With that in mind, Weller began toying with the idea of going back to school. In 1998, a friend and museum director suggested Syracuse University, which has a campus in Florence, Italy. Weller liked the sound of that. He’d lived in Italy off and on for years, knew the country, and figured he could take a few courses while staying at his usual hotels living the life of a movie star. He was mistaken.
It’s Syracuse’s emphasis on cultural immersion and intensive learning that makes it one of the best study abroad programs in the world. The university wanted him to stay in one of its apartment buildings with 12 students 30 years his junior as fellow tenants. He was a long way from Hollywood.
“I felt like the caboose at the end of the train compared to these other genius history students,” he says. “This whole master’s thing—except for paleography—was a cakewalk for them, but I really had to play catch-up ball.”
But according to Syracuse fine arts professor Gary Radke, Weller’s presence in class matched his intensity on the screen and stage. “I’ll never forget it,” he says. “During fieldtrips for my traveling seminar, Peter would sit in the back of the bus doing dramatic readings of the textbook, urging the others to take advantage of the opportunity and live and breathe the stuff.”
A natural teacher
Professors quickly recognized that he had a love for the subject that captivated students. They offered him a position teaching fieldtrips on Renaissance art and history, and he accepted.
He continued teaching for Syracuse after completing his master’s, even while shooting Brian Helgeland’s The Order, a season of Fox’s 24, and the History Channel series Engineering an Empire.
In spring 2004, the university made Weller a professor ad hoc at its New York campus, where he taught a classics seminar that combined his love of film and history. Entitled “Hollywood and the Roman Empire,” the course involved writing a series of papers comparing 450 pages of works by Homer, Edward Gibbon, and other authors of antiquity to the fiction of Hollywood epics like Ulysses and Ben-Hur.
No easy A in class
“Initially, students come in thinking they’re going to get an easy A from old Robocop, and then they see the reader and drop out,” Weller says. “My enrollment starts at 90, and I lose about 30 the first day.”
Despite this, Radke says that the students who decide to soldier through the lessons are glad they did. The class is far from the easy “A” some students thought it would be, but its requirements pale in comparison to the demands Weller places on himself.
Right now, he divides his time between directing episodes of Las Vegas and Monk and completing his Ph.D. coursework at UCLA. And while it’s exhausting, Weller says he’s having a ball living the best of both worlds. It’s a good fortune that’s due in part to a day at the museum in 1979.