Terrence Malick

• 1. Introduction

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  Terrence Malick graduated from Harvard College summa cum laude in 1965, won a Rhodes Scholarship to study philosophy at Oxford, then walked away from the whole enterprise without a degree after a dispute with his advisor. He translated a dense work of German philosophy, taught at MIT, freelanced for national magazines, and only then, at nearly thirty, decided to make movies. That sequence of decisions tells you something essential about the filmmaker he would become.

  Malick's feature debut, Badlands, arrived in 1973 and drew raves at the New York Film Festival. His second film won an Academy Award for its cinematography. And then he vanished. He moved to Paris, wrote screenplays that were never produced, and stayed out of public view for roughly two decades. When he returned, critics were not sure what to make of him.

  What drives a man like that? What does a body of work shaped by Kierkegaard and Heidegger actually look like on screen? And why does it polarize scholars and audiences so sharply, film after film? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. Roots and Philosophy

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  Emil Malick, Terrence's father, was a geologist, and the family's Assyrian roots traced back to Urmia. That combination of deep-time scientific thinking and displaced ancestral identity may help explain why Terrence's films return again and again to geological scale and spiritual searching. His mother was Irish Catholic, and the household mixed Orthodox Assyrian heritage with that Catholic tradition.

  At Oxford's Magdalen College, Malick began a thesis on the concept of world in Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. His supervisor, the philosopher Gilbert Ryle, disagreed with the direction of the work, and Malick left without completing the degree. The ideas he was wrestling with did not disappear, though. In 1969, Northwestern University Press published his translation of Heidegger's Vom Wesen des Grundes as The Essence of Reasons, a technical philosophical text requiring deep familiarity with both languages and both thinkers.

  Back in the United States, Malick taught philosophy at MIT while writing freelance journalism for Newsweek, The New Yorker, and Life. These parallel lives as philosopher, journalist, and emerging filmmaker shaped a sensibility that would resist conventional storytelling from the very beginning.

• 3. Badlands and Days of Heaven

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  Badlands drew its story from the real crimes of convicted teenage spree killer Charles Starkweather, and Malick cast Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek as the young couple moving through the 1950s Midwest. To raise half the budget, Malick approached people outside the film industry entirely, including doctors and dentists, and put in $25,000 of his own money. Executive producer Edward R. Pressman covered the rest.

  Production was troubled. Many crew members left midway through shooting. Yet the finished film stunned audiences at the New York Film Festival, and Warner Bros. bought distribution rights for three times the film's entire budget.

  Days of Heaven pushed further into visual experimentation. Malick shot predominantly during the golden hour, using primarily natural light in the farm country of the Texas Panhandle as its story unfolds in the early twentieth century. Production began in Alberta, Canada in the fall of 1976. Several crew members quit before shooting finished, largely over Malick's directorial approach. Editor Billy Weber and Malick then spent two years in post-production, during which they developed unconventional editing and voice-over techniques after realizing the picture they had planned would not fully work as conceived.

  When the film finally reached audiences in 1978, critic Harold C. Schonberg wrote in The New York Times that it was "full of elegant and striking photography" while calling it "an intolerably artsy, artificial film." That split reaction proved prophetic. The film won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography and the prize for Best Director at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival. Decades later, a 2015 critics' poll published by the BBC voted it one of the fifty greatest American films ever made.

• 4. The Long Disappearance

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  After Days of Heaven's release, Malick was developing a Paramount project called Q, which explored the origins of life on earth. Then he moved to Paris and dropped out of the film world entirely. The years that followed were more productive than they appeared from the outside.

  He wrote multiple screenplays: one about Josef Breuer's analysis of Anna O.; adaptations of Walker Percy's novel The Moviegoer and Larry McMurtry's The Desert Rose; a script about Jerry Lee Lewis; and a stage adaptation of the Japanese film Sansho the Bailiff that was intended for Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda. He continued developing the Q script throughout. His longtime production designer Jack Fisk has said Malick was also shooting film during this period.

  The Q project never became a feature film in the conventional sense, but it fed two major works decades later: The Tree of Life and Voyage of Time. The hiatus was not silence. It was accumulation.

  When Malick did eventually return, it was with a World War II film adapted from James Jones's novel, with a cast that included Sean Penn, Adrien Brody, Jim Caviezel, Nick Nolte, Ben Chaplin, George Clooney, and John Travolta. Filming took place in the Daintree Rainforest in Queensland, Australia and in the Solomon Islands. The Thin Red Line was the longest gap between studio features in living memory for a major American director.

• 5. The Tree of Life and Its Prizes

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  The Thin Red Line won the Golden Bear at the 49th Berlin International Film Festival and earned seven Academy Award nominations. It confirmed that Malick could attract the biggest actors in Hollywood and that critics would take him seriously as one of the most significant directors working.

  Malick's fifth feature, The Tree of Life, filmed in Smithville, Texas and elsewhere during 2008, marked a new threshold. Starring Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, and Sean Penn, the film spans multiple time periods and frames one family's grief against the scale of cosmic history. Scholars Christopher B. Barnett and Clark J. Elliston described it as "arguably Malick's most acclaimed work."

  It premiered at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme d'Or. Later polls placed it 79th among the greatest American films of all time in a BBC Culture survey of 62 international critics, and seventh among the greatest films since 2000 in a separate worldwide critics' poll by the same outlet. At the 84th Academy Awards, it was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Cinematography for Emmanuel Lubezki, who had become Malick's most frequent cinematographic collaborator across five films.

  A. O. Scott, reviewing the film for The New York Times, compared Malick to Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, James Agee, and Herman Melville as American artists whose definitive work "did not sit comfortably or find universal favor in their own time" but "leaned perpetually into the future."

• 6. Personal Grief On Screen

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  Larry Malick, Terrence's younger brother, went to Spain in the late 1960s to study guitar with Andrés Segovia. Under the pressure of his musical studies, Larry intentionally broke his own hands. Their father Emil traveled to Spain to be with him. Larry died shortly after, possibly by suicide.

  Terrence Malick has carried that loss into his films explicitly. Both The Tree of Life and Knight of Cups explore and reference the death of a younger brother. The family drama at the center of The Tree of Life, with its meditation on suffering, loss, and the presence of mercy in the world, was shaped by that specific wound.

  Malick's semi-autobiographical film To the Wonder drew on his personal relationships as well, specifically his marriages to Michèle Marie Morette and Alexandra "Ecky" Wallace. He met Morette in Paris in 1980 and married her there in 1985; they divorced in 1996. Wallace was his high-school sweetheart. The film, shot predominantly in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, has been called "arguably Malick's most derided," yet it draws its emotional material from lived experience rather than literary source.

• 7. Voyage of Time and A Hidden Life

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  Voyage of Time was released in 2016 in two versions: a 40-minute IMAX version narrated by Brad Pitt and a 90-minute feature narrated by Cate Blanchett. The Hollywood Reporter described it as "a celebration of the Earth, displaying the whole of time, from the birth of the universe to its final collapse." Malick described it as "one of my greatest dreams." It drew on footage accumulated over decades of collaboration, including material from special effects creators Douglas Trumbull, who worked on 2001, and Dan Glass, who worked on The Matrix.

  A Hidden Life, released in 2019, told the story of Franz Jagerstatter, an Austrian conscientious objector during World War II who was put to death at age 36 for refusing to support military action. He was later declared a martyr and beatified by the Catholic Church. August Diehl plays Jagerstatter; Valerie Pachner plays his wife, Franziska. Filming took place at Studio Babelsberg in Potsdam, in the small mountain village of Sappada, and in Brixen, South Tyrol.

  Malick said of the film that he had "repented and gone back to working with a much tighter script" compared to his more recent work. The remark was a candid acknowledgment that the extremely free-form approach of To the Wonder, Knight of Cups, and Song to Song had tested audiences' patience. The Way of the Wind, a film about the life of Jesus told through parables, was reported in production near Rome as of June 2019, with Geza Rohrig as Jesus, Matthias Schoenaerts as Saint Peter, and Mark Rylance in four roles as Satan.

• 8. A Cinema of Instinct and Reason

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  Film scholar Lloyd Michaels identified Malick's central preoccupations as "the isolated individual's desire for transcendence amidst established social institutions, the grandeur and untouched beauty of nature, the competing claims of instinct and reason, and the lure of the open road." Michaels argued that in all of American cinema, Malick is the filmmaker most frequently granted genius status after producing a relatively small and discontinuous body of work.

  Roger Ebert located a single unifying thought beneath all of Malick's films: "Human lives diminish beneath the overarching majesty of the world." Ebert considered Malick among the rare directors who aimed at nothing less than a masterpiece with each project.

  Critic Chris Wisniewski described Days of Heaven and The New World as neither literary nor theatrical but "principally cinematic," communicating through image and sound rather than through dialogue or event. He pointed to Malick's characteristic tools: philosophical voice-overs from individual characters; images of nature offering quiet contrast to human violence; cinematography built on natural light; and striking musical choices.

  Malick's contracts, notably, stipulate that his likeness may not be used for promotional purposes, and he routinely declines interviews. He has lived in Austin, Texas. The director who spent two decades writing scripts that were never filmed, who translated Heidegger and taught at MIT before he made his first feature, continues editing The Way of the Wind.