From the Magazine / December 1998 Issue
The Runaway Genius
The herculean struggle to get Terrence Malick's first movie in two decades–a film version of James Jones's war epic The Thin Red Line–to the screen was complicated not only by its elusive director’s reticence but also by the two producers who believe they made it all happen.
By Peter BiskindApril 23, 2010
www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2010/04/runaway-genius-199812
When The Thin Red Line, a tale of World War
II, unleashes its artillery—including an all-star cast of Sean Penn, Nick
Nolte, John Travolta, Woody Harrelson, John Cusack, Bill Pullman, Gary Oldman,
George Clooney, and others—in December, expect a 21-gun salute to a hero who
seems certain to remain an unseen soldier. The project marks the return, after
exactly two decades, of the mysterious director Terrence Malick, whose Badlands (1973)
and Days of Heaven (1978) are classics. Malick, who declined
to speak for this article, has established himself as a sort of cinematic
Salinger, as silent as Garbo, as evasive as the Fugitive. A fleeting presence,
like the rare birds he loves to watch, Malick is the kind of seductive talent
sought after as much for his elusiveness as for his eye. He has always been an
enigma, one of modern Hollywood’s genuine myths. Nobody knows why, at the
height of his powers, after those two unforgettable films, he walked away from
directing. And nobody knows why he came back. But one thing is definite:
offscreen a battle rages about who deserves the credit for bringing Malick
home.
Bobby Geisler first met Malick in 1978 when he approached
the filmmaker to direct a movie version of David Rabe’s play In the
Boom Boom Room. Geisler—short and cheerful with long, thinning locks
and an accent that softly suggests the South—was a novice producer who had been
deeply impressed by Badlands, which starred then unknowns
Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek in a story loosely based on the bloody career of
spree killer Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate. With
its stunning mix of psycho and pastoral, Badlands inspired
subsequent lovers-on-the-lam films, culminating in Oliver Stone’s notorious
homage, Natural Born Killers, in 1994. Badlands made
its debut at the New York Film Festival in 1973, overshadowing even Martin
Scorsese’s Mean Streets.
Malick turned down the Rabe project. Still, he and Geisler
had hit it off and began meeting at Los Angeles restaurants little frequented
by celebrities, such as the Hamburger Hamlet on Sunset and Doheny, where they
sat in back batting around ideas. Malick, about 35 then, was bearish and
bearded. He had the beef-eating habits of a boy raised in Texas and Oklahoma;
as he talked he wolfed down hamburgers, two at a time. Malick invariably wore
jeans and a seersucker sport coat a little too small for him. It gave him a
slightly Chaplinesque air. Geisler kidded him that it looked like the
seersucker jacket that Kit Carruthers—Sheen’s Starkweather surrogate—stole from
a rich man’s house in Badlands.
For 18 months or so, well into 1979, Geisler and Malick
worked on a project based on the life of Joseph Merrick, the 19th-century
British sideshow celebrity who suffered from a rare, debilitating disease. One
day Geisler was stunned to receive an invitation to a screening of Days
of Heaven, Malick’s new picture. The director had never mentioned it.
Featuring Richard Gere in his first big role, along with Sam
Shepard and Brooke Adams, Days of Heaven was a brutal shoot,
complicated by conflict between the director and its temperamental male lead,
as well as by savage battles between Malick and the producers, Bert and Harold
Schneider. Linda Palevsky, then married to Malick’s friend and patron, computer
millionaire Max Palevsky, recalls, “Terry’s quite mad, and he had this notion
of wanting to make the perfect movie. He used to describe the kind of purity he
wanted—he would say things like ‘You have a drop of water on a pond, that
moment of perfection.’ That’s the kind of quality he expected from the work he
did, and if he couldn’t do that, then there was no point making a movie. You’d
say to Terry, ‘You really ought to go into therapy,’ and he’d say, ‘If I go to
therapy, I’ll lose my creative [juice].’”
The picture languished in the editing room for nearly two
years, partly because Malick wouldn’t or couldn’t make decisions. Says Paul
Ryan, who shot second unit on the film, “Terry’s not one to draw things to a
close.” Confounding the doubters, Days of Heaven emerged as a
testimony to Malick’s artistic persistence, a dark jewel of a film, acclaimed
for its stunning imagery, even by critics who found its meager narrative
elliptical. The movie was nominated for four Oscars (winning the
best-cinematography award) and impressed Charles Bluhdorn, the colorful head of
Paramount’s parent company, Gulf & Western, who fell in love with Malick’s
melancholy tone and dreamy landscapes. Bluhdorn gave him a production deal.
Still, Malick seemed to feel he had failed at what he had set out to do.
Geisler’s Merrick project never wound up on Malick’s
Paramount agenda. When director David Lynch announced his Merrick
project, The Elephant Man, Malick and Geisler shelved
theirs—and quickly lost touch. Still, Malick had made a lasting impression on
the producer. “I thought Terry was a genius, an artist, and I was completely
mesmerized by him,” Geisler says. “I felt better when I was with him, and more
than anything I wanted to learn from him, swore that I would produce a play or
a movie of Terry’s if it was the last thing that I did.”
