With the UK release of Knight of Cups this weekend, Neil Calloway looks at a unique directing talent…
Terrence Malick has directed seven films since his debut with Badlands in 1973. That might not seem like many, but when you factor in the fact that between the release of Days of Heaven in 1978 and The Thin Red Line in 1998 he didn’t make a single film, he’s got quite an impressive work rate.
Despite so few films being made, his influence on other film-makers is huge. When Malick’s The Tree of Life was released, Christopher Nolan spoke of his influence on his own films. While that’s hard to see, it’s undoubtedly true that Malick’s films has influenced many writers and directors. True Romance is Tarantino’s homage to Badlands, David Gordon Green’s work shows his influence. Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood contains very Malickian scenes, as does The Revenant; both films utilised Jack Fisk, Malick’s long term collaborator as production designer. Emmanuel Lubezki, who has worked on every Malick film since 2005, was also cinematographer for The Revenant. Andrew Dominik shot some second unit footage for The New World, and Malick’s influence shows in The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, where Sam Shepard – one of the stars of Days of Heaven, appears. Ryan Gosling’s directorial debut, Lost River, seemed like a mix of David Lynch and Malick. Even Beyonce’s recent HBO film for her album Lemonade has been compared to his work.
For someone who hasn’t directed much, Malick has also been relatively prolific this century. Between Badlands in 1973 and The New World in 2005, he only made two other films – Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line. Since then he’s made The Tree of Life, To The Wonder and now Knight of Cups (with another film already in the can). While The New World was familiar as a Malick film – on the edge of mainstream cinema, but still recognisably a narrative film, the semi-autobiographical The Tree of Life moved into more abstract territory, with the film containing a twenty minute dialogue free sequence about the birth of the universe. Despite big names such as Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams and Javier Bardem, To The Wonder was even more abstract, with little dialogue and even less of a coherent story. Despite this, it still contained familiar Malick tropes.
Though his films cover everything from 1950s criminals (Badlands) and the Second World War in the Pacific (The Thin Red Line) to the Pocahontas story (The New World) and 1950s America (The Tree of Life) all his films contain people who find, and then lose, an idyll. Very few scenes in his films are shot indoors, and many are shot using only natural light; Days of Heaven was almost exclusively shot during the “magic hour” – the short period after the sun has set but when there is still available light. It’s also fair to say that the focus of Malick’s films are the men, with women having little agency.
Famously Malick takes a long time to make films; he’ll shoot a lot of footage, take years to edit, and cut out or seriously reduce an actor’s screen time in a film on a whim. Billy Bob Thornton recorded a voice over (another Malick trope) for The Thin Red Line that was never used, and Gary Oldman, Martin Sheen, Mickey Rourke and Viggo Mortensen – among others – were cut from the final movie. Michael Sheen and Jessica Chastain (whose breakthrough role came in The Tree of Life) were excised from To The Wonder.
Malick doesn’t give interviews, or appear at press conferences or premières. Between Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line he lived in France, working on various projects that never came to fruition, in between The Thin Red Line and The New World, he developed a script about Che Guevara (he’d been in Bolivia working on an article about Che when the revolutionary was killed). The film eventually morphed into Steven Soderbergh’s two Che films. All of this leads to more intrigue about him; every film of his is an event, and actors queue up to work with him, knowing full well they might not even appear in the finished film.
Malick divides opinion, and his work is far from flawless, but he remains one of the great talents of American cinema.
Neil Calloway is a pub quiz extraordinaire and Top Gun obsessive. Check back here every Sunday for future instalments.
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Originally published May 8, 2016. Updated April 15, 2018.
