ran a profile on Malick this weekend. For those of you who don't subscribe:
November 6, 2005
The Terrence Malick Enigma
By CARYN JAMES
TERRENCE MALICK'S films - all three of them over 32 years - are known for their exquisite, tantalizing images: a killer in a black Cadillac racing along a dusty road framed by endless plains in "Badlands"; an isolated farmhouse, lights glowing against a midnight blue sky in "Days of Heaven." But the most mysterious image of all is that of a man in a suit and fedora, who appears briefly in "Badlands" at a house where the killer is hiding. That's Terrence Malick himself, and behind the ordinary, slightly pudgy face is a director with one of the most brilliant and strangest careers in film.
His legendary status as some bizarro genius (and it's hard to argue with that) accounts for the great curiosity about his fourth film, "The New World," a version of the Pocahontas story with Colin Farrell as the least anonymous of John Smiths. New Line Cinema hopes to release the film on Dec. 25, and hope is the operative word; the original November release was postponed so that Mr. Malick could go on editing. That can't be reassuring coming from a man who spent nearly a year editing "Badlands" (1973) and two whole years editing "Days of Heaven" (1978). Yet even now those works seem as nearly perfect as films can be.
After making them, though, Mr. Malick, only in his mid-30's, vanished from filmmaking for 20 years. He returned with "The Thin Red Line," a big, ambitious World War II movie that has extraordinary scenes but nothing like the perfectly realized art of his earlier, polished gems. And while "The Thin Red Line" may have brought expectations for any Malick work back to earth, the guessing game continues. Why the vanishing act and why the return?
Mr. Malick doesn't give interviews, but this much is evident: It's odd that he's a filmmaker at all. He has the singular vision of a poet yet works in a form that relies on collaboration and other people's money. What's a perfectionist to do?
His unique style in those early films is unmistakable. Both "Badlands," loosely based on a 1950's case of a serial killer and his teenage girlfriend, and "Days of Heaven," about a lethal love triangle in Texas in 1916, share a powerful feel for the natural landscape and the way place shapes character. Both rely on striking voice-overs and deal with the same essential paradoxes: the cold calculations behind romance and the visual poetry of violence.
The young Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek did some of their best work in "Badlands." He is the coolest of killers (as in James Dean cool), blasé as he shoots people who get in his way. She is a hopeless romantic, whose naïve voice-over is Mr. Malick's most distinctive touch; a voice-over shaping the film has since become his trademark. And all that editing time was worth it: there is not a false move in this spare, 95-minute film.
Mr. Malick brought some kind of alchemy into the editing room for "Days of Heaven," too. It may be one of the most beautiful films ever made and took form largely after the fact. There is a simple eloquence to its story of a man (Richard Gere), his lover (Brooke Adams) and his young sister (Linda Manz), who leave Chicago to work in the wheat fields owned by a rich and dying farmer (Sam Shepard, whose movie-star sideline to his playwriting took off after this). The setting is as gorgeous as the romance is cynical, with Mr. Gere's character suggesting that his girlfriend marry the farmer for his money; their triangle ends in two violent deaths. But it is the young sister's narration - her accent tough, her words often poetic - that gives the film its elegiac tone, and that voice-over wasn't even planned until after the film was shot.
Most people who spend two years in an editing room and drastically revamp a movie wouldn't be able to see it after a while, would start making it worse. It says something about Mr. Malick's rare, obsessive clarity of vision that not a frame in "Days of Heaven" seems arbitrary. The voice-over even supports his friends' claims that personally he has a sense of humor. "He was headin' for the boneyard any minute," the girl says of the farmer, but he wasn't "goin' around squawkin' about it."
Mr. Malick's friends and colleagues insist that he doesn't cultivate his own myth, that he is truly (they don't say neurotically) private. And he is surrounded by people who protect him. Jack Fisk, who has been the production designer on all four films, spoke about Mr. Malick's work in a recent telephone interview and said, "All of us that love Terry would never do anything to invade his privacy."