Exhausted and bruised by Days of Heaven, Malick
spent considerable time with his girlfriend, Michie Gleason, in Paris. While
she directed a film called Broken English, he labored in their
Rue Jacob apartment on his new script, tentatively entitled Q. Its
prologue, which dramatized the origins of life, became increasingly elaborate
and would ultimately take over the rest of the story.
Malick shuttled between Paris and Los Angeles, where he
hired a small crew, including cameraman Ryan and special-effects consultant
Richard Taylor, who worked intensely for a year or so to realize Malick’s
vision. “He wanted to do something different, get images nobody had ever seen
before,” recalls Ryan. In one version, the story began with a sleeping god,
underwater, dreaming of the origins of the universe, starting with the big bang
and moving forward, as fluorescent fish swam into the deity’s nostrils and out
again.
“Terry was one of the coolest guys I ever worked with,” says
Taylor. “He had a passion for trying to do things from the heart. The amount of
work we produced was phenomenal.” Malick dispatched cameramen all over the
world—to the Great Barrier Reef to shoot micro jellyfish, to Mount Etna to
shoot volcanic action, to Antarctica to shoot ice shelves breaking off. “He was
writing pages of poetry, with no dialogue, glorious visual descriptions,” Ryan
continues. “Every few months, Paramount would say, ‘What are you doing?’ He’d
give them 30 pages that would keep them happy for a while. But eventually they
said, ‘Send us a script that starts with page one and at the end says, “The
End.” We don’t care what it is, but do something.’ Terry’s somebody who always
functioned very well from the underground position. Suddenly, everybody was
looking at him. . . . He did not work well under those conditions. He didn’t
want to be on the spot.”
Taylor adds: “Then one Monday, Terry never showed up. He
didn’t call anybody, we couldn’t find him—we got worried that maybe something
had happened to him. Finally, after about two weeks, we got a phone call. He
was in Paris, and he said, ‘I’m not sure if I’m going to make this picture.
Maybe you should just pack all that stuff up.’ He just stopped. It was
disappointing. I had never put my heart into a project as much as I did that
one.”
Malick’s relationship with Gleason ended, leaving him as
bitter and disillusioned personally as he had become professionally. Still, he
liked Paris and was spending more time there. Every now and then he called
friends. On one occasion he exclaimed to Ryan, “I have a great idea. We’re
gonna give cameras to people who are just coming out of insane asylums, and let
them film. You think that’s nuts, but it’s not. I’m deadly serious about this.”
One day in 1980 or 1981, Malick’s landlord introduced him to
Michèle, a tall, thirtysomething blonde Parisienne who lived in the same
building. She had a young daughter, Alexandra. Michèle had never met anyone
like Malick. “He takes you places where you never go with regular people,” she
says. “He’s interested in everything from ants and plants and flowers and grass
to philosophy. And it’s not superficial. He reads all the time and remembers
everything. He’s got this incredible charm . . . something interior.”
Malick, friends surmised, was trying to fashion a normal
life far from Hollywood. Michèle had become part of that. She thought of
herself as average, unglamorous. She cooked and did dishes while Malick played
father to Alex. Occasionally, they attended Mass. Always preoccupied with faith
and religion, Malick knows the Bible well.
In a year or two, the trio moved to Austin, Texas, where
Terry had attended prep school, St. Stephen’s Episcopal, in Westlake Hills. He
had been a star football player and outstanding student. His parents, whom he
and Michèle visited often, lived by then in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Terry’s
father, Emil, was an oil geologist of Lebanese extraction (“Malick” means
“king” in Arabic) who worked for Phillips Petroleum. His mother, Irene, is
Irish and grew up on a farm in the Chicago area.
The Malicks were a family of secrets, marked by tragedy.
Terry was the oldest of three boys. Chris, the middle son, had been involved in
a terrible automobile accident in which his wife was killed. Chris was badly
burned.
Larry, the youngest, went to Spain to study with the guitar
virtuoso Segovia. Terry discovered in the summer of 1968 that Larry had broken
his own hands, seemingly despondent over his lack of progress. Emil, concerned,
went to Spain and returned with Larry’s body; it appeared the young man had
committed suicide. Like most relatives of those who take their own lives, Terry
must have borne a heavy burden of irrational guilt. According to Michèle, the
subject of Larry was never mentioned.
Malick was worshiped by his family. He was devoted to his
mother. (For years he wouldn’t allow her to read the script of The Thin
Red Line because of the profanity.) But he had terrible fights with
his father, often over trivial issues. Even at the age of 50, according to
Michèle, he still argued with Emil over whether he should wear a tie to church.
Another bone of contention was family photographs. Malick’s father loved to
take pictures, but it made Terry uncomfortable. (Malick’s contract with
Twentieth Century Fox prevents his likeness from being used to promote The
Thin Red Line.)
Michèle did her best to adapt to Austin. Malick took her on
bird-watching expeditions to Big Bend National Park in south Texas. But she was
out of her element. Although Terry, who spoke softly and slowly, tried to avoid
confrontations, he shared his father’s temper. According to Michèle, Terry
loved to debate abstract intellectual issues but had very rigid ideas about how
domestic life ought to be lived. He did not brook contradiction.
