Terrence Malick
Terrence Frederick Malick is an American filmmaker. Malick began his career as part of the New Hollywood generation of filmmakers and received numerous accolades, including the Palme d'Or and the Golden Bear, in addition to nominations for three Academy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, a DGA Award, and a WGA Award.
Malick made his feature film debut with the crime drama Badlands, followed by the romantic period drama Days of Heaven, which earned him a nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Best Director. He then directed the World War II epic The Thin Red Line, for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director, the historical romantic drama The New World, and the experimental coming-of-age drama The Tree of Life, for which he was again nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director and won the Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or.
Malick's directorial output became more consistent and experimental with To the Wonder, Knight of Cups, Song to Song, and A Hidden Life. During this time he also directed the documentary film Voyage of Time about the birth and death of the universe. Malick has frequently collaborated with Emmanuel Lubezki, who served as the director of photography on seven of his films.
Malick's films explore themes such as transcendence and conflicts between reason and instinct. They typically have broad philosophical and spiritual overtones and employ meditative voice-overs by their characters. Malick's style has polarized scholars and audiences; many praise his films for their lavish cinematography and aesthetics, but others fault them for lacking plot and character development. His work has nonetheless ranked highly in retrospective decade-end and all-time polls.
Life and career
Early years and education
Malick was born in Ottawa, Illinois. He is the son of Irene and Emil A. Malick, a geologist. His paternal grandparents were of Assyrian descent from Urmia, while his mother was an Irish Catholic. Malick attended St. Stephen's Episcopal School in Austin, Texas, while his family lived in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.Malick had two younger brothers, Chris and Larry. Larry Malick was a guitarist who went to study in Spain with Andrés Segovia in the late 1960s. In 1968, Larry intentionally broke his own hands due to pressure over his musical studies. Their father Emil went to Spain to help Larry, but his son died shortly after, possibly by suicide. The early death of Malick's younger brother has been explored and referenced in his films The Tree of Life and Knight of Cups.
Malick graduated from Harvard College in 1965 with a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He received a Rhodes Scholarship, which he used to study philosophy at Oxford University's Magdalen College. After a disagreement with his advisor, Gilbert Ryle, over Malick's thesis on the concept of world in Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, Malick left Oxford without a degree. In 1969, Northwestern University Press published Malick's translation of Heidegger's Vom Wesen des Grundes as The Essence of Reasons.
After returning to the United States, Malick taught philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology while freelancing as a journalist. He wrote articles for Newsweek, The New Yorker, and Life.
1969–1978: Film debut and acclaim
Malick started his film career after earning an MFA from the brand-new AFI Conservatory in 1969, directing the short film Lanton Mills. At the AFI, he established contacts with people such as actor Jack Nicholson, longtime collaborator Jack Fisk, and agent Mike Medavoy, who procured for Malick freelance work revising scripts. He wrote early uncredited drafts of Dirty Harry and Drive, He Said, and is credited with the screenplay for Pocket Money. Malick also co-wrote The Gravy Train under the pseudonym David Whitney.Malick's first feature-length work as a director was Badlands, an independent film starring Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek as a young couple on a crime spree in the 1950s Midwest. It was influenced by the crimes of convicted teenage spree killer Charles Starkweather. Malick raised half the budget by approaching people outside of the industry, including doctors and dentists, and by contributing $25,000 from his personal savings. The rest was raised by executive producer Edward R. Pressman. After a troubled production that included many crew members leaving halfway through, Badlands drew raves upon its premiere at the New York Film Festival. As a result, Warner Bros. bought distribution rights for three times its budget.
Malick's second film was the Paramount-produced Days of Heaven, about a love triangle that develops in the farm country of the Texas Panhandle in the early 20th century. Production began in the fall of 1976 in Alberta, Canada. The film was mostly shot during the golden hour, with primarily natural light. Much like Malick's first feature, Days of Heaven had a lengthy and troubled production, with several members of the production crew quitting before shooting was finished, mainly due to disagreements with Malick's idiosyncratic directorial style. The film likewise had a troubled post-production phase. Billy Weber and Malick spent two years editing it, during which they experimented with unconventional editing and voice-over techniques once they realized the picture they had set out to make would not fully work.