In fact, those who spoke on the record for this article never went off the record; and those who spoke off the record never went on, for fear of unsettling their personal or professional relationships with Mr. Malick. His friends' assurances that he was working during his 20 years away (living mostly in Paris then, and mostly in Texas now) is technically true: he wrote an early, unused version of "Great Balls of Fire!," the 1989 Jerry Lee Lewis biopic, and worked on projects that never got far. Both Mr. Fisk and Sarah Green, who produced "The New World," said Mr. Malick wrote a version of the script more than 20 years ago; he apparently has a stockpile of others. But that doesn't explain why someone would turn his back on a career that offered boundless possibilities.
Speculation about his long absence is no more than that, though. Logic and cheap psychology suggest that fear of success or fear of failure might be involved. He may never duplicate the artistry and acclaim of his early films, and it wouldn't be surprising if the prospect of competing with himself caused creative paralysis in a filmmaker who likes every blade of grass to be shot perfectly.
If we don't know why he left, we certainly don't know why he came back, but he seems to have returned with the desire to apply his distinctive style to films with a broader scope. "The Thin Red Line" runs 2 hours and 50 minutes, and juggles a half-dozen main characters in telling the story (based on James Jones's novel) of soldiers in the battle of Guadalcanal. Instead of a single narrative looking back and commenting on the story as in the earlier films, here the voice-overs come from many soldiers, who meditate on life, death and war. The film's feel for nature is as strong as you'd expect, and there is a new attention to action; it is, after all, a movie about a battle. Unlike most war films, though, you can see the fear in these soldiers' eyes.
But all that jumping from character to character undercuts the film's emotion. And it's a good guess that Mr. Malick, who dutifully finished the movie so it could make the Oscar-qualifying deadline in 1998, could have used more editing time. Typically, there were drastic late changes. Adrien Brody, little known before "The Pianist," was meant to play a central character, but his role was cut to nearly nothing. Billy Bob Thornton, who was not in the film, reportedly recorded an entire narration that was never used.
"The Thin Red Line" didn't win a single Oscar and didn't make money, but the experience seems to have unblocked Mr. Malick. He appears to have a renewed energy for filmmaking, as long as he can work the way he likes: changing the script as he goes along, shooting in natural light, taking his time to edit. Mr. Fisk said: "I was looking at locations for him for four years before 'The New World,' for different films. Some of those things he couldn't get set up because he wouldn't have had the freedom he wanted." He came very close to making a film about Che Guevara, but "Che" and the other projects "weren't as bankable as the John Smith story," Mr. Fisk added.
Set in the Jamestown settlement in 1607, "The New World" is being sold as a love story, with Pocahontas caught between Smith, the dashing renegade whose life she famously saved as her father was about to kill him, and John Rolfe (Christian Bale), the more cautious settler she later married. (Most historians doubt that there was a romance between the very young Pocahontas and Smith, and some even question whether she saved his life, but the filmmakers are comfortable with their fiction.)
Although Mr. Farrell and Mr. Bale are the big-name stars, the story belongs to Pocahontas (Q'orianka Kilcher). Russell Schwartz, president for marketing at New Line, said, "Terrence said to me very early on, 'This is our original mother,' " meaning that her journey is that of America itself, as she goes from her role as native American to a woman who embraces European civilization when she is baptized and moves to London.
For a movie opening soon, though, there is still a ridiculous amount of secrecy surrounding "The New World." Mr. Fisk guessed that Pocahontas would do the narration and Ms. Green, the producer, would say only that there'd be one. Mr. Schwartz described the voice-overs as internal monologues and said that in the early version shown to New Line, "we start with Colin's voice-over because we enter the world from John Smith's point of view, then it's picked up by Pocahontas." That brings "The New World" closer to the meditative narratives of "The Thin Red Line" than the commentaries of the first Malick films. So does the length, an expected 2 hours and 15 minutes. The film's trailer suggests two unsurprising elements: it is a work of visual beauty and, following "Alexander" and "A Home at the End of the World," Colin Farrell is having yet another bad-hair movie.
The film's budget of around $30 million isn't much by Hollywood standards ("The Thin Red Line" cost $50 million) and New Line expects the film to do well internationally. Whatever "The New World" turns out to be, it isn't likely that Mr. Malick will be considered a big risk for his next film. Maybe he's getting more practical.
Or not. Mr. Fisk said: "There are a couple of other projects he's been working on since the 70's. He hasn't yet made the projects most important to him." What are they? "I can't tell you," he laughed.
