Days of Heaven
Days of Heaven is a 1978 American romantic period drama film written and directed by Terrence Malick, and starring Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, Sam Shepard and Linda Manz. Set in 1916, it tells the story of Bill and Abby, lovers who travel to the Texas Panhandle for work harvesting crops for a wealthy grain farmer. Bill persuades Abby to claim the fortune of the dying farmer by tricking him into a sham marriage.
Days of Heaven was Malick's second feature film, after Badlands, and was produced on a budget of $3 million. Production was particularly troublesome, with a tight shooting schedule in Canada in 1976 and significant budget constraints. Film editing took Malick a lengthy two years, due to difficulty with achieving a general flow and assembly of the scenes. This was eventually solved by incorporating improvised narration from teen Linda Manz. The film was scored by Ennio Morricone with contributions by guitarist Leo Kottke, and photographed by Néstor Almendros and Haskell Wexler.
Days of Heaven received positive reviews on its original theatrical release. Its natural-light photography was widely praised, although a small number of critics considered only this aspect to be worthy of high praise. It was not a significant commercial success, but did win an Academy Award for Best Cinematography along with three nominations for the score, costume design and sound. Malick won the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Director and was nominated for the Golden Globe.
Days of Heaven has since become one of the most acclaimed films of the decade, particularly for its cinematography. It appeared at #49 on a BBC 2015 poll of the greatest American films. In 2007, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Plot
In 1916, Chicago steelworker Bill accidentally kills his factory foreman during an argument. He flees to the Texas Panhandle with his girlfriend Abby and his young sister Linda. As their train winds its way across the country, an older Linda mulls over these events in voiceover narration. She recalls that a religious man once warned her of a vision of apocalyptic hellfire, and notes that at the Last Judgment, God will rescue the good and turn away the evil.In Texas, a wealthy farmer suffering from an unspecified malady hires as many seasonal shockers as he can find, including Bill and Abby, who pretend to be siblings to deter gossip. Bill overhears a doctor telling the farmer that he has one year left to live. The farmer's accountant encourages him to sell his farm and enjoy his profits, but the farmer decides on staying.
The terminally ill farmer takes a liking to Abby, and asks her to stay with him after the harvest. Bill encourages Abby to marry the farmer so that they can inherit his money when he dies. Abby questions whether Bill still loves her. Bill confidently predicts that the farmer will die soon and they will be reunited. Abby marries the farmer and persuades him to let Bill and Linda stay at the farmhouse. The farmer's foreman suspects that Abby and Bill are con artists, but the farmer dismisses the suggestion and distances himself from the foreman.
The farmer's health remains stable, foiling Bill's plans. Over time, the shy farmer wins over Abby with his genuine disposition. However, he grows suspicious of Abby's excessively familiar relationship with her "brother." Bill belatedly realizes that Abby has fallen in love with the farmer. He realizes that the only way to salvage the situation is to depart the farm, leaving his little sister with his ex-girlfriend. The farmer tries to be a good father figure to Linda.
Bill returns to the farm during the following year's harvest. He admits to Abby that encouraging her to marry another man was a mistake. Before Abby can make a decision, a locust swarm arrives. To save the harvest, the farmer lights controlled fires to smoke out the locusts. However, when he sees Bill, he loses control of himself and chases after Bill with a gun. He accidentally knocks over one of his own lamps, triggering a blaze that destroys much of the harvest. Bill kills the farmer with a screwdriver the next day during a confrontation where the farmer points a revolver at him.
Once again, Bill, Abby, and Linda are on the run. With the foreman's help, the police shoot Bill while he tries to escape. Seeking a new life, Abby leaves Linda at a boarding school and departs on a train with soldiers headed for World War I. Later, Linda runs away from the school with a friend from the farm.