Days of Heaven was finally released in 1978 to mostly positive responses from critics. Its cinematography was widely praised, although some found its story lackluster. In The New York Times, Harold C. Schonberg wrote that it "is full of elegant and striking photography; and it is an intolerably artsy, artificial film." It won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography and the prize for Best Director at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival. Its reputation has since improved, having been voted one of the 50 greatest American films ever made in a 2015 critics' poll published by the BBC.
Following the release of Days of Heaven, Malick began developing a project for Paramount, titled Q, that explored the origins of life on earth. During pre-production, he suddenly moved to Paris and disappeared from public view for years. During this time, he wrote a number of screenplays, including The English Speaker, 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 to be directed by Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda, in addition to continuing work on the Q script. Although Q has never been made, Malick's work on the project provided material for his film The Tree of Life and eventually became the basis for Voyage of Time. Jack Fisk, a longtime production designer on Malick's films, has said Malick was shooting film during this time as well.
1997–2011: Return to cinema
Malick returned to directing in 1997 with The Thin Red Line, released two decades after his previous film. A loose adaptation of James Jones's World War II novel of the same name, it features a large ensemble cast, including Sean Penn, Adrien Brody, Jim Caviezel, Nick Nolte, Ben Chaplin, Elias Koteas, Woody Harrelson, George Clooney, and John Travolta. Filming took place predominantly in the Daintree Rainforest in Queensland, Australia and in the Solomon Islands.The film received critical acclaim, was nominated for seven Academy Awards, and won the Golden Bear at the 49th Berlin International Film Festival. The Thin Red Line has since been ranked among the best films of the 1990s in Complex, The A.V. Club, Slant, Paste, and Film Comment.
After learning of Malick's work on an article about Che Guevara during the 1960s, Steven Soderbergh offered Malick the chance to write and direct a film about Guevara he had been developing with Benicio del Toro. Malick accepted and produced a screenplay focused on Guevara's failed revolution in Bolivia. After a year and a half, the financing had not come together entirely, and Malick was given the opportunity to direct The New World, a script he had begun developing in the 1970s. He left the Guevara project in March 2004, and Soderbergh took over as director, leading to the film Che. The New World, based on the story of John Smith and Pocahontas in the Virginia Colony, was released in 2005. Over one million feet of film were shot, and three different cuts of varying length were released.
While the film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Cinematography, critical reception was divided throughout its theatrical run; many praised its visuals and acting while finding its narrative unfocused. Five critics later named The New World one of the best films of its decade, and it ranked 39th in a 2016 BBC poll of the greatest films since 2000.
File:Terrence Malick, tree of life premier.jpg|thumb|Malick at the Cannes Film Festival premiere of The Tree of Life
Malick's fifth feature, The Tree of Life, was filmed in Smithville, Texas, and elsewhere during 2008. Starring Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, and Sean Penn, it is a family drama spanning multiple time periods; it focuses on an individual's struggle to reconcile love, mercy and beauty with the existence of illness, suffering and death. It premiered at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme d'Or. It later won the FIPRESCI Award for the Best Film of the Year. At the 84th Academy Awards, it was nominated for three awards, including the Academy Award for Best Picture, Best Director for Malick, and Best Cinematography for Emmanuel Lubezki. A limited theatrical release in the United States began on May 27, 2011.
Malick scholars Christopher B. Barnett and Clark J. Elliston wrote that it became "arguably most acclaimed work". It was voted the 79th greatest American film of all time in a 2015 BBC Culture poll of 62 international film critics. The work was also ranked the seventh-greatest film since 2000 in a worldwide critics' poll by BBC.