Universal Soldier? The Emersonian Combat Experience of Terrence Malick’s ‘The Thin Red Line’

Cinematographer: John Toll. Production stills by Merie Weismiller Wallace © Fox 2000 Pictures

 

By Tim Pelan

 
Terrence Malick’s long-awaited return to cinema with 1998’s The Thin Red Line, an adaptation of James Jones’ iconic novel of the American infantry’s bitter struggle against Japanese forces on the island of Guadalcanal in WWII’s Pacific campaign, was a surprising endeavor in many ways. Firstly, few would have pinned Malick for a war movie, including the director himself. Secondly, he brought his own unique sensibility to the material, a metaphysical, transcendent, questioning elaboration of previous approaches with Days of Heaven and Badlands that positioned it markedly different from that year’s more prosaically traditional, yet viscerally eye-opening Saving Private Ryan, directed by Steven Spielberg. If there are any war movie clichés in Malick’s film, they are upended and turned inside out. The film begins with a sly-looking crocodile slipping beneath the stagnant swampy waters, until only its eye remains visible. “Nature is cruel,” Nick Nolte’s Colonel Tall tells Elia Koteas’s Captain Staros at one point. It’s not cruel though. It’s indifferent. From Unanswered questions: vision and experience in Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line—“The opening shot offers a range of meanings: ancient, pre-historic, hiding beneath the water, the crocodile represents a predatory threat—prompting thoughts of the law of the jungle, perhaps to be contrasted with the laws of civilization. The sustained chord on a huge organ intensifies the threat and beckons us to consider the jungle as a monument, a natural cathedral, to the scale of creation. As Part’s chord fades out, a series of shots presents trees assailed by vines and roots, while an unspecified voice-over asks the film’s first questions: ‘What’s this war at the heart of nature? Why does nature vie with itself, the land contend with the sea? Is there an avenging power in nature, not one power but two?’”

Malick experiments with voice-over in The Thin Red Line. The opening narration is of no particular soldier, rather an omniscient questioning presence. We hear other characters’ inner thoughts, dreams, and deliberations throughout also. The Thin Red Line adopts a distancing approach through open text. There is no singular objective view. We are invited to participate in subjective viewpoints that often clash with others, or are at odds with characters’ physical actions. The meaning of the experiences witnessed—Witt and his fellow AWOL trooper’s idyllic sojourn in the Melanesian village; the tensions of the Brass on the transport ship; the grunts slog through the brush; the centerpiece battle on the ridge and surrounding long-grassed approach; and the mop-up of the Japanese bivouac and release during time off the line: these all mean different things to different characters. In terms of German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, the world they all share in, and by extension the one we visit in the darkened theatre, is merely a network of appearances whose existence and connection occur only in our mental representations, our meditations on experience. Thus, their “war stories” are unfolding in real-time as a multitude of multi-faceted influences shape their sensibilities. Private Witt’s throughline as the one character we follow most closely embodies American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson’s belief in the “divine sufficiency of the individual,” a questioning restlessness at odds with G.I. discipline.

 

Malick’s directing style and instructions to his crew could be somewhat free-flowing. Kirk Acevedo, who played Private Tella, recalled that his director would instruct him, “Now Kirk, you’re on the ship and the beach is right there and you’re calling out into the abyss. And that’s what your motivation is.” Acevedo got into it though. “His directing is very poetic and very, sort of, catching for fairies and butterflies, so to speak.” Malick’s production designer Jack Fisk had grown used to his style over several collaborations, although he could find it “exhausting. Because he’s the most difficult man to understand. Sometimes he’ll talk in metaphors. Sometimes he’ll show me a photograph or a painting. Sometimes he’ll just make a literary reference or talk about a piece of music.” He started filming in June 1997 and wrapped 100 days later, having shot over a million feet of film at a conservative estimate. Surprisingly, The Thin Red Line came in on time and on budget.

His vision was to portray much of the violence indirectly. According to Bobby Geisler, who was instrumental in getting Malick to direct, only to be unceremoniously ousted (although he and his partner, John Roberdeau retained screen credits), “A soldier is shot, but rather than showing a Spielbergian bloody face we see a tree explode, the shredded vegetation, and a gorgeous bird with a broken wing flying out of the tree.”

Malick debated every change and deviation from Jones’ novel, asking permission from his widow, Gloria. She eventually told him, “Terry, you have my husband’s voice, you’re writing in his musical key; now what you must do is improvise. Play riffs on this.”

 

Infamously, Adrien Brody’s character Corporal Fife, supposedly the nominal lead, got sidelined and almost completely excised from the drama as Malick saw something special in Jim Caviezel’s Private Witt, who embodies the spiritual, questing soul of the piece, and acts as a counterpart to Sean Penn’s cynical Sergeant Welsh. Brody told James Mottram in The Independent that “the pressure on that film was that I had to carry the movie with a cast of stars that I truly admired. I was so focused and professional, I gave everything to it, and then to not receive everything… in terms of witnessing my own work. It was extremely unpleasant because I’d already begun the press for a film that I wasn’t really in. Terry obviously changed the entire concept of the film. I had never experienced anything like that.” Co-editor Leslie Jones remarks on the film’s home release extras that “He (Malick) just had a really strong connection with that character and Jim Caviezel. You could see it; new footage coming in with Jim and it was much more focused and powerful. He found Whit’s voice during production and elaborated on it later.” Malick saw the film’s style as “Paradise Lost, an Eden, raped by the green poison of war,” as he put it to his producers during the development and wooing stage of bringing him on board.

If Witt and Welsh butt heads at grunt level, Nolte’s Colonel Tall and Koteas’ Captain Staros are the officers who wrestle over the souls of their men. Tall has kissed butt throughout his career to get a wartime command, and seeks glory at Guadalcanal. But when he and Captain Staros clash over the seemingly chaotic attack on Japanese dug in on a grassy hill, who is right? Is Staros overly concerned for his men, too cautious? Is Tall right to push them on? “Only time you worry about a soldier is when he stops bitchin’,” he tells Staros. He knows the artillery volley is useless, “but it bucks the men up.” The Captain sends stretcher bearers out to those less injured, just because he can see them and their wailing tears his guts. Men are ordered forward then shot and fall out of sight. Sunlight sweeps away shadow across the undulating tall grass as if they were never there. A soldier reaches out to touch a leaf, which curls protectively closed. Another cowering soldier checks as an unconcerned snake slithers past. Nature abides, while man dances to the same old tune.

 

Another private spots three enemy soldiers on the ridge and shoots one down. “I killed a man,” he thinks. “I killed a man, and no one can touch me for it.” He’s at once a detached observer, yet also pumped with adrenaline, enough to alert his comrades. The cliché of the dying soldier requesting a friend write his family at home is knocked down. “You gonna write his old lady?” “F-fuck no, that’s not my job,” a guy says, backing away, bug-eyed at death up close and personal.

The battle goes on all day, the men parched and isolated in the sweltering sun. At dusk, wild dogs feast on corpses. Sergeant McCron (John Savage), in shock at the loss of his squad, stands up and yells at the unseen enemy. How come he lives and they die? God’s silence mocks him. Private Bell (Ben Chaplin), whose uxorious feelings for his wife cost him a previous peacetime commission, seeks escape in fantasies of their life back home. His fantasy seems to embolden him to volunteer for the assault on the hidden gun emplacement, accomplishing daring deeds, until the fantasy is revealed as a fallacy—he later gets a Dear John letter requesting a divorce and grants it, too in love with her to fight for her, finally acknowledging the distance that now exists between them.

Tall compromises and allows Staros’ flanking maneuver, but puts the keen Captain Gaff (John Cusack) in charge of the chosen squad. The move breaks the impasse and victory is assured, the men going on to sweep clear the Japanese rear line bivouac. Tall promotes Staros to an Army legal post befitting his peacetime experience, and throws in a medal, for the sake of a clean Regimental record. The Army wants yes men up front, not mollycoddlers. “It’s not necessary for you to ever tell me I’m right,” he tells Staros. “We’ll just assume it.”

 

Nick Nolte, from various sources—Charlie Rose, The Guardian, and The Free Library:

“The question is, is there any place on the battlefield for human compassion? That’s James Jones’ question… [He] wrote a story about his own experiences in war—that men go into war not knowing why—they’re usually indoctrinated to go in for idealistic reasons. Then they realize they’re going to die or they’re going to have to kill somebody and they become tremendously horrified… [He] said that the great experiences he had in the war were, one, the horror, and, two, the day he was shot and knew he was going to die… Such a fear came over him—up from his feet, overwhelming his body—that it stripped away all social and military conditioning, personality, grasp… When you know you are going to die [this] tremendous fear overwhelms you. And in that moment of fright and horror, [you] literally lose [your] self… It shatters all of your social conditioning, your facade, your personality… Something is replaced once that self is gone… into this nothingness… and that’s this unbearable compassion of love… compassion of love for [your] fellow men… for the fellow standing next to [you]… He said, after you feel that, and have lost your self, then you know you will die for your buddy. And he said, it’s one of the strange ironies that come out of this terrible diseased idea of war. He says he never felt that love again. That the love of a parent for a child comes closest. But the parent still holds on to their identity.”

