Cirrus@Austlit

Born in Brisbane, P.J. Hogan lived on the New South Wales north coast as a teenager, attending Mount Saint Patrick College in Murwillumbah, New South Wales. In 1984, he graduated from the Australian Film, Television and Radio School with a Graduate Diploma: Screenwriting. His graduate film, the 25-minute Getting Wet, won him an AFI Award for Best Short Fiction Film in 1984.

He followed this script two years later with the script for the feature film The Humpty Dumpty Man, a political thriller starring Frank Gallacher as a political lobbyist caught up in a deadly game of espionage between the KGB and his own Secret Service: The Humpty Dumpty Man was co-written with Karl Zwicky, and directed by Hogan. Two years later, Hogan collaborated with Zwicky again, on the Film Vicious (also known as To Make a Killing), another thriller, about a group of violent teenage thugs: this time, the film was co-written by Hogan and Zwicky but directed by Zwicky.

Throughout the mid-1980s and early 1990s, Hogan also wrote television scripts for such programs as c/o The Bartons, The Flying Doctors, Skirts, The Miraculous Mellops, and Lift Off.

Hogan's breakthrough success as a director came with 1994's Muriel's Wedding, for which he was also the script-writer. Following this, he scripted and directed a number of films for American production studios, including Unconditional Love (1999, released in 2002, starring Kathy Bates and Rupert Everett), which he co-wrote with Jocelyn Moorhouse, and Peter Pan (2003), co-written with American script-writer Michael Goldenberg. In 2008, he collaborated with Tomás Romero to produce the story for The American Mall, a musicla romantic comedy set in a shopping mall (directed by Shawn Ku to a teleplay by Margaret Oberman).

In 2012, he reunited with Muriel's Wedding star Toni Collette for Mental, for which Hogan was once again both script-writer and director.

Hogan has also directed a number of films for which he was not the script-writer, including the episode 'Sloth' for the anthology television series Seven Deadly Sins; My Best Friend's Wedding (1997), with a script by Ronald Bass; a film-length pilot for a proposed (but ultimately cancelled) re-boot of supernatural soap opera Dark Shadows (2005); television film Nurses (2007), with a script by Samantha Goodman and Andrew Stern; and Confessions of a Shopaholic (2007), with a script by Tracey Jackson, Tim Firth, and Kayla Alpert.