of relaxed,” Mr. Sturgess said. Relaxed is not, however, a word that springs to mind when you’re watching the actors in “The Way Back” suffer through unforgiving terrain. (The film, which opens this winter and spring, was shot mostly in Bulgaria and Morocco, with a few scenes in India.)

The rigor of Mr. Weir’s approach might explain the five-year gap between “Fearless” in 1993 and “The Truman Show”; another five years passed before “Master and Commander.”

His whole career seems faintly present in his new film’s grim but starkly beautiful trek. “I think because I’d had those other projects that failed to come to light, I was determined that this one was going to happen, and I drew on those reserves of energy,” Mr. Weir said.

“Really,” he said, “as a filmmaker you spend all your life working on simplification. That’s what you aim for if you’re lucky enough to have a long career.”


By TERRENCE RAFFERTY