Interview - John C. Reilly on The Thin Red Line

John C. Reilly on The Thin Red Line.

“We were up in far north Queensland in the rain forest area of Australia and then for about a month in Guadalcanal. He’s an amazing guy. He’s, despite his reputation, he’s not some Howard Hughes-like hermit figure whose afraid to talk to people. He’s very open and friendly and warm and encouraging. He’s just a very private person. He’s almost like… I heard that he’s studied philosophy before he started directing films, before he made Badlands, when he went to AFI, the American Film Institute, using their first class. He was a philosophy student before that, and it makes sense when you meet him, because it doesn’t really, he doesn’t really seem like a film director. He doesn’t have any of that… he just seems like a truth seeker. He’s someone… I’ll give you an example of a story. We’re making The Thin Red Line and there was this day when there was this army base, and there was hundreds and hundreds of extras and this huge base with tents and trucks, and vintage airplanes taking off and landing. It was this big massive shot, and the camera was gonna’ be in the back of this truck with some of the main actors, myself included, as it drove through the camp.”

“So in order to get the shot, they had to orchestrate this massive group of people, like an entire camp, and they were like, ‘STAND BY! SHOOT THE AIRPLANES! GET THE TRUCKS GOING! OKAY, EXTRAS!’ There was dust everywhere and there was noise, and everybody’s waiting you know, and we’re in the back of the truck, ‘Here we go, here we go…’ and ‘STAND BY!’ And all of a sudden, Terry’s like, ‘Oh look, there’s a Red-Tailed Hawk! Look! John, John [Toll] get the camera! Get the camera! There he is!’ We’re all like [imitating a confused slack-jawed look]. ‘Are we really filming a hawk right now? Are you kidding? There’s airplanes taking off!’ And we sat there for five or ten minutes while he got different angles of this bird flying through the sky, you know, but that’s how, it was like the script didn’t really matter to him, the story didn’t matter, although we shot the script and we shot the story, the movie didn’t really resemble the script by the time he finished editing it. I think that shows real vision, you know, he didn’t let anything distract him from what he found to be truthful or meaningful, whether it was a Red-Tailed Hawk or whether it was a bug landing on a leaf, or whether it was an extra suddenly starting to cry because he was moved by something, or whether it was the main actor doing a speech. So, it was just like he was gathering moments, just taking them with him and then he’d get back and say ‘Let’s turn this into a movie.’” — John C. Reilly on The Thin Red Line

Article - Editing the Thin Red Line

Conversations with...
Billy Weber and Leslie Jones

By Liv Torgerson

Can you imagine working on a picture that shot a million and a half feet of film and the director never watched dailies? Or a $50-million film released without even one preview? These improbable scenarios occurred on Terrence Malick's 'The Thin Red Line', according to editors Billy Weber and Leslie Jones, who spoke at a Fireside Chat at Electric Picture Solutions on February 25. For their work on the film, the duo, along with Saar Klein, were honored with Oscar and Eddie nominations for best editing.

Billy Weber and Leslie Jones

Billy and Leslie had collaborated previously on several films as editor and assistant, and, more recently, as co-editors. Billy's credits include 'Midnight Run', 'Beverly Hills Cop' and 'Top Gun', which earned him an Oscar nomination in 1987. He also directed a feature, 'Josh and S.A.M.', in 1993. Leslie grew up around the business, watching her father and grandfather work as editors. (All three generations have now earned Oscar nominations!) She co-edited 'Murder at 1600' with Billy and has cut several documentaries on her own, including 'Wild Bill', 'Hollywood Maverick'. Her working relationship with Billy undoubtedly piqued the interest of the capacity crowd of film assistants.

At the editors' request, the evening revolved around a Q&A session that concentrated largely on 'The Thin Red Line'. The audience enjoyed the opportunity to learn of Billy's experiences working on all three of Malick's films: as associate editor on Badlands in 1973, as editor on 'Days of Heaven' in 1978, and now as co-editor of 'The Thin Red Line'. In re-uniting with Malick, Billy said he "knew much more and could handle the situation better. My prior experience and knowledge were also helpful in guiding Leslie through the long and difficult process of working with this very creative director."