The first real fight he and Michèle had was over buying a
television, which she thought Alex, who was 11 or so by then, needed to help
acclimate her to a foreign country. Malick, who has the habit of casting his
likes, dislikes, and personal eccentricities as matters of principle, argued
that TV was trash, that it would ruin the child. (When traveling, Malick often
had the TV removed from his hotel rooms, and when that wasn’t possible, covered
it.) Michèle wouldn’t relent—and there was a blow-up. At difficult times like
these, Malick would often just leave, for hours, days, or weeks. She never knew
where he went, and it made her crazy.
Malick had other eccentricities. He was compulsively neat
and possessive about his things. Michèle says she was not allowed to cross the
threshold of his office. If she wanted to read one of his books, he preferred
to buy another copy rather than lend his own. It was difficult for her to
figure out what he was reading, anyway: he always placed books cover down. When
he listened to music, he used a Walkman and rarely left cassettes faceup.
Malick didn’t discuss his film work with Michèle, telling
her, “I want my personal life to be completely separate from the movies.”
Although once in a while she read his scripts, mostly he wouldn’t tell her what
he was working on, and she was not supposed to ask. Occasionally, Malick went
to Los Angeles, and every so often he took Michèle along. She met a few of his
friends. Malick and Michèle had married in 1985, but no one in L.A. had known
of the wedding, or even of their relationship. She felt she had ceased to
exist.
Alex had become sassy and rebellious. But Malick was very
strict. Not only was there no TV, there was no candy, no telephone. The
stricter he became, the more the teenager acted out. Michèle was not strong
enough to protect her. One day, Terry and Michèle found Alex gone. She had
apparently gotten her father to send her a ticket to France. She was only 15 at
the time.
Malick’s production deal with Paramount had ended in 1983
after the sudden death of Charles Bluhdorn. He supported himself by writing the
occasional script. He did something for Louis Malle and also completed a
rewrite of a Robert Dillon script called Countryman for
producers Edward Lewis and Robert Cortes in 1984. “I couldn’t communicate with
him directly,” recalls Cortes. “I would make a phone call to a certain number,
leave a message, and then his brother would call me back.” Once, Malick and
Cortes actually met face-to-face at Universal executive Ned Tanen’s home in
Santa Monica Canyon. After the meeting, Cortes offered to give him a lift. “He
was very cryptic about where to drop him off,” Cortes continues. “I let him out
at the corner of Wilshire and Seventh or somewhere. He waited for me to drive
away, and then he just walked off.”
Mike Medavoy, who then headed production at Orion Pictures
and who had been Malick’s agent, hired the director to write a script for Great
Balls of Fire! Malick also did a rewrite of a script based on Walker
Percy’s novel The Moviegoer. In 1986, Rob Cohen, then head of
Taft-Barish Productions, hired him to adapt Larry McMurtry’s The Desert
Rose for Barry Levinson to direct. “Malick was someone who was
listening to a high whine in his head,” recalls Cohen. “He was very tense and
fragile, the least likely person to be a director. I once had to have a meeting
with him in Westwood. He was getting up every five minutes and hiding behind
pillars; he kept thinking he saw somebody he knew. He would call me, and I’d
hear trucks rolling by on the highway, and I’d say, ‘Where are you?’ and he’d
answer, ‘I’m walking to Oklahoma!’ ‘What do you mean, you’re walking to
Oklahoma? From Texas?’ ‘Yeah, I’m looking at birds.’”
By the time Geisler reconnected with Malick in 1988, the
producer was teamed up with another Texan, John Roberdeau, who had grown up in
Austin. Roberdeau was also a Malick devotee, who had committed Days of
Heaven to memory—every shot, every cut, every scrap of dialogue.
Geisler and Roberdeau have a mixed reputation in the film and theater
community. They are praised by many for their taste and generosity to artists,
but disliked by others for their tireless self-promotion and record of running
up bad debts. At the time they met Malick, they had produced several
plays—including a Broadway production of Eugene O’Neill’s five-hour
drama, Strange Interlude, on Broadway with Glenda Jackson.
But, after a decade in the business, they had completed only one movie, Streamers (in
1983). Robert Altman, the film’s cantankerous director, had grown so frustrated
with the pair’s interference that the relationship completely broke down.
Geisler and Roberdeau approached Malick about writing and
directing a picture based on D. M. Thomas’s novel The White Hotel, a
vividly erotic story of the Freudian analysis of a woman who dies in a
concentration camp. In a characteristic display of largesse, they offered him
$2 million, which they didn’t yet have. Malick declined, but went on to concede
that it might be time he went back to movies. Geisler recalls Malick’s saying
that if the two producers would be patient they could walk down that path
together. Malick told them he would be willing to write an adaptation of
Molière’s Tartuffe—a classic farce—or James Jones’s World War II
saga The Thin Red Line, a sequel of sorts to From Here
to Eternity. Geisler and Roberdeau sensibly chose the latter and paid
Malick $250,000 to write a script.
Malick sent Geisler and Roberdeau a first draft in late May
of 1989. The producers flew to Paris and met up with the director and his wife
on the Pont Saint-Louis, a bridge which connects the precincts of Notre Dame to
the Île Saint-Louis. In a gesture both thoughtful and seductive, they gave the
Malicks a silver flask from Tiffany on which was inscribed a sergeant’s chevron
and one of their favorite lines from the Jones novel: “Billions of hard, bright
stars shone with relentless glitter across the tropic night sky.” They had
dinner at the Brasserie de l’Île Saint-Louis, where Jones, who had died in
1977, and his wife, Gloria, had often lunched. The foursome walked up the Quai
d’Orléans to No. 10, where Jones had lived, and Malick bowed before the former home
of the master.