Cast
- Richard Gere as Bill
- Brooke Adams as Abby
- Sam Shepard as The Farmer
- Linda Manz as Linda
- Robert Wilke as The Farm Foreman
Production
Development
In 1975, Jacob Brackman introduced Malick to fellow producer Bert Schneider. On a trip to Cuba, Schneider and Malick began conversations that would lead to the development of Days of Heaven. Schneider agreed to produce the film. Paramount Pictures CEO Barry Diller, who wanted Schneider to produce films for him, agreed to finance Days of Heaven. At the time, the studio was heading in a new direction. They were hiring new production heads who had worked in network television and, according to former production chief Richard Sylbert, " product aimed at your knees". Despite the change in direction, Schneider was able to secure a deal with Paramount by guaranteeing the budget and taking personal responsibility for all overages. "Those were the kind of deals I liked to make ... because then I could have final cut and not talk to nobody about why we're gonna use this person instead of that person", Schneider said.Malick admired cinematographer Néstor Almendros's work on The Wild Child and wanted him to shoot Days of Heaven. Almendros was impressed by Malick's knowledge of photography and willingness to use little studio lighting. The two men modeled the film's cinematography after silent films, which often used natural light. They drew inspiration from painters such as Johannes Vermeer, Edward Hopper, and Andrew Wyeth, as well as photo-reporters from the start of the 20th century.
Casting
Before 1975, Malick had tried and failed to get Dustin Hoffman or Al Pacino to star in the film, and John Travolta auditioned for and won the lead role of Bill, but ABC-TV refused to release him from his contract for the television series Welcome Back, Kotter.| Actor | Role |
| Richard Gere | Bill |
| Brooke Adams | Abby |
| Sam Shepard | The Farmer |
| Linda Manz | Linda |
| Robert Wilke | Farm Foreman |
| Jackie Shultis | Linda's Friend |
| Stuart Margolin | Mill Foreman |
| Tim Scott | Harvest Hand |
| Gene Bell | Dancer |
| Richard Libertini | Vaudeville Leader |
| Doug Kershaw | Fiddler |
Schneider and Malick cast young actors Richard Gere and Brooke Adams and actor/playwright Sam Shepard for the lead roles. All three were relative unknowns: Gere had appeared in a handful of minor roles, Brooke Adams' only prior credited film work was a lead in the horror B-movie Shock Waves. The casting director didn't intend to recommend Adams to Malick, but Malick viewed her audition tape independently, and decided to call her back. While Shepard was a prominent playwright, his only prior film role was a cameo in the 1970 experimental film Brand X.
15-year-old child actress Linda Manz was likewise a first-timer, a "streetwise kid" who attended a performing arts school in New York. Manz turned up unannounced at casting director Barbara L. Claman's office, "smoking and looking all of 10 years old" but, according to Claman, "she had that special quality we wanted." Manz's part was initially smaller, but Malick was so impressed by her that he made a last-minute decision to have her improvise an unscripted narration.
Principal photography
Production began in the late summer of 1976. Although the film was set in Texas, the Rocky Mountains are incongruously seen in the exteriors shot in southwestern Alberta in and around the ghost town of Whiskey Gap, located from the Montana border, while the denouement was shot on the grounds of Heritage Park Historical Village in Calgary.Jack Fisk designed and built the mansion from plywood in the wheat fields and the smaller houses where the workers lived. The mansion was not a facade, as was usually the custom, but authentically recreated inside and out with period colors: brown, mahogany, and dark wood for the interiors. Patricia Norris designed and made the period costumes from used fabrics and old clothes to avoid the artificial look of studio-made costumes.
According to Almendros, the production was not "rigidly prepared", allowing for improvisation. Daily call sheets could have been more detailed, and the schedule changed to suit the weather. This upset some Hollywood crew members not used to working this way. Most crew members were used to a "glossy style of photography" and felt frustrated because Almendros did not give them much work. Daily, he asked them to turn off the lights they had prepared for him. Some crew members said that Almendros and Malick did not know what they were doing. The tension led to some of the crew quitting the production. Malick supported what Almendros was doing and pushed the film's look further, removing more lighting aids and leaving the image bare.
Due to union regulations, Almendros was not allowed to operate the camera. With Malick, he would plan out and rehearse the camera's and the actors' movements. Almendros would stand near the main camera and give instructions to the camera operators. Almendros was gradually losing sight by the time shooting began. To evaluate his set-ups, "he had one of his assistants take Polaroids of the scene, then examined them through powerful glasses". According to Almendros, Malick wanted "a very visual movie. The story would be told through visuals. Very few people really want to give that priority to image. Usually the director gives priority to the actors and the story, but here the story was told through images".
Much of the film would be shot during magic hour, which Almendros called: "a euphemism, because it's not an hour but around 25 minutes at the most. It is the moment when the sun sets, and after the sun sets and before it is night. The sky has light, but there is no actual sun. The light is very soft, and there is something magic about it. It limited us to around twenty minutes a day, but it did pay on the screen. It gave some kind of magic look, a beauty and romanticism." Lighting was integral to filming, and helped evoke the painterly quality of the landscapes in the film. A vast majority of the scenes were filmed late in the afternoon or after sunset, with the sky silhouetting the actor's faces, which would otherwise be difficult to see. Interior scenes that feature light coming in from the outside, were shot using artificial light to maintain the consistency of that intruding light. However, the "magic look" would also extend to interior scenes, which occasionally used natural light.
For the shot in the "locusts" sequence, where the insects rise into the sky, the filmmakers dropped peanut shells from helicopters. They had the actors walk backward while running the film in reverse through the camera. When it was projected, everything moved forward except the locusts. For the close-ups and insert shots, thousands of live locusts were used which had been captured and supplied by Canada's Department of Agriculture.
While the photography yielded the director satisfactory results, the rest of the production was difficult. The actors and crew reportedly viewed Malick as cold and distant. After two weeks of shooting, Malick was so disappointed with the dailies, he "decided to toss the script, go Leo Tolstoy instead of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, wide instead of deep shoot miles of film with the hope of solving the problems in the editing room."
The harvesting machines constantly broke down, which resulted in shooting beginning late in the afternoon, allowing for only a few hours of light before it was too dark to go on. One day, two helicopters were scheduled to drop peanut shells to simulate locusts on film; however, Malick decided to shoot period cars instead. He kept the helicopters on hold at great cost. Production needed to catch up, with costs exceeding the $3,000,000 budget by about $800,000, and Schneider had already mortgaged his home to cover the overages.
The production ran so late that both Almendros and camera operator John Bailey had to leave due to a prior commitment on François Truffaut's The Man Who Loved Women. Almendros approached cinematographer Haskell Wexler to complete the film. They worked together for a week so that Wexler could get familiar with the film's visual style.
Wexler was careful to match Almendros' work, but he did make some exceptions. "I did some hand held shots on a Panaflex", he said, " the opening of the film in the steel mill. I used some diffusion. Nestor didn't use any diffusion. I felt very guilty using the diffusion and having the feeling of violating a fellow cameraman." Although half the finished picture was footage shot by Wexler, he received only credit for "additional photography", much to his chagrin. The credit denied him any chance of an Academy Award for his work on Days of Heaven. Wexler sent film critic Roger Ebert a letter "in which he described sitting in a theater with a stop-watch to prove that more than half of the footage" was his. Later in life, however, he had accepted Almendros receiving credit as cinematographer:
I thought, "Well, God damn it. I should get credit with Nestor on it." And then I had talks with the producer, Bert Schneider, and he said, "Look, you've won Oscars already. What the hell, Nestor should have it." So then I said to myself, "Well, Haskell, you're being a little selfish." And the real thing that convinced me not to say anything ... was that Nestor set the tone of the film. It was actually me maintaining his style to a certain extent, so if there was to be an award, which we didn't know there would be, he should get it. And I'm so happy now—particularly since he is no longer with us—that that happened.