Because of Malick's unique working style, the editors were faced with an unusual set of challenges. Much of the film was unscripted. At times three units were shooting at different locations around Australia and, though he was concerned about what was being captured, the director did not screen the dailies. Leslie started the picture without Billy, who came on after principle photography wrapped. She met Malick only once prior to the shoot, briefly in L.A., and though she was on location for five months, Leslie rarely saw him during production. "Terry and I rarely talked about the film," she commented. "He left me to my own devices. Eventually I came back with a five-hour first cut."

"Even that five-hour version was very powerful, and you could see it was a very moving story back then," Billy added.

The editing team spent 13 months in post, and the mix lasted four months. There were no previews, but there were several in-house screenings; the largest of which, attended by 15 people, was for marketing executives. Malick had final cut. Although the editors said he had specific ideas he wanted to try, the director was also willing to explore and experiment with the material. His creative process demanded time and patience, and though occasionally frustrating, was often rewarding as well.

In working with the footage, the editors found the blend of seasoned and less-experienced actors to be a particular challenge. The many cameos were another difficult element, as were the film's voice-overs, which were not initially in the script. Making room for them was tricky, and most were recorded directly into the Avid. Some of that scratch track remained in the final film, according to Billy. "Terry is not really fond of dialogue, and shoots takes with and without it," he said. Leslie added, "Terry lost dialogue wherever possible. The final film varied greatly from the original concept."

The team used four Avids (at one point a fifth was added). They were linked via a fibre-channel network, allowing multiple editors to work on the same sequences simultaneously. In addition to the three editors, the crew included an Avid assistant, a first assistant who was also credited as associate editor, and two film assistants. Occasionally, additional help was brought in to conform. "All things considered," commented Leslie, "it was not that big of a crew."

According to both editors, Malick enjoyed the technological advances overall, like the camera cranes used for the shoot, but was less enamored with the Avid. The editors, however, thought the Avid enabled them to cope with the wealth of incredible footage from cinematographer John Toll. "If we had cut on film," said Billy, "we would still be editing today."

Working on 'The Thin Red Line' was a very special experience for both Billy and Leslie, and they acknowledged that the entire crew felt extremely fortunate to be a part of the film. At the end of the Fireside Chat, the editors encouraged assistants to "cut, cut, cut. It doesn't matter what you cut. Practice whenever possible on your current film and show it to your editor for comments. Get experience editing freebies, low-budget films and anything else you can. Just cut."

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The Editors Guild thanks Electric Picture Solutions
for hosting and helping us launch the Fireside Chat series.

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Reprinted from
The Motion Picture Editors Guild Newsletter
Vol. 20, No. 3 - May/June1999

Article - Nick Nolte on Malick

Nick Nolte on Malick

January 19, 2003: Nick Nolte talks about Malick to Time Out:

'Terrence Malick is oblique. As I got into that role, Terry would come tome and show me a few pages he'd written, and I'd read this wonderful poem. I'd say: "That's great, Terry, but it's six pages." He said: "Yes, take those six pages and edit it down to what you would say." So I would edit it down, show it to Terry and he'd say "It's a bit long " I'd end up with one or two lines out of six pages.

'My first day on set, the actors had called a meeting and he asked me to come along. So I watched all the actors talk about why they felt so discombobulated. One complaint was that he didn't finish scenes. Terry listened to everything, and at the end said: "Thank you, this has been a wonderful meeting, you're absolutely right, and we must do what we've talked about." They're all looking at Terry like, "We do it? What can we do?" I've never seen a guy defuse a situation like that.

'So I watched Terry. He would start shooting the scene, but watch the sky. And about six, when the sky was just right, he'd say "That's enough of this scene, let's revisit the scene we shot the other day. Nothing will match, but that's fine " He was finishing the scenes in golden light. He couldn't tell the studio he was only going to shoot in golden light, they would have freaked, so he would hold these scenes off. The actor didn't get to do what he wanted to do, John Toll didn't get to photograph it the way he wanted to, and Terry didn't get to shoot it as he'd written it. All those elements were thrown out, and the only new element was this light that's what it was about.'

Article - Terrence Malick: His Own Sweet Time

TERRENCE MALICK: HIS OWN SWEET TIME

by Bruce Handy
Oct 13, 1997 5:00 AM GMT

https://time.com/archive/6731619/terrence-malick-his-own-sweet-time/

Who would have thought that George Lucas, Stanley Kubrick and Terrence Malick, the three most notable AWOLS in American moviemaking, would all be directing films this year? It’s like a harmonic convergence for cineastes and film geeks. Lucas, of course, hasn’t been behind a camera since finishing 1977’s Star Wars; he is currently in London shooting the first of the three long-awaited Star Wars prequels in which Ewan McGregor will star as the youthful Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Natalie Portman as Luke Skywalker’s mom. Kubrick, who hasn’t worked since 1987’s Full Metal Jacket, is also in London, where he is filming Eyes Wide Shut, a psychosexual thriller with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman; Kubrick began shooting the picture almost a full year ago and, exceeding even his own reputation as a quasi-demented perfectionist, shows no signs of wrapping any time soon. “They’re having a great time,” says Cruise and Kidman’s publicist. We bet.


And then there’s Malick, a director whose entire resume lists only a pair of box-office duds. But what duds! The two films have survived in critical esteem to be numbered among the more significant films of the 1970s–itself one of the more cinematically significant decades. Malick, however, is probably even better known for not only exiling himself from Hollywood, like Lucas and Kubrick, but also for having willfully removed himself from the public eye altogether and becoming, as it is commonly said, the J.D. Salinger of movies. Out of the aforementioned trio, you certainly wouldn’t have guessed that Malick would be the one directing seemingly every other male movie star in Hollywood in a big-scale World War II combat epic. The picture is The Thin Red Line, based on the James Jones novel about the battle of Guadalcanal. The cast includes George Clooney, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, Nick Nolte, Gary Oldman, Sean Penn, Bill Pullman and John Travolta. And they are only, with the exception of Penn, members of the supporting cast.


The film’s core players are a group of mostly unknowns who portray the grunts and noncoms of the novel’s C for Charlie company. If the young actors and Malick do their jobs well, The Thin Red Line could do for this cast what The Godfather did once upon a time for the careers of Al Pacino, Robert Duvall and James Caan. Altogether the film has more than 60 speaking parts, hundreds of extras and a shooting script of 180-plus pages–which would indicate a running time of more than three hours. And that’s not including the scenes Malick has been adding and improvising since the movie’s scheduled five-month shoot got under way late last June in the Daintree rain forest near Port Douglas, Australia, which is doubling for Guadalcanal. Later, the crew will depart for the island itself to shoot scenes involving a sojourn among the native Melanesians. All in all, it’s a daunting undertaking for any director, let alone one who hasn’t voluntarily worked in two decades, or talked to the press for even longer.


Perhaps because of this, Malick’s colleagues tend to adopt a cheerfully reassuring tone when answering reporters’ questions, which inevitably boil down to more polite versions of, Isn’t he a bit, well, loony? “He’s very mysterious, very private, but it’s not like he’s crazy. He’s a lovely and charming man who just wants to keep things to himself,” says Laura Ziskin, president of Fox 2000, the division of 20th Century Fox that is financing The Thin Red Line’s $50 million to $60 million budget. “He’s fun. He’s not reclusive or dark. He just has a strong sense of privacy,” says George Stevens Jr., the film’s executive producer and a longtime friend and patron of Malick’s. The supposed recluse could be glimpsed one day last month filming a scene of troops slogging through a jungle clearing amid real mud, real biting ants–they’re green here–and enough fake smoke to impress even a young, hot, video-trained director. Fifty-three years old, Malick this day cuts a modestly dashing, mildly eccentric figure in work shirt, blue jeans, big black rubber boots, a wide-brimmed hat slung over his back Zorro-style and a surgical mask strapped Michael Jackson-style across his nose and mouth (the smoke, a producer says, is irritating a Malickian sinus condition).


Though he is tall, bald, possessed of a hawkish, handsome nose and a striking snow-white beard, Malick’s most distinguishing feature may very well be the intensity of his gaze–appropriately enough for a filmmaker–which has an unsettling quality of being both wide-eyed and penetrating. As it happens, these are also qualities that associates and friends ascribe to the man himself. He is also said to be, in no particular order, difficult, honorable, secretive, deeply spiritual, sweet, vindictive, humble, mercurial, self-possessed, insecure and the best-read person on the planet. “He’s a genius,” says a colleague. “That’s the good news and the bad news.”


Though his current employment means he is no longer the J.D. Salinger of the movies, Malick can still lay claim to being their Thomas Pynchon. While allowing journalists to visit the set of The Thin Red Line (and acting the gracious host in an informal, off-the-record chat), he continues to refuse formal interviews, something he hasn’t done since a 1974 chat with Women’s Wear Daily. Indeed, his last recorded comment of any kind was, “Well, I, I, uh, I guess I don’t want to talk about it…” when journalist David Handelman cold-called him in 1985 and asked what he was up to. Nor will he allow himself to be photographed, not even by the official set photographer or by a video crew documenting the shoot for the inevitable “making of” promotional film.


A quarter of a century ago, his first film, 1973’s Badlands, earned the then 29-year-old a prominent spot in the generation of young film-schooled directors that included Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Brian DePalma, who together created a new, nervy kind of movie-literate cinema but who then, as the 1970s wore on into the ’80s and ’90s, made some really rotten movies along with the good. Malick’s reputation, meanwhile, remains crystalline, pure with the promise and power of his youthful work. Badlands, which was shot for somewhere between $250,000 and $350,000–no money even in those days–starred Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek as on-the-lam lovers, a story seemingly inspired by the case of Charles Starkweather, the 1950s spree killer. Unlike, say, Natural Born Killers, the film is less interested in violence than in the ways in which its two self-absorbed romantics fail to communicate with each other and yet somehow bond; to wit, the dialogue includes some of the drollest non sequiturs in movie history.


Five years later, Malick followed his lavishly praised debut with the studio-financed Days of Heaven, an opaque allegory about migrant farm workers in Texas on the eve of World War I. It is so lyrically beautiful and narratively elliptical that its cast, which included Richard Gere and Sam Shepard, was upstaged by a field of wheat–which might sound like a knock on the film but is really a tribute to the quiet, meditative power of its best moments, of its preoccupation with the verities of the natural world. As one might assume from that description, Days of Heaven, like Badlands, fared poorly at the box office. Unlike Badlands, it also received mixed reviews, but those who did like it were rhapsodic, and the film cemented Malick’s reputation as one of the industry’s most esteemed young talents.


Unfortunately for the sake of dramatic newsmagazine articles, Malick doesn’t appear to have had a particularly sensational reason for turning his back on moviemaking. The shoots for both his films had been draining and difficult, and the director was said to have been disillusioned as well by the normal run of Hollywood hustling. According to an associate, Malick found the whole ancillary process of marketing a movie “sickening”–and who wouldn’t? “He said he always planned to take a break,” recounts Mike Medavoy, Malick’s agent at the time of Badlands and currently the head of Phoenix Pictures, which is producing The Thin Red Line for Fox. “He just didn’t plan to take such a long break.”


There are, of course, plenty of other things to do in life, especially for someone with a c.v. like Malick’s: high school football player; oil-field worker; Harvard graduate; Rhodes scholar; lecturer in philosophy at M.I.T.; journalist for both Life and the New Yorker–and all that before he had even thought about making a movie. While on “sabbatical,” he traveled the world, indulging his love of nature, studying religion–Malick is a devout Episcopalian–and eventually began dividing his time between Paris, where he married a Frenchwoman (his second wife, from whom he is currently separated), and Austin, Texas, which is near where he grew up and where he now lives full time. He also kept a hand in Hollywood, writing numerous scripts for hire. The only one that saw anything approaching the light of day was an early draft of Great Balls of Fire, the 1989 movie about the singer Jerry Lee Lewis.


The Thin Red Line’s genesis goes back to 1988, when Robert Geisler and John Roberdeau, two aesthetically ambitious but financially limited producers, approached Malick about writing a screenplay and settled on an adaptation of the Jones novel, to which Malick was drawn in part by its vision of the intense love that bonds men under hellish duress. A number of drafts later, the producers brought the project to Medavoy’s Phoenix Pictures in 1995 in the hope of actually getting it made. At the time, Malick wasn’t planning to direct it. He was talking about returning behind the camera, but for something smaller. None of the principals can identify the exact point when Malick decided to tackle The Thin Red Line, but soon he was discussing casting with nearly every major young actor in Hollywood, most of whom were enthralled at the prospect of working with a near mythic director.


Executives at Fox were initially nervous about trusting such a large-scale project to a man who hadn’t worked in 20 years, but doubts were dispelled after Malick, in exploratory meetings, displayed a confident grasp of production details. For his part, Malick was just as wary. “Early on,” says Nick Nolte, “Terry called me. He wanted to know what had changed in Hollywood. I told him I didn’t think a thing had changed. I said maybe the fear is more pronounced, and the greed, but it’s basically the same game.”


Thus fortified, Malick plunged ahead. To do so, he may have indulged in a bit of self-deception. “Terry kept telling me before the film started that it was going to be a small movie,” says Jack Fisk, the movie’s production designer, who worked in the same capacity on Days of Heaven and Badlands. “I don’t think Terry realized how big it was until the first day, when he showed up on location and saw the tents and trucks.”


What’s intriguing about The Thin Red Line is the chance it offers to watch the more indulgent filmmaking style of the 1970s collide with that of the 1990s. Roughly midway through its shoot, the film was only a half-day or so behind schedule–an incredible achievement considering both the scope of the production and the fact that the schedule must take into account Malick’s fondness for multiple takes, for improvisation, for stopping to shoot, Days of Heaven-style, any flora and fauna that catch his eye (“He’s obsessed with grass and feral pigs,” notes a young cast member).


While filming a scene in which Nolte, who plays a hard-driving, glory-hunting lieutenant colonel, is chewed out by a superior over the phone (for Nolte’s benefit, John Cusack improvises a verbal reaming from behind the camera), Malick’s directions seem to consist solely of “Take a pause,” “Look over at the river,” and “Let’s do another one.” As the number of takes for this simple scene runs into the high teens, Nolte seems to get more and more flustered, losing concentration and blowing his lines (Cusack: “Are you incompetent, Colonel?” Nolte: “Yes I’m incompetent. What’s my first f____ line?”) until his growling frustration and the character’s seem to merge, finally giving Malick what he wants. This is apparently his preferred way of working: letting actors go on and on until they exhaust themselves and stumble into some kind of spontaneous truth. “Terry loves scenes going wrong,” says a cast member.


When Malick gives concrete notes, he tends to speak in metaphors as singular as the images in his films. He talks about the “green poison of war,” and instructed one actor to play a scene like “a squid being thrown up on the beach from the abyss.” On the other hand, the stage directions in his script could be dauntingly airy for an actor: “Fife’s terror passes gradually over into a longing for life and peace.” How do you play that?


From an audience’s point of view, it will be interesting to see how Malick’s meditative style meshes with the urgency of a combat tale. As it evolves on set, this is shaping up to be both the most ambitious war movie since Apocalypse Now and, potentially, the strangest. “It’ll be Malick’s Iliad,” says Geisler with only slightly undue portentousness. A cast member says that the director, maybe sensing a roll, is already talking about an even more ambitious follow-up. Malick’s Odyssey?

Article - Terrence Malick's return to Hollywood

 

Terrence Malick's return to Hollywood

The director has ended his long self-imposed exile to direct ''The Thin Red Line''

By Josh Young 

 

September 5, 1997 4:00 a.m. ET

https://ew.com/article/1997/09/05/terrence-malicks-return-hollywood/

Twenty years into a world-class disappearing act, Terrence Malick had come to be known as the J.D. Salinger of the movie business. After writing and directing two of the more enduring films of the ’70s, Badlands and Days of Heaven, the abrasively brilliant filmmaker dropped out of sight, leaving an aura of mystery that rapidly transformed him into a good old-fashioned Hollywood legend — the genius in absentia. John Milius, cowriter of Apocalypse Now and director of Conan the Barbarian and TNT’s recent Rough Riders, calls Malick ”a very talented director, if not the most talented of my generation.” That generation, by the way, includes Spielberg, Coppola, and Scorsese. Now, nearly 21 years after he yelled ”Cut!” for the last time on Days of Heaven, Hollywood is witnessing the second coming of Terrence Malick.

Witnesses are few, though, because the 53-year-old director is shooting his comeback movie, his own adaptation of James Jones’ World War II novel The Thin Red Line, in the jungle near Port Douglas in Queensland, Australia. Told against the backdrop of a cataclysmic battle — America’s bloody defeat of the Japanese at Guadalcanal — the film explores the raw human dynamics of a rifle company in combat. Filming began June 23 and continues until November, with release scheduled for late 1998.

If pedigree counts for anything, this $50 million drama will deliver: A-list actors who’ve enlisted in Malick’s ”C for Charlie” company include Sean Penn, George Clooney, Nick Nolte, Gary Oldman, Woody Harrelson, John Travolta, John Cusack, Bill Pullman, John Savage, Lukas Haas, and Ben Chaplin; and The Thin Red Line, hailed as one of the most realistic war novels ever, is a sequel to Jones’ From Here to Eternity, the basis for the 1953 film starring Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, and Frank Sinatra that won eight Oscars.

Malick’s return was nurtured for nine years by two New York-based producers, Bobby Geisler and John Roberdeau, whose credits include Robert Altman’s 1983 adaptation of David Rabe’s play Streamers. Geisler, 45, and Roberdeau, 44, wooed Malick with charm and patience. When he was primed, the duo called on Mike Medavoy, Malick’s first agent, who now runs Phoenix Pictures, to find the money. ”Our main accomplishment,” Geisler explains, ”is that we didn’t take ‘no’ for an answer.” That it all finally came together is, says Jones’ widow, Gloria, ”almost a miracle.”

Malick, who hasn’t given a formal interview since 1974 and has to date refused to do any press to promote The Thin Red Line, was an anomaly from the day he arrived in Los Angeles in the late ’60s with a string of life experiences that people in Tinseltown call interesting back story. He grew up in Waco, Tex., working the oil fields and driving cement trucks before going to Harvard, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford. He was teaching philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when his application to the American Film Institute was accepted by George Stevens Jr., son of the legendary director and now the executive producer of The Thin Red Line. ”I always liked the movies in a kind of naive way,” Malick said at the time. ”They seemed no less improbable a career than anything else.”

Article - Terrence Malick returns to directing

Terrence Malick returns to directing

Terrence Malick returns to directing -- ''The Thin Red Line'' is helmed by the legendary director

By Josh Young 

 

January 15, 1999 5:00 a.m. ET

https://ew.com/article/1999/01/15/terrence-malick-returns-directing/

Terrence Malick is standing at the top of dancer, one of the hills nestled in the mountains of the Daintree Rainforest above the tiny town of Port Douglas in northern Australia. The 55-year-old director, whose balding head, gray beard, and thoughtful eyes make him look like a professor, is wearing blue jeans and a denim shirt and hiding beneath a floppy akabroo outback hat. He’s peeling lines of dialogue from a scene of his adaptation of The Thin Red Line as if they’re layers of an onion.

In the scene being shot, David Harrod, a Texan who gained 30 pounds eating ice cream and pumping iron to play Corporal Queen, is mercilessly beating a Japanese soldier with the butt of his rifle. John Cusack, who plays his superior, moves into the frame and pulls him off. By the eighth and final take, six lines of dialogue have been stripped to Harrod letting out a whoop. The emotion is pouring out of the actor, and so is his blood. ”Wipe the blood from the nape of your neck!” shouts Malick as he peers through the lens. ”Vigorously! Vigorously!”

Malick, who hasn’t given an interview since 1974 and has a clause in his Thin Red Line contract that he will do no press, has come to the end of the earth to shoot his first film in nearly two decades, an adaptation of James Jones’ 1962 novel about the raw human dynamics of a World War II rifle company in the Pacific. The director has enlisted a cast of unknowns (Harrod, Jim Caviezel, Adrien Brody, Dash Mihok), rising stars (Ben Chaplin, Elias Koteas), and big names (Cusack, Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Woody Harrelson, John Travolta, George Clooney) to re-create America’s bloody defeat of the Japanese at Guadalcanal in 1943. But it doesn’t take long to see that Malick isn’t making a commercial movie — or even a conventional art film.

”I don’t know if this will make sense the way a normal film does,” Cusack says, taking a smoke break beside a stream at the foot of the mountain after the scene. ”Terry’s wildly intuitive and impressionistic. He wrote a script based on the novel, and he’s making a film based on the script, but he’s not shooting the script. He’s shooting the essence of the script, and he’s also shooting the movie that’s up there on the hill. He’s trying to transcend the book and the script and himself. He’s just out there. He’s a wild cat.” Later, Harrod (whose blood-spurting take didn’t make the final cut) adds: ”Terry’s big on improvisation. He liked the blood improvisation, especially because it was my own blood.”

It wasn’t the only blood spilled during the journey of The Thin Red Line to the screen. Before the war was over, Malick had divorced his second wife, Michele. He’d frozen out producers Bobby Geisler and John Roberdeau, who spent eight years nurturing the project and him. He’d reduced Fife (played by Brody) from a main character to a glorified extra. He’d written a part for Gary Oldman then told him not to show up. He filmed scenes with Bill Pullman and Lukas Haas then cut them altogether. (He’d even given his divorce attorney a bit part then cut him, too.) He wrote narration, hired Billy Bob Thornton to record it, then discarded it for a symphony of eight narrators. And he’d left Twentieth Century Fox with what he’d envisioned all along — a $52 million esoteric meditation on God and man and war and trees. But as fate would have it, Malick delivered his picture the same year Steven Spielberg made a World War II movie with Tom Hanks.

The Thin Red Line - New York Times - Film Review

 

'The Thin Red Line': Beauty and Destruction in Pacific Battle

By JANET MASLIN

A thrilling sense of déjà vu accompanies the lush Edenic images that provide "The Thin Red Line" with its prologue in paradise.

Even if they could be watched without knowledge of their provenance, they would be instantly identifiable as the work of Terrence Malick, whose 1970's "Badlands" and "Days of Heaven" were the most beautiful and elusive films of their time. Malick's subsequent two decades in cinema limbo may have turned him into a figure of hype-inviting mystery, but it's immediately obvious that they have not dimmed his visual genius. It's as if a familiar voice had never left off speaking as, at long last, Malick's huge new opus begins.

His intoxication with natural beauty, fused so palpably and strangely with the psychic sleepwalking of his human characters, remains exactly as it was. So does the innate momentousness that has always come so easily to Malick's filmmaking. Here is a visceral reminder of all that made his past work so hauntingly majestic, even if this movie's difficulties will soon announce themselves with equal clarity. Intermittently brilliant as it is, "The Thin Red Line" shows why being a great film director and directing a great film are not the same.

Having envisioned an adaptation of James Jones's famous Guadalcanal novel since at least 1988, Malick has had time to drift far afield of his original idea and into something hazier. Though its starting point was a book full of gut reactions and detailed particulars, Malick has moved the material to a different plane. Disjointed poetic effects and ravishing physical beauty now supplant the nuts and bolts of wartime experience, even if this film -- like "Saving Private Ryan," with which it happens so bizarrely to overlap -- depicts a military landing on a beach and a terrifying assault on a hillside bunker. For all their surface similarities, Steven Spielberg's film was about character and Malick's is about spirit.

As "The Thin Red Line" contemplates mankind's self-destructiveness, the oneness of a company of soldiers, the rape of nature and the emptiness of Pyrrhic victory on the battlefield, it leaves behind any ordinary opportunities for individuals to emerge from the fray.

Actors here, whether famous or unknown, are concealed behind helmets and grime as they move -- often wordlessly -- through the initially unspoiled landscape of this Pacific island. As filmed magnificently by John Toll (with the Daintree rain forest in Queensland, Australia, doubling for the actual site), "The Thin Red Line" seems to capture every blade of grass gloriously while also reminding the audience over two and three-quarter hours how very many blades of grass are here. Though the United States-Japanese battle played out here was one of pivotal importance during World War II, its strategic value is not really the heart of the matter here. Indeed, the fury of battle often fades away as this film's indistinct principals venture into their own private thoughts.

Hence the married man (Ben Chaplin) who faces battle thinking of his bride and reciting in typically dreamy voice-over: "Why should I be afraid to die? I belong to you. If I go first I'll wait for you on the other side of the dark waters. Be with me now." Malick can accompany even the most sentimental reveries with lofty phrasings and lovely imagery, like this man's visions of his sweetheart in summer dresses. She has purity, sensuality and lightness that would be rare in any film.

"The Thin Red Line" will as easily fascinate those attuned to Malick's artistry as it disappoints anyone in search of a plot. For all the marquee power of its stellar cast and the story's potential for high drama, remarkably little happens. As in "Saving Private Ryan," violence erupts with shocking randomness for soldiers at the battle site, but it is interspersed with meditative passages, glimpses of the island's indigenous life, and near-wordless passages propelled by the eloquent forboding of Hans Zimmer's score. The way light filters through the canopy of the rain forest means at least as much here as the specifics of battle.

Nick Nolte, giving yet another ferocious performance in his own personal banner year (he can be seen to devastating effect in next week's "Affliction"), joins Sean Penn, Elias Koteas and Woody Harrelson (whose death scene here is among the film's most accessible, wrenching moments) as stars who manage to emerge with strong personalities intact. But no one here has a role with much continuity, since the film's editing shows off the performers to such poor advantage. "The Thin Red Line" is one more film that could have been helped by excising repetition and focusing performances, but it wanders almost randomly instead. The heart-piercing moments that punctuate its rambling are glimpses of what a tighter film might have been.

Among the unfamiliar actors in a position to make their marks here, James Caviezel supplies a handsome, beatific countenance to suit his character's fervent meditations on flawed humanity. ("How did we lose the good that was given us? Let it slip away. Scattered. Careless. What's keeping us from reaching out, touching the glory?") Red-haired Dash Mihok, as the private named Doll, provides the film's strongest visual sense of battlefield chaos. And Adrien Brody plays one of the novel's major figures, Corporal Fife, virtually without a peep. Like the film's leading Johns -- Cusack as a Captain, Savage as a crazed Sergeant and Travolta, believe it or not, as a brigadier general -- he simply gets lost in the hubbub that surrounds him.

The glorious Melanesian scenes that provide both the film's divine serenity (and its signs of destruction) amount to nature photography as exquisite as it is redundant. Brilliantly colored birds, greenery in silhouette, shards of light and idyllic underwater swimming -- not to mention a soundtrack layered with sounds of the rain forest -- are among reasons to admire "The Thin Red Line" despite its habits of meandering. As was surely Malick's intent, those sensations matter as much as life or death here, to the point where they are inextricably intertwined. He brings that simple, essential message on his long-overdue return.   

"The Thin Red Line" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It includes profanity and tough violence on the battlefield.