At Le Jardin des Plantes and other sites around Paris they
settled in to discuss the script. Geisler had prepared 400 notes, and he
believes his seriousness impressed Malick. “Had we not delivered 400 notes,”
Geisler maintains, “had we just said, ‘Thanks for the screenplay, we’ll be in
touch later,’ he would not have directed it. It was because we were in this
dialogue that he did.
“The notion that we discussed endlessly,” Geisler continues,
“was that Malick’s Guadalcanal would be a Paradise Lost, an Eden, raped by the
green poison, as Terry used to call it, of war. Much of the violence was to be
portrayed indirectly. A soldier is shot, but rather than showing a Spielbergian
bloody face we see a tree explode, the shredded vegetation, and a gorgeous bird
with a broken wing flying out of the tree.”
Malick had agonized about every deviation from Jones’s
novel, no matter how trivial. He asked Gloria Jones’s permission for the
smallest changes. Eventually she told him, “Terry, you have my husband’s voice,
you’re writing in his musical key; now what you must do is improvise. Play
riffs on this.”
Malick ultimately fashioned a remarkable script, infused
with his own sensibility. But he had made some questionable choices. He
retained several of Jones’s more conventional situations, but dropped some
interesting elements, including the suggestion of a homoerotic undertow among
some of the characters. Later, he changed Stein, a Jewish captain, to Staros,
an officer of Greek extraction, thereby gutting Jones’s indictment of
anti-Semitism in the military, which the novelist had observed close-up in his
own company.
On the final night of the producers’ visit, over dinner at
the Café de Flore, in a dramatic appeal he had rehearsed ahead of time, Geisler
beseeched Malick to direct the script himself, and assured him that he and his
partner would wait forever if necessary. According to Geisler, Malick agreed.
But the director left open numerous doors through which he
might make a hasty exit. Always cautious, he wasn’t about to enter into any
ironclad commitments. The producers realized that although they had hooked
their fish, it was far from reeled in. “It was important that we find a way to
remain in continual touch with Terry,” Geisler says, candid about his efforts
to cement the relationship. “The best way to do that was to commission him to
develop another project.” In late 1989, although Malick had never before
written a play and was not much interested in the stage, he suggested adapting
the story which had been the basis for the great Kenji Mizoguchi film Sanshō
the Bailiff for the theater. Geisler and Roberdeau agreed to pay him
$200,000, plus a $50,000 bonus, which Malick would collect the night the play
opened on Broadway.
The producers plunged into the research, supplying Malick
with anything and everything he needed. And often, expensively, going him one
better. No script existed for the Mizoguchi film, so they had it transcribed
and translated by both a Japanese linguist who spoke English and an American
who spoke Japanese. (Debates over particularly enigmatic areas of the text were
also incorporated.) The producers excavated 10th-century literature written in
ancient Japanese—travel sketches and diaries. They taped Japanese children who
were the same age as the children in the script, speaking Malick’s lines, so he
could hear what they sounded like.
The three men became what the producers considered to be
close friends. Geisler corresponded with Emil Malick, sending him newspaper
clippings on subjects of interest to him, and even two city guides to
Washington, D.C., on the eve of a visit. When Roberdeau’s brother was diagnosed
with leukemia, Malick offered to donate his bone marrow. Even though the
producers had other projects—they had enlisted the now deceased Dennis Potter
to write The White Hotel—Malick was the focus. Claims Geisler, “We
behaved like family toward each other. We liked each other, I thought, loved
each other. He was the center and circumference of our lives.”
Occasionally, the trio converged on Los Angeles. At the
Beverly Hills Hotel, Malick asked them to request one of the first-floor rooms
in the back, with the patios. Rather than use the valet, he parked on Crescent
Drive, adjacent to the hotel, and instead of walking through the lobby, he
crossed the grounds and entered from the rear, hopping over the little patio
fence, rapping on the plate-glass door for admittance. Says Roberdeau, “It was
as if he was Greta Garbo or something.”
The producers’ friends told them that they were crazy, that
Malick would never finish a project. But, says Geisler, “I thought we were
working with a guy who was one of the few true artists of the 20th century. It
wasn’t an easy day’s work, but it was a great day’s work. Terry was the Holy
Grail. He was thought to be unfindable, unapproachable, unconvincible. Others
had failed; we would be successful. We realized how much that might mean to our
careers.”
Malick, still not entirely won over, had plenty of caveats.
For a long time he would not allow the producers to keep a sample of his
handwriting. They say original copies of documents bearing his penmanship were
to be returned to him with no copies made. Handwritten notes were to be
destroyed. It reminded Roberdeau of Badlands, in which Sheen’s
character would never sign his name the same way twice out of fear of forgery.
Geisler and Roberdeau practiced what they called “method
producing,” which consisted of elaborate (and expensive) trips, flying to San
Francisco to see the Kodo Drummers, visiting an Asian collection at the Boston
Museum of Fine Arts and then heading on to Grafton, Vermont, for a Sanshō
the Bailiff editing session while they ate cheese soup and watched the
leaves turn. They booked Malick into the best hotels, reserved tables at the
finest restaurants. Sometimes he took such first-class service for granted, but
occasionally he balked, tried to plan his own trips, or rejected a car. They
sent it anyway.
One day in the fall of 1990, Malick told the producers he
had long been working on a script called The English-Speaker, based
upon Dr. Josef Breuer’s well-known 19th-century case study of Anna O., a
hysteric. In Malick’s silent world of secrets, this script was especially
personal, private. He would allow no one but Geisler to read it. Of the
project, the producer says, “It’s as if he had ripped open his heart and bled
his true feelings onto the page.” It is indeed a remarkable script, The
Exorcist as written by Dostoyevsky. So when Malick said, “Let’s do
this,” Geisler and Roberdeau, drunk on his prose poetry, agreed, paying him
$400,000.
Late in the summer of 1990, Malick had turned in the first
draft of Sanshō the Bailiff. The producers knew it wasn’t
quite there yet, but in early 1991 they sent it out to directors Peter Brook,
Peter Stein, and Ingmar Bergman. Each turned it down. Undeterred, the producers
conceived the ambitious notion of staging the play as a workshop and inviting
the participation of the world’s masters of set design, sound, lighting, and
choreography. But they still needed a director.
In August 1992, Geisler and Roberdeau, along with the
Malicks—who by that time were estranged and living separately—met up at the
music festival in Salzburg. They were impressed by the great Andrzej Wajda’s
staging of the Polish classic Wesele and were familiar with
Wajda’s celebrated trilogy—A Generation, Kanal, and Ashes
and Diamonds—a masterpiece of world cinema.
Wajda had never heard of Malick, but flew to New York in
October to screen Badlands and Days of Heaven at
the Tribeca Film Center. Afterward, at a nearby restaurant, he agreed to
direct Sanshō the Bailiff. The tables were covered with
butcher paper, and Wajda drew a picture with crayons. He inscribed it, “For
Terry from Andrzej Wajda.” Geisler was so excited, he called Malick in Austin,
saying: “Next stop, Warsaw!”
On a cold and wintry December evening of the same year, the
Malicks and the producers converged on Wajda’s family home in Warsaw. Faded
photographs of ancestors and war heroes illuminated by flickering candles in
sconces peered down at them from the green enameled walls as they shared a
traditional dinner with Wajda and his wife, actress Krystyna Zachwatowicz, two
enormous dogs, and various friends and relatives who dropped by.
Malick, who detests beets and fish with bones—or even the
appearance of bones—seemed ill at ease as the guests hungrily attacked the
three beet dishes (pickled and roasted beets, as well as borscht), four
varieties of herring, along with kasha, duck, and 10 or so other delicacies.
The meal was washed down with generous quantities of Polish vodka, which Malick
drank sparingly.
Wajda felt that the play required substantial revision. He
expected Malick to roll up his shirtsleeves and do more, do better. Sitting by
the roaring fire after the sumptuous meal, Wajda turned to Malick and said,
“Terry, what you need to do to Sanshō the Bailiff is make it
more like Shakespeare.”
Recalls Geisler, “That was the beginning of the end.”
The workshop was budgeted at $600,000. As the first day
approached, the producers’ long-suffering backers abruptly pulled out. Still,
the show went on. True to their word, Geisler and Roberdeau did manage to
gather some remarkable international talents, including lighting designer
Jennifer Tipton, sound designer Hans Peter Kuhn, and a collection of fine
Asian-American actors. But the six-week workshop, held at the Brooklyn Academy
of Music (BAM) in November of 1993, was a bust.
The relationship between Malick and Wajda quickly
deteriorated. A few days into the workshop, Michèle arrived from Paris to see
her husband. To her, it seemed that Wajda was threatened by Malick’s presence.
Malick thought Wajda didn’t understand his play; he was frustrated by how
little the director was bringing to it. He was angered by what he regarded as
Wajda’s condescending attitude—“You, boy, go do your rewrites.”
Wajda spoke English to Geisler and Roberdeau, but never a
word to Malick, with whom he conversed through translators. He was annoyed that
Malick had not done the work he wanted. Malick insisted on doing it his way,
but he wasn’t the director. Says Kuhn, “Terry didn’t know anything about
theater, and he was not interested in learning. He was very stubborn.”
On the last day, just after Michèle returned to Paris,
Malick asked the producers for a limo. Geisler and Roberdeau were puzzled; he
had never asked for a car and chauffeur before. They were flabbergasted when
they saw it was for Ecky Wallace, an Austin woman who was an old friend of
Malick’s from St. Stephen’s. Later, she became Malick’s girlfriend.
The workshop cost $800,000, alienated Malick, and left the
producers devastated, although it was a disaster of their own making. The play
just wasn’t ready. Geisler and Roberdeau were besieged by angry creditors—BAM,
caterers, travel agents, publicists, restaurants. The partners were dead broke.
They sold their furniture to meet their payroll; Roberdeau sold CDs and books
so they could eat. One creditor managed to have Geisler arrested. He was led
from his town house in handcuffs, marched down West Ninth Street in Manhattan’s
Greenwich Village, and thrown in jail overnight for grand larceny, a charge
that was later dismissed. (In April 1996, Geisler and Roberdeau were evicted
from the home they shared.)