 

As the soldiers pass their dead comrades’ fresh white crosses, sprinklers feed the freshly laid grass growing over their graves. They have all the water they need now. The intrusion of the soldiers on the “garden of Eden” has impacted the Melanesian natives also. Earlier, Witt remarked to a mother that the children don’t fight. All is good. Later, we witness adults brawl in the village. The crocodile is now tethered, bound, the soldiers having conquered nature, bored, dissolute, quick to anger or despair. A soldier who pulled gold fillings from the mouths of slain Japanese troops now shakes and sobs in the rain, haunted by a whispered foreign tongue licking around his fractured conscience, before hurling the grisly trophies aside and gripping himself in place of a mother’s embrace.

The soldiers attempt to process the alien experience and environment they have been thrust into. Their own worldview and ideology are sorely lacking, causing an existential crisis. Only Witt seems at peace. “Darkness, light, strife, and love, are they the workings of one mind? The features of the same face? Oh my soul, let me be in you now, look out through my eyes, look out at the things you made, all things shining.” From Gavin Smith in Film Comment:

“In their final conversation, a strange Conradian bond having formed between them, Sgt. Welsh mockingly asks Witt, ‘You still believing in the beautiful light, are you?’ Quietly adding, ‘How do you do that?’, Penn captures a subtle shift in Welsh, suggesting a man who, after all he’s been through, is no longer secure in his beliefs. Witt responds, ‘I still see a spark in you.’”

 

John Toll, Malick’s cinematographer, was witness to a similar kind of eliding miscommunication between his director and Steven Spielberg (his wife Lois Burwell worked as key make-up artist on Saving Private Ryan). As recalled in Total Film: “During production, Malick sent Spielberg, who was shooting Ryan, a Japanese battle flag packaged up like a soldier’s trophy from the front line. It was a symbolic act layered with contested meaning: was it a gift, or a competitive shove?

Spielberg’s response was tellingly prosaic: he sent Malick a crew jacket from Saving Private Ryan. Apparently, not every Hollywood director has the soul of a poet…”

Tim Pelan was born in 1968, the year of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (possibly his favorite film), ‘Planet of the Apes,’ ‘The Night of the Living Dead’ and ‘Barbarella.’ That also made him the perfect age for when ‘Star Wars’ came out. Some would say this explains a lot. Read more »

 

“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.” —Nick Nolte

A monumentally important screenplay. Screenwriter must-read: Terrence Malick’s screenplay for The Thin Red Line [PDF]. (NOTE: For educational and research purposes only). The Blu-ray of the film is available from the Criterion Collection and other online retailers. Absolutely our highest recommendation.

 

DEATH AND THE MASTER

“The herculean struggle to get Terrence Malick’s first movie in two decades—a film version of James Jones’ war epic The Thin Red Line—to the screen was complicated not only by its elusive director’s reticence but also by the two producers who believe they made it all happen.” —Death and the Master by James Wolcott

 

Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line press kit scans.

 

JOHN TOLL, ASC

An interview conducted by Sven Mikulec

Since The Thin Red Line is one of my favorite anti-war films of all time, I wanted to know a bit more about the process of making it, about his working relationship with Malick. “He’s just such an incredible visualist,” Toll starts by stating what most fans of Malick’s work would perhaps deem obvious. “Many of his ideas are spontaneous. He definitely had specific ideas about the visual approach to the film, but he also wanted to leave himself open to opportunities that we would find as we were shooting. It was like a combination of being very specific about what we were going to do and being very open to when new ideas came about.” This immediately reminds me of James Mangold and what he recently told me about the importance of being ready to adapt to new circumstances and new ideas that spring out in the process of making a film: “[Filmmakers] had an idea about what a scene was supposed to be, and it could be a very brilliant and informed idea, but then some kind of magic is happening and they resolutely ignore that magic because it contradicts or complicates their original plan. I really think it’s the director’s responsibility to take advantage of whatever magic is happening and make it look like their plan. There’s no greater myth than that the director saw it all in advance.”

Malick and Mangold, it seems, would get along just fine. “He was very open to adapting to any opportunities that might happen because of the unique nature of the locations and the amount of time we had,” Toll continues. “He sees everything in terms of nature, natural environments. We were working in incredible exterior environments, and when things would change in those environments, he would be eager to take advantage of those things.” —John Toll: ‘There’s No Difference Between Feature Films and TV Shows—It’s All Filmmaking to Me’

 

The following is an interview from American Cinematographer © 1999 ASC, written by Stephen Pizzello, ‘John Toll, ASC details his experiences on The Thin Red Line, an existential combat film that marks the long-awaited return of director Terrence Malick.’ Subscribing to American Cinematographer is highly recommended.

The Battle of Guadalcanal was one of World War II’s pivotal conflicts. Early in 1942, Japanese forces in the South Pacific were advancing toward the Solomon Islands, which had been selected as the strategic site of an airfield that would extend the range of the Axis power’s air force. When U.S. intelligence relayed this information back to Washington, America’s military brain trust decided that the airfield, which would threaten Australian sea lanes, had to be controlled—at any cost. Mobilizing much more quickly than the Japanese had anticