The Thin Red Line - Interview with Hans Zimmer

 

The Inside Film Interview with Hans Zimmer, Music Composer

This interview originally appeared in Inside Film on an unlisted date. Interview by Simon Goodman. Copyright of A & R Publishing, Limited.

No. 5 Film Composer

Composing the score for The Thin Red LIne was the hardest commission Hans Zimmer has ever accepted. And this is a man with one of the most prestigious portfoliors in the industry including As Good As It Gets, Rain Man, The Last Emperor, The Prince of Egypt and The Rock.

Where did you train?

I had two weeks of piano lessons. I was Stanley Myers' assistant--he wrote the music for The Deer Hunter. I was also in the Buggles. Remember Video Killed the Radio Star? We ruined a whole generation! I was doing commercials in London for Air-Edel. THey had a load of film composers and that's how I met him.

What was your first gig and how did you get it?

My Beautiful Laundrette. They let anybody do movies back then. Stanley and I did it together. After that I did A World Apart. That was my big break. Barry Levinson's wife liked the music and went out to buy the CD, and Barry hired me for Rain ManBlack Rain and Thelma and Louise for director Ridley Scott.

What is the strangest film that you've had to score?

True Romance was the strangest. We had money for nine musicians and so to spite the budget I hired the most useless, incongruous bunch of guys I could find. The diversity gave us a great result!

And the hardest?

Thin Red Line was the hardest. Terrence Malick wanted me to write the music first. Usually you compose to a rough cut. I threw all my previous knowledge out the window and started again. I needed to provide a structure for him to build the film on. Th one thing Terry gave me was the ability to be a better composer. I wrote for nine months without a day off. It was incredible pressure in the cutting room.

Where's the best place to learn the craft these days?

I thought the film music course at UCLA wasn't great so I put together a one-day seminar and taught there. The best training, though, is to just do it, not study it. You learn through failure. Commericals are a good place to start. It's about learning the aesthetics. You could also try becoming someone's apprentice. In LA, I have a whole studio of young composers learning off me all the time, in the same way that I learn from stanley all those years back.

What about someone who want to get into the business?

Ask yourself these questions. How sure am I of my talent? How stubborn and resilient am I? You need to stick to your guns when the going is tough. Also see yourself as a film maker, not a composer, because you are writing, but in a different language.

The Thin Red Line - Interview with Dash Mihok

 

The Inside Film Interview with Dash Mihok

This interview originally appeared in Inside Film on an unlisted date. Interview by Steve Goldman. Copyright of A & R Publishing, Limited.

Friendly Fire (Part I)

You must be pleased to be part of such an epic film.

And to remain on screen, absolutely. I mean, there were a lot of other guys who were down there for months and they appeared for just 30 seconds. So at the very least I'm thankful for that. But even now I can say I loved it. I just thought it was so different from any other film I've ever seen. It's so much more about the balance of life, our connections and non-connections with God, our fear and non-fear of physical death and its meaning. It is about the struggle of each particular man in his own inner thoughts, and fears, and yet it's also the story of the whol group.

Did the film make you think differently about war?

Well, I wasn't a fan of war from the onset, I have to say. But in making a film like this you can get as close as you possibly can to that kind of experience without being shot at. I feel that when you're acting and you raise yourself to that level of adrenaline, it feels as if you're almost there. It has definitely left its mark on me.

What attracted you to the project?

All the obvious reasons--a great script, a great part, a great director. To be honest, I would have been excited to go and just work as a production assistant.

Was anyone injured during the filming?

To a limited extent. People got hurt here and there. There's one shot that Terry had to keep in the film because Ben Chaplin cut his face in it. Things like that. People tripping and falling. People following a little too close here and there. A lot of extras. A lot of actors. A lot of weaponry. A lot of tough terrain. For me, though, it was a simple equation. I was beaten to a pulp every night and my shins were as black as your hair--every night.

You have a number of scenes with Sean Penn, whose reputation precedes him. What was it like working with him?

Sean is Sean. He's so Sean. You know, he's funny and he's dry. He can be cynical and brutal and hysterical. He's all those things, he can turn on a dime and be mean, and then he's the sweetest guy in the world. But if anyone, it was Nick Nolte who dominated the set. Then again, it might have been an extension of his role as the Colonel. Of course, everyone at the end of the day took their marching orders from Terrence Malick.

How does The Thin Red Line compare to Saving Private Ryan?

I didn't think that Saving Private Ryan had a great script. I mean, I kind of think the script sucked basically. I think it was a great film and a great Spielberg movie, but this script blew Private Ryan out of the box. And by the way, I read for Matt Damon's part--Private Ryan--which I didn't get.

The Thin red Line - Interview with Elias Koteas

 

The Inside Film Interview with Elias Koteas

This interview originally appeared in Inside Film on an unlisted date. Interview by Steve Goldman. Copyright of A & R Publishing, Limited.

Friendly Fire (Part II)

How did you get cast in the film?

The usual way. I was sent the script by my agent about a month or so before filming started. We set up an appointment. I auditioned. They put me on tape and sent it off to Terrence Malick in Australia and that was it. It happened real fast. Just the same way I'm sure that real soldiers are recruited. You get the news and boom! You're on a plane and suddenly you're off overseas with all the fear and anxiety of fulfilling your mission and the fear and anxiety that you might not be able to cut the mustard.

Were you up against any major names?

I don't know. It was tough for him to cast the whole film, though. I heard that it took a while. So I felt that weight as well, that sense of rsponsibility in taking on the part, which was paralled in the character's sense of responsibility towards his men. Each time you go into a job, each journey is different. Sometimes you feel like you're nailing it, other times you feel like you've never acted before. This time it was more of the latter. Couple that with having limited reheasal time and that puts on a lot of pressure. As an actor you try to use it.

What is the relationship between this film and Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan?

America learned a lot about warfare during Guadalcanal, as depicted in this film. The troops were green and inexperienced. Hence the major connection with Private Ryan is that what we learned in warfare in that vicious South Pacific battle we took to D-Day--Oddly enough, I was also cast for this film on the anniversay of D-Day.

What did you know about Terrence Malick?

Only his reputation. It was only when I got home that I watched his previous films. I was aware of Days of Heaven and Badlands, but I hadn't seen them. But I learned a lot, obviously, by working with him. Terry has an amazing improvisational quality. When he discovered my Greek background, for example, he incorporated it into the character.

How close did it feel to a real battle?

For those five months, it was my war. You have to go through that process. For better or for worse, my life paralleled some of those anxieties. And I could only use that in terms of myself and my craft. If I don't get this job right as an actor, will I have a future? The same for Captain Staros. If he doesn't fulfill his mission, will he have a future as a soldier?

What was day-to-day life like on the set?

Obviously, we didn't have trailers, we had camps. And then we would either hike along the trails or be driven to the set, or "the front" as I would call it. It was very similar to Chapter Four of All Quiet on the Western Front. That's the parallel. And I don't mean disrepsect towards the men who endured it. Whatever I understand, it is in my own minuscule way, compared with what any soldier goes through.

It's quite a jump from your Ninja Turtle films. I assume Malick didn't base his casting decision on those performances.

No. He didn't se anything I've done. Didn't want to. He felt it would distract him from assessing me. He wanted to see me as me and then try to capture that. And I respected that. I also didn't want to see his other movies and be intimidated. So we both started on a level playing field.

Has being a part of this film altered you?

I knew going in I would come out altered. That was part of the attraction. No one ever changes on a casual whim. You have to go in kicking and screaming to come out the other end in some positive way with a different appreciation for life. After a while I felt such a connection to the insanity of the moment that I was addicted to it. Anything other than that wasn't enough. We were scared, and that's why the film is authentic.

The Thin Red Line - Interview With Ben Chaplin

 

Inside Film Interview With Ben Chaplin

This interview originally appeared in Inside Film on a date I can't find anywhere contained in it. Interview by Simon Goodman. Copyright of A&R Publishing, Limited.

Game Over

Ben Chaplin's apprenticeship as the latest export of Cool Britannia is over. Simon Goodman spoke to him about how he manages to keep sane in a world full of poodle parlors, plastic surgeons and directors who send you off to boot camp.

Ben Chaplin moved to Hollywood by default. It wasn't work that sent him there. It wasn't ambition to become the greatest British living legend. He wasn't hankering to be to be the next boy from over here who's doing rather well over there.

"It wasn't really a conscious move. I was chasing romance more than work. Then I met a couple of people there who saw me in a play in London and then I got an agent."

That led to his film debut in The Truth About Cats and Dogs in which he starred opposite Uma Thurman. Chaplin then took the leading role opposite Jennifer Jason Leigh in Agnieszka Holland's version of Henry James' novel Washington Square. His next big feature film project is Lost Souls.

Not bad for a lad who made his name on British TV as Matt, the surfing skunk pussy with agoraphobic tendencies in BBC sit-com Game On. Despite the fact that Ben has spent "more time out there than I have done over here in the past four years" and much to the disapointment of the cynics and the wannabes, he will never lose touch with his roots. Or dye them for that matter because he is not an advocate of Beverly Hills chic.

"It's an interesting phenomenan. Some people think that just because I am working in Hollywood I have rejected England. That's so English. I'd never pretend to be American or adopt any aspect of the accent." Perhaps it is Chaplin's nostalgia for his home turf that influenced Terence Malick's decision to cast him in the role of Pvt. Bell.

"You always make it better than it is when you're away from your loved ones. Terry always had this thing about Bell's wife--that my imaginings, my memories of the relationship were rose-tinted. The memories needed to be as good as that to keep Bell going."

Chaplin acknowledges that, like the other actors in The Thin Red Line, he was a receptacle for Terence Malick's vision. "My journey is Terry's: he chose the journey for all the characters. We all represented something different. My character was the embodiment of love. I myself had this whole other journey in the film so I never felt more powerful as an actor as I did working on that film. Terry was a big enabler. However, I never felt more powerless as well. Terry's a visionary. You trust it because you are there for him. All of us were there to serve him."

Chaplin's personal journey reflects one that most of the cast seem to travel through while filming.

"The whole film was a massive life experience. I am now Ben Chaplin plus that film. It was intense." The intensity began with a nine-day World War II style boot camp hosted by a couple of Vietnam vets. "You had to have your rife with you the whole time and if you didn't you were seriously punished. Not just you but the entire platoon were sent on a two mile run in the tropics. I can't tell you how hot it was."

Did anyone throw a wobbly?

"No, but we all wanted to. We thought that it was going to make us all sick before filming. And we were! But during the process we all realised how absolutely necessary it was".

What followed was an exhausting schedule that lasted five months. Though Chaplin is adamant that it wasn't on Apocalypse Now levels.

"There were a few times when I went stir crazy. One time I took a production car without permission and just drove it back to the hotel. That is sinful and I could have been fired for it. No one found out. Once I got back to the town I rang up and told them where I was. I was going nuts.

"When you partied you partied very hard and not in a particularly sensitive way. it was very male. You felt it happening to yourself. It wasn't anything you could control. There was a lot of drinking. We played pool. I was actually quite good. They were playing American rules, you've got Australian rules, then there's Queensland rules which are different to the New South Wales rules. We were close to few punch-ups around the table a lot of the time."

Chaplin, however, is very aware that to compare his five months in the jungle with that of a real life experience smacks of the kind of luvvie bravado that gives his profession a bad name. "It seems disrespectful to to compare the bond that was created between all the actors with the bond between the soldiers who died in the actual conflict. On my level it was the most intense bonding I have ever gone through, There's a tenderness there which really comes across in the film. An experience like that stays with you forever."

The Thin red Line - Interview with Jim Caviezel

 

The London Interview with Jim Caviezel

This interview originally appeared in This Is London on February 23, 1999. Interview by Steven Goldman. Copyright of Associated Newspapers, Limited.

Leading The Thin Red Line

If Jim Caviezel carries the translucent shroud of shell-shock about him, it's with good cause. The 30-year-old actor is, after all, a survivor of Terrence Malick's Second World War epic, The Thin Red Line - easily one of the most anticipated and perplexing films of the year. Still, it's hard to say if Caviezel's aw'-shucks farm-boy bewilderment is due to the sudden spotlight which surrounds his de facto stardom or the fact that his performance somehow managed to survive one of the messiest cutting-room floors in recent memory.

"My whole thing was to do the best I could," says the man himself, a virtual unknown outside casting circles until hand-picked by Malick for the central role of Private Witt - an AWOL grunt who returns to his unit for the battle of Guadalcanal. "There were many voices who said, 'We could get Brad Pitt. We could get Matthew McConaughey. We could get Johnny Depp ... Caviezel - we can't even pronounce the name'. Well, I told Mr Malick, 'You ask them if, when they first saw it, they could pronounce the name Schwarzenegger - I certainly bet they were able to do it after a few million dollars'."

In short order, Hollywood has learned to pronounce the name (it's of Swiss origin and sadly rhymes with "weasel"). All it took was rave reviews and a million-dollar-plus opening in the US, despite a release initially limited to a scant seven theatres. And so, all of a sudden, Hollywood has come to court an actor often dismissed in the past.

Dressed in a rag-wool sweater and sporting the requisite blend of humility and braggadocio, Caviezel certainly looks as if he's the new male lead. The fact that he is, in The Thin Red Line at least, is down to pure luck. Initially 20th Century Fox decided to build an early publicity campaign around newcomer Adrien Brody, who was central to the original screenplay, only to discover that his performance was largely excised from the final cut. (Among the other amputees from the million feet of footage: Gary Oldman, Bill Pullman, Lukas Haas and a voiceover narration by Billy Thornton; stars John Travolta and George Clooney survive, but enjoy less than six minutes of screen time combined.)

"I was so focused on the job at hand that I never thought beyond filming," says Caviezel, who spent 127 days on a shoot which moved from Daintree Rainforest in northern Australia to the Solomon Islands. "Every day I would say, 'Today is the last day of the rest of my life ... this hour, this moment, this scene right here'. So I never thought I'd be sitting here in front of you. Never conceived it ... I had simply promised the man who had given me the opportunity that I would give it all I had. And I knew what a responsibility it was."

A Catholic schoolboy from rural Mount Vernon in Washington State, Caviezel describes himself as a "shy kid" who developed a taste for mimicry at an early age and, soon after, the stage. "I would do Eddie Murphy, just about anyone to get a laugh. But then when I started doing plays in school, things began to change. All the nuns and teachers would come up afterwards and tell me I just had to go into acting. Of course there were two things I didn't want to be back then, namely an actor or a priest. I mean, if I had my choice, I would have been a basketball player."

Caviezel, nevertheless, soon made his break from hoops to acting with a bit part as an Italian ticket agent in Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho - securing the role only after fooling local casting agents into believing he was a recent Italian immigrant. With a Screen Actors' Guild card in hand, he moved to California with his wife Kerri (the couple now divide their time between LA and Mount Vernon), landing minor roles in lacklustre films like Diggstown, Wyatt Earp and Matt Le Blanc's monkey movie, Ed. To put it bluntly, Caviezel found himself going nowhere fast. "I was looking ahead through my life, where I wanted to be and what I wanted to do. It was around that time I started thinking about going back to school to become a chiropractor, like my father. Fortunately it was around that time that I also got the call from Terrence Malick.

"I grabbed the phone and tears started coming out of my eyes," says Caviezel when asked about the summons from the maverick director of Badlands and Days of Heaven. "I told him that whatever he needed me to do, I had the confidence to do it. That I'd be there for him."

And in the end, it was Malick - returning with his first movie in 20 years - who remained faithful to Caviezel's performance. "Towards the end of filming, I'd get calls from my agent about new projects casting out of [20th Century] Fox. But they needed to see this film first and I didn't know who was going to be cut out. I could have been cut out, for all I knew ... I just happened to be fortunate that I ended up in the situation I'm in right now."

Whether The Thin Red Line can ignite Caviezel's career as Malick's Days of Heaven did for Richard Gere remains to be seen. But the formerly struggling actor will make dramatic inroads in the months ahead with Ang Lee's US Civil War drama, Ride With the Devil, and the American football pic, Any Given Sunday, which he is currently filming with Oliver Stone. The roles are notably supporting ones in ensemble films which may not give Caviezel the break-out he deserves. No matter, as far as the actor is concerned. "After being involved with a project like this," he says, "what could you possibly do to top it?"

The Thin Red Line - Interview with Jim Caviezel

 

The Lexington Herald-Leader Interview with Jim Caviezel

This interview originally appeared in the Lexington Herald-Leader on January 15, 1999. Interview by Heather Svokos, Pop Culture Writer. Copyright of the Lexington Herald-Leader.

`Thin Red Line' Star 'Accents' Role With Echoes of Kentucky

In The Thin Red Line, Jim Caviezel plays the movie's central figure, an idealistic Kentucky farm boy caught in the horrors of front-line combat in World War II.

Caviezel's performance is gripping, and as audiences watch it unfold they'll hear traces of Dave DeMarcus, a young Fayette County cattle farmer.

And see glimpses of Elhannen Stacey, Bert Goff, Frank Hickey, and Kelly Watkins, four World War II veterans from Breathitt County.

With the part of Private Witt in The Thin Red Line, Caviezel, 30, has snagged his first major part, after 10 years of plugging away in show business. And at least part of his critically acclaimed performance was shaped in Kentucky.

After director Terrence Malick selected him for the role, he suggested that Caviezel visit the Bluegrass.

No problem - he was bent on going anyway.

Caviezel figured one of his acting buddies might be able to help. So he called Josh Hopkins, a Lexington up-and-comer whom he worked with in G.I. Jane. Hopkins is also the son of former U.S. Rep. Larry Hopkins and his wife, Carolyn.

"I thought of Josh right away," Caviezel said from his Los Angeles home. "He was my only tie into Kentucky. Josh and I are very close."

Although Caviezel, like Hopkins, is a natural-born mimic, he hails from Mount Vernon, Wash . "I couldn't speak a lick of Southern dialect, let alone Kentucky."

Recalls Hopkins: "He wanted me to help him with the accent. I said: 'Jimmy, you gotta go to Kentucky.'"

Hopkins hooked Caviezel up with Dave DeMarcus, a Sayre School classmate who now raises cattle and tobacco at his farm off Winchester Road. DeMarcus and his wife obliged, and for two weeks Caviezel watched, learned and rolled up his sleeves. He milked cows and watched while DeMarcus oversaw cattle breeding and tested bulls for fertility.

So, was the Hollywood boy grossed out by the down-and-dirty business of farm life?

"Not really," DeMarcus said. "He was right in there."

The whole time Caviezel observed DeMarcus at work, he'd watch the farmer's mouth - he also video and audiotaped DeMarcus, so he could hone his speech pattern.

"Jim really worked on the sound," Hopkins said. "Dave has a pretty thick accent, and Jim came away sounding exactly like him."

DeMarcus thought so, too. "At supper, he'd say: `Tell me how I'm doing. Do I sound like you?'"

"Yeah, I guess you do," DeMarcus recalled with a grin. "My family thought it was hilarious."

Meeting with veterans

While Caviezel was doing his research, Hopkins' mother, Carolyn, took the actor to Breathitt County, where he met four World War II veterans.

"We just sat down and talked about what life was like before, and the Depression," Caviezel said. "They were poor - they walked to school for about 4 or 5 miles, so going into the military and having to run 15 miles - that was nothing - they were tough. For them it was like going into the Boy Scouts."

One of the veterans was Elhannen Stacey of Jackson, who saw frontline combat in Italy and southern France.

"He asked a lot of questions to get a better understanding of what the people were like in this area," Stacey said. "He seemed to be very sincere about doing his research. He wanted to be as realistic as possible in the part he played."

Stacey says he and the three other veterans who met with Caviezel plan to catch the film when it opens this weekend, and they'll be rooting for Caviezel. "I understand it's a blood-and-guts, front-line type of part," Stacey said.

Caviezel extracted a few things from each of his research subjects to help him find Private Witt's foundation. He used DeMarcus' work ethic, his youth and his physicality. From the veterans, he got an idea of their experiences during the war, and what it was like growing up in pre-World War II Kentucky. "That right there was the heart of the whole trip," he said.

Caviezel has already received excellent notices for his work - Rolling Stone movie critic Peter Travers said he gave a performance of "shattering intensity."

The actor seems elated that he landed such a major role in a Malick film. (The acclaimed director has steered clear of moviemaking for 21 years. His two previous films were Badlands in 1973, and 1978's Days of Heaven.)

When he describes the emotional roller coaster that led him - a self-described "no-namer" - to being selected, he loads the saga with tales of letdown, basketball metaphors, fate-filled meetings and games of career roulette. But it boils down to this:

10 years of trying

One night, perched on the edge of his bed, he told his wife, Kerri: "This is it. If it doesn't happen, it's over."

"It wasn't about quitting," he recalled. "It's just that it's been 10 years. I look at the future and I want to have kids some day, and I want to feed them."

"It comes to a point where play time's over."

Then, after months of pins-and-needles, Malick finally rang him up.

"He just said," and here Caviezel breaks into a Texan-meets-Kermit the Frog imitation of Malick: "`Well Jim, I was wondering if, uh, you know, well, you know, you would like to play the role of Witt.'

"If my eyes had flood dams, they were released - they broke. I pulled the phone away, because I didn't want him to think I was desperate."

He told Malick: "You made the right decision. I will give you more than you expected, or would ask of anybody."

"He said, `I know.'

"I just walked around, I could see colors differently - I noticed the dirty colors of the smog. ... It's always an asphalt jungle, but the Hollywood signs - I just wanted to go over and kiss them."

Hopkins is thrilled for his friend. Both actors agree that it's great to see the guys you struggled with make a breakthrough. (Incidentally, Hopkins has another Thin Red Line connection: his L.A. roommate, Dash Mihok, has a part in the film.)

Caviezel's Private Witt, is an idealist who proves to be a thorn in the side of Sgt. Welsh (Sean Penn).

Similar to character

"I think Terry (Malick) casted a lot of guys who are similar to their characters. I'm not as good as Witt, but I have idealistic leanings. I think Sean's character is a lot like him - he doesn't trust people, and he thinks you've got to get what you can, but deep down, he's got a heart of gold.

"If you had to go to war and fight with someone, I'd definitely pick (Penn). He's the kind of guy that works when everyone's got their back turned. He's very brash - he doesn't come off pretty - but he's the very thing a coach would love."

With all the sweat and homework Caviezel put into his part, his coach - Malick - might think the same of him.

"He came away really treasuring his time in Kentucky," Hopkins said. "He wants to come back. He said, `Someday I'd like to have a big house and a horse farm in Kentucky.' He loved it.

"I knew he would."

The Thin Red Line - Interview with Jim Caviezel

 

The Houston Chronicle Interview with Jim Caviezel

This interview originally appeared in The Houston Chronicle on January 14, 1999. Interview by Louis B. Park. Copyright of The Houston Chronicle.

A 'Thin Red' Puzzler

Moviegoers seeing The Thin Red Line when it opens this weekend will know they've seen something impressive and harrowing. They may also end up scratching their heads, wondering just what it was all about. Unlike 1998's other big World War II movie, Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line sometimes seems to need, if not an interpreter, at least a tour guide.

"It's nonlinear," said Jim Caviezel , who plays one of the U.S. Marines who hit the beaches of Guadalcanal, finding themselves in a desperate struggle against the Japanese, their incompetent officers and their private demons.

Caviezel was in Houston last week to talk about the movie. "It's like if you woke up from a dream and I said, `Tell me about it,'" he said. "And you said, `I started at Point A, and then went to Point B, and then to Point D.' And I said, `Wait a minute, what about Point C?' And you said, `It doesn't matter.'"

A dream - or nightmare - is a good explanation for what viewers experience in The Thin Red Line, which is based on the best-selling 1962 book by James Jones, author of From Here to Eternity.

The book begins with Marines below deck on a ship, waiting to invade Guadalcanal. The movie starts with Pvt. Witt, Caviezel's character, doing an introspective interior monologue while on a tropical island where he and another Marine have gone absent without leave. The two are soon captured and sent back to their unit.

Throughout the film, harrowing combat scenes as realistic and frightening as those in Saving Private Ryan are mixed with memories of stateside lovers, considerations of the meaning of war and life, and intimate, personal moments that are more literary in tone than what we usually see on screen.

Often it seems like the soldiers are fighting themselves - or war itself - rather than a tangible enemy, a notion emphasized by our not even seeing the Japanese except as vague shapes or gun flashes for the first hour of the movie.

"It's a meditation on the evils of war, as powerful as any personal prayer you could say in a moment of tragedy," Caviezel said.

"Terry Malick is like the professor Robin Williams plays in Dead Poets Society, and he tells his students, `Open your book and read the first couple of pages on how to write a poem.' The kid starts to read it, and the professor says, `Tear it out. Don't let anyone tell you how to make a poem.' This is what Terry does."

Another thing Malick does is attract stars like metal shavings to a magnet. The movie-star lineup in The Thin Red Line is impressive: Sean Penn, George Clooney, John Travolta, Nick Nolte, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson and John Savage.

Aside from Penn and Nolte, most of the stars have very small roles, appearing in the movie just for a chance to work with Malick.

"I just wanted to be in it," Clooney said about his one-minute role in the film.

Malick, who lives in Austin, built a good reputation as a director in the 1970s, based on only two films, which he also wrote. They were the haunting young-criminals story Badlands and the heartbreakingly beautiful Days of Heaven. Neither was a box-office hit, but both received very good reviews and made it clear that Malick was a filmmaker of unusual vision and extreme technical skill.

Since Days of Heaven in 1978, for which he won several major awards, Malick, a Rhodes Scholar, has been the J.D. Salinger of cinema, retreating to Paris and almost completely from filmmaking. His reputation as a recluse and the enforced absence from filmmaking enhanced his status to near-legendary status.

When word went out that Malick was again making a film - a war movie - just about every male actor in Hollywood took notice.

Which explains why there are so many stars in the movie, and why Malick was able to turn what the studio probably hoped would be a straightforward, audience-thrilling war film into a complex, highly personal "meditation on the evils of war."

Which brings us to back to Caviezel. With all these big names in the cast, why is it that this virtual unknown has the largest role in one of the most eagerly anticipated films in years? The movie is an ensemble piece, with no real lead role, but Caviezel's Witt is at its center.

If the name of this rather shy young actor - clearly uncomfortable doing interviews - doesn't ring any bells, don't feel bad. You're not alone in not recognizing Caviezel, who was on the verge of giving up acting before The Thin Red Line.

Prior to playing this, Caviezel's most prominent role was probably that of brother Warren Earp, in Kevin Costner's Wyatt Earp in 1994. Most recently he was a minor character in G.I. Jane.

"I told my wife, in another six months I'm seriously considering wrapping this up," Caviezel said. "Although I loved acting, I felt it was important to be working. If we have kids, it will be important that I pay bills. It would have been very difficult (to quit) because I loved it, but I could always do theater on the side."

Caviezel, 30, is tall and lean, but not as gaunt as he appears in The Thin Red Line, where his tall frame - "On a good day I'm maybe 6 feet, 2 inches; on a bad day maybe 6-1 1/2" - carried only 170 pounds, because the Marines were supposed to look like they have not eaten well. His now clean, handsome face looks haggard and dirty in the movie.

Caviezel didn't know who Malick was when he auditioned and was asked to go to Malick's house to meet him.

"To be truthful, when I went in and met with him, I kind of told him, this is who I was and what was important to me. We really didn't talk about the movie much. Maybe that had something to do with it.

"School and many things in my life have been difficult for me. I've had to work a lot harder than most people. I always figured college was for smart guys, so I came to Hollywood," he said with a grin.

"One thing was never a problem, and maybe it's a gift, is character and integrity," said Caviezel, who is deeply religious. "There are things that I believe in so strongly that I basically have said I'm willing to give up what I'm doing in order to have my family live a great life. I don't need to change. I need to be like myself; this is who I am. From the get-go, that was either going to push (Malick) away or draw us together."

Apparently, it drew them together. Malick changed his mind about the role he originally wanted Caviezel to play and cast him as the moral Witt, who avoids killing, even when it might save his own life.

Caviezel also lucked out in the editing process. Originally, Witt was just one of several important characters. Many other major and minor roles were cut completely from the film.

"I think we shot a record 1 1/2 million feet of film," Caviezel said. "That's basically 50 movies. Coming out of (shooting) that, it was like, well, what kind of film are we going to have here?"

Some filmgoers will be asking that question as they leave the theater. Few will doubt The Thin Red Line is achingly beautiful and frighteningly intense. But it is also a film that demands complete attention.

"If someone is very linear, Saving Private Ryan will work brilliantly for them," Caviezel said. "The Thin Red Line could have been about invading Guadalcanal, going to capture Henderson (air) field, getting the Japanese off the island - making it as linear as possible.

"But it's not. It's about the condition of the human heart and spirit. It's about the thin red line between life and death, between heaven and hell, between sane and insane. It stays true to that line. It's not really tangible."