Says Roberdeau, “It was ridiculous. We were sitting on all
these assets that we had sunk our money, blood, and time into. It was time to
put Terry on notice.” In December, they began to press Terry about which of the
two movie projects would go first, The English-Speaker or The
Thin Red Line. Geisler, who was closer to Malick, played the good cop,
Roberdeau the bad. The latter angrily told the director, “Don’t pretend you’re
not a participant in all of this.” But, says Geisler, Malick blithely refused
“to take any responsibility whatsoever. Our problems were our problems. He had
forewarned us in the beginning that his timetable would be his timetable, and
if we were still standing by the time that he got around to directing one or
both of the movies, that would be great.”
In January 1995, the producers sent Malick a note, begging
him to allow them to approach Mike Medavoy, who was in the process of setting
up his own company, Phoenix Pictures, to finance The English-Speaker and/or The
Thin Red Line. They say Malick never answered. Geisler and Roberdeau
borrowed money for tickets and flew to Los Angeles, arriving in a teeming
rainstorm. Fallen trees blocked the narrow roads that thread the canyons of
Beverly Hills. Later the two men came to feel that they had ignored a portent
of biblical proportions. But Medavoy agreed to give them $100,000 to secure the
project for his company; he said he would back The Thin Red Line with
the other two men serving as producers.
But Sanshō the Bailiff had badly damaged
the relationship between Malick and the producers. Geisler and Roberdeau,
terrified, made herculean efforts to mend fences. By the following year,
Malick’s wounds had apparently begun to heal, and the three men again professed
affection for one another. Geisler and Roberdeau say that Malick asked them to
hire him to adapt A Tale of Two Cities for the stage.
The producers spoke between themselves about how to keep the
pressure on, how to steer Malick away from theater and toward starting The
Thin Red Line. At the time, the feeling was that since the film’s
message was that war dehumanized the G.I.’s and made them anonymous, stars
would not be used in the picture. The producers sent their two assistants on
weekend trips to the Midwest to scout fresh faces, corn-fed boys at spelling
bees and debating contests. It was expensive, but it was a way of moving Malick
forward.
March of 1995 brought a reading of The Thin Red Line at
Medavoy’s home. The Malick magic worked its spell. The reading included Martin
Sheen delivering the screen directions, Kevin Costner, Will Patton, Dermot
Mulroney, Peter Berg, and Lukas Haas.
Malick was nervous. His face was flushed. He had prepared
some remarks, but when he stood up his mind went blank. He was deeply
embarrassed and looked as if he just wanted to survive to the end. Observes
Roberdeau, “He was in his element, but he was painfully aware that everybody
was looking at him as the master. This was a kind of coming-out.” The fact that
Malick turned up at all was a symbolic gesture that somehow made The
Thin Red Line official. But there was still a long road ahead.
In June, a five-day workshop was scheduled, also at
Medavoy’s. A few weeks before it was due to begin, Malick said he couldn’t
sleep at night; he was worried that Geisler and Roberdeau might produce Sanshō
the Bailiff before he finished it, directed by someone else. They say
he demanded that his producers relinquish all rights to the play to him.
Geisler says, “Terry would have drawn a line in the sand, and The Thin
Red Line wouldn’t be happening today.” By this time, they had invested
nearly $1 million and a decade’s effort in The Thin Red Line. They
agreed to his terms.
Plans for the film workshop proceeded. One day Brad Pitt
dropped by. Malick met Johnny Depp at the Book Soup Bistro, on Sunset. Recalls
Geisler, “Depp basically said to Malick, ‘Let’s sign this napkin; you tell me
where to show up, when, what to play.’ After Depp and Pitt provided the
affirmation Terry needed, it was easier to get him to meet with other actors.”
But there was a downside to stars; Geisler told the suddenly starstruck
director, “You’re going to compromise the movie.” Finally Malick gave in. According
to a source, Malick said, “The audience will know that Pitt’s going to wake up
after his death scene and collect his $1 million.”
But word had gotten out that Costner, Pitt, and Depp were up
for roles in The Thin Red Line, and a feeding frenzy began
among male actors. Geisler and Roberdeau were even getting calls from
actresses. “There are no actresses in it,” Roberdeau told one agent. “There’s
only a photograph of a woman in one scene.” Without missing a beat, the agent
said, “She’ll play that! She’ll be the photograph.”
Pre-production moved slowly, with Malick displaying his
characteristic reluctance to make decisions. Says a source, “It was hard for
him to say something definite. He would couch [his ambivalence] in a way that
was very compelling on the surface, all about being delicate, and he speaks so
idiomatically that sometimes you get caught up in the beauty of what he’s
saying, but fundamentally it was hard to get him to commit to things.” He met
with scores of actors, told each of them, “There is no one whom I admire more.”
Around the beginning of 1996, Malick phoned Michèle in Paris
and told her he wanted a divorce. It did not come as a complete surprise. There
had been problems since her days in Austin. But she claims when she had asked
Malick if things had changed between them, he had always said, “No, no, no.”
Malick was inching toward production, but there were still
unresolved issues. As soon as Medavoy got involved, Geisler says, a turf war
broke out. It was one that, without Malick’s support, Geisler and Roberdeau
would inevitably lose. Medavoy says he welcomed the participation of Geisler
and Roberdeau. “I did everything to keep them on,” he says. “I took them out to
lunch. I said, ‘Here’s your chance to really learn how to make a movie.’”
But Geisler and Roberdeau had no experience with a project
of this scale. Medavoy hired his friend, veteran producer George Stevens Jr.,
whom Malick had known and liked since the late 60s. (Stevens had invested
in Badlands.) He was to supervise the production, which would
largely take place in Queensland, Australia, and cost about $55 million.
Medavoy asked Geisler and Roberdeau to share their
producers’ credit with Stevens. They refused.
In the fall of 1996, according to Geisler, Malick called him
and said that he was once again having trouble sleeping. Now he was worried
about The English-Speaker. He feared that, since his exclusive
five-year directing option had lapsed at the end of 1995, the producers might
turn it over to another director.
“I thought he wanted me to say a few words of love and
reassurance,” recalls Geisler. But he says Malick made it clear that he would
not proceed with The Thin Red Line unless the producers
extended his right to direct The English-Speaker in
perpetuity. The producers refused.
“Terry said that if we ultimately produced one of the three
projects with him, we should feel ourselves lucky,” Geisler remembers, summing
up an exchange with Malick. “I said, ‘You’re scaring me now, because you’re
making me feel as if you have no intention ever of developing Sanshō or
directing The English-Speaker, which was not the spirit in
which these other projects were commissioned.’”
Medavoy agreed with them, told Malick that if he felt so
strongly about The English-Speaker he should buy the script
back or enter into a partnership with the producers. But Malick was adamant,
denied he had any ulterior motives, and held out a carrot. Again, according to
Geisler, he said, “We’ll clean our wound to the bone, proceed together on The
Thin Red Line without doubt or suspicion. We will now be speaking
pilot to pilot. I don’t want to jump out and see that you’re still on the
plane. We’ll be able to jump out of the plane together.” Roberdeau broke in,
saying, “I feel like I’ve already jumped out of the plane. I’m on the ground
with my legs broken.”
Geisler consoled himself with fantasies about the glorious
day when The Thin Red Line would finally open, “A Terrence
Malick picture, produced by Robert Geisler and John Roberdeau.” He explains:
“During those years of stress, selling furniture and books and CDs, I got
through it because I said, ‘Bring Malick back and, oh, what a day it will be.
What a reward we’ll have. We’ll stand shoulder to shoulder, speak pilot to
pilot.’”
Principal photography was to begin on June 23, 1997. Phoenix
had a deal with Sony, which was slated to co-finance the picture. Geisler and
Roberdeau learned from a story in Variety that Sony president
John Calley had pulled his company out of the film. They say they faxed the
article to Malick in Australia, where he was scouting locations. He flew to Los
Angeles immediately and pressed Medavoy, who admitted he didn’t have the financing.
Geisler and Roberdeau claim that Malick was furious with his old friend, and
asked them if, contractually, he could take the film away from Medavoy.
Medavoy responds, “I don’t know if that’s true or not,
because Terry never mentioned it to me. I had told Terry that we ran the risk
of not doing it at Sony, and since he was in Australia and unavailable, I
waited until he got back to tell him that it wasn’t going to be Sony, but that
we would find another distributor.”
In any event, Malick, Medavoy, and Stevens (sans Geisler
and Roberdeau) were obliged to pitch the project, something Malick had hoped to
avoid. Fox 2000 president Laura Ziskin agreed to pick up the film, but required
the presence of some stars. They would play supporting roles while
lower-wattage actors, such as Elias Koteas, Adrien Brody, and Jim Caviezel,
took on the main parts. The last stone had been cleared from the path.
“In May of 1997, we were working our hearts out in New York,
and I saw that people were beginning to move to Australia,” says Geisler. “We
called Phoenix. Under no circumstances were we to be in Australia, ever! I
called Terry and said, ‘What we just heard doesn’t square with either our
recent situation, in which you seemed to rely upon me, if not hourly, at least
every other day, nor our relationship over the last 10 or 20 years.’ We just
wanted the pleasure of seeing him say ‘Action!’ for the first time in 20 years,
feeling we had earned that, and he would not be there were it not for John and
me.
“Basically he said I should be grateful to him for directing
this movie. It was not what he expected to direct, he didn’t want to, he was
doing it only for me. I said, ‘Terry, this is going to sound melodramatic and
biblical, but let me put it to you like this: I feel like Moses. I led this
fucking movie through the desert, and now the fun starts, everybody else is
walking into the promised land.’ He said, ‘Bobby, there is no one for whom I
have more admiration than you. No one speaks the truth to me like you do,
Bobby.’” Essentially, says Geisler, Malick blamed it on Medavoy.
Geisler continues, “To be really theatrical about it, this
sums up my whole life with Terry Malick.” He takes out a small manila envelope
and turns it upside down, spilling a handful of brightly colored pills, like
M&Ms, onto the table. He slowly counts out 17, some of which are vitamins.
“Several years ago, I didn’t take anything,” he says. “My face has started
falling off. High blood pressure, diabetes, I got fat, I drink too much. I’m
never going to get over this. We were co-dependent. I don’t like to think this
about myself, but we were members of a cult.” Adds Roberdeau, “We were the high
priests of it. I’m the cardinal of Bobby’s Malick cult.”
Disputes between directors and producers are, as is well
known, common in the film business. But what happened next was a little
strange. Several journalists visited the set, among them Josh Young from
Entertainment Weekly. Shortly thereafter, Young received a copy of a peculiar
statement from the set on The Thin Red Line stationery, and a later letter,
unsigned. The statement said, in part: “Bobby Geisler and John Roberdeau are
imposters and confidence men who have no connection with Mr. Malick and who have
had only a distant one in the past. Journalists should beware of letting these
tricksters promote their own careers by using Mr. Malick’s name . . . ” The
letter attacks them for crediting themselves “as the reason [Malick] has
returned to filmmaking,” and credits Ecky Wallace instead.
It seems extremely unlikely that Malick would have lent
himself to so bizarre an exercise as this one. But regardless of who wrote the
statement, it reflects the sentiments of the people around Malick. Says
Medavoy, “The [producers] were really resourceful in getting to Terry and
putting the impetus into it, but I don’t think they convinced him to make the
movie, maybe Ecky did. I don’t know. But one thing’s for sure: he came to it
himself, and it wasn’t about money, it was about passion.”
Says Clayton Townsend, Oliver Stone’s producer, who worked
on pre-production, “Geisler and Roberdeau are two guys who live in their own
world. They’re very pretentious fellows and take great pride in their paper
presentations. They just had a knack for putting on a lot of people along the
way. I tried to stay clear of them.”
Adds one source, “There are a lot of people Geisler and
Roberdeau owed money to. The fact is, they might have had the police after them
if this picture hadn’t been set up. They are the great spenders of the Western
world. They didn’t have enough money to pay for the office help, but you ask
them to go out and get you a list of actors and they Federal Express you a book
full of pictures in a $200 binder. The two guys are trying to get their careers
started on Terry. They wore out their welcome.”
Adds another source, “It wasn’t that they were banned from
the set. They hadn’t been involved for a year prior to the shooting, except in
their own minds. They’re people Terry got involved with and wishes he hadn’t.
Terry said that not only did they not bring him back, their being around was
discouraging him from coming back.”
The source adds that Geisler and Roberdeau were working at
cross-purposes with Phoenix. For example, he claims that the production was
waiting for the delivery of uniforms, which never came. When the supplier was
called, he said he had been fired by Roberdeau. (Geisler denies this.) Another
source says that Geisler and Roberdeau were asked to give Adrien Brody, an
actor they had recommended, a tape of Il Posto, a film that
Malick wanted him to see. Instead they arranged a screening and dinner at the
Royalton Hotel in New York for a dozen people. Malick was reportedly furious
that they had “improved” on his instruction.
Adrien Brody plays Fife, a major character in the
novel—Jones modeled him after himself. Now his scenes have been reduced, and
the film, not unlike Oliver Stone’s 1986 Platoon, turns on the
conflict between idealism and cynicism as embodied in the clash between two
characters—Welsh, who is played by Sean Penn, and Witt, who is played by Jim
Caviezel. (Caviezel and Elias Koteas, who plays Staros, are the two actors
whose performances are generating advance praise.)
Although people around Malick now say that it was, among
other things, Geisler and Roberdeau’s problems with creditors that estranged
the director, their phone logs reveal that he was calling them frequently,
often two or three times a day, as much as a year after The New York
Observer went public with their financial woes, right up to the start
of production.
The producers think Malick got rid of them because of their
close relationship with Michèle. Says Geisler, “We and Michèle got divorced
around the same time. We got the call and Michèle got the call. A chapter was
closed and a chapter was opened.” Geisler and Roberdeau are contractually
allowed to thank four people in the credits. Michèle Malick was one of the
people they selected. According to Geisler, when Terry heard about all of this,
he threatened to take his name off the picture.
Concludes Geisler, “Terry’s writing is obsessed with mercy
and sacrifice and love and courage and comradeship, but that just doesn’t
square with who he is: utterly unmerciful. But great artists are not
necessarily always nice people.”
The fact is, we’ll probably never know the entire truth
about this relationship. But one thing is clear: Malick and the producers, who
did manage to retain their screen credit, were made for each other. His genius
sparked their ambition; their ambition cleared his path back to filmmaking.
Geisler and Roberdeau ensnared Malick in a web of love that he may have come to
experience as obligation, and he broke loose. They tried to seduce him, become
the circumference of his life, but he seduced them and became the center of
theirs. As playwright Charles Mee Jr., who wrote four drafts of The
White Hotel, puts it, “When Bobby and John first encounter an artist,
they are so appreciative, they are so generous, but there comes a time when
they would like some consideration in return, and if they don’t get it, they
feel dissed. There comes a test of love—that most people fail.”
The fact is, the director has returned and, despite his long
absence, brought The Thin Red Line in on time and on budget.
The much discussed result is a “meditation on men and war,” as Laura Ziskin
calls it, as far from Saving Private Ryan, the year’s other
big war movie, as you can get. “The technical virtuosity of Saving
Private Ryan is stunning,” she continues. “The artistic virtuosity
of The Thin Red Line is equally stunning. There’s a kind of
hypnotic quality to Malick’s movies, and this one is just mesmerizing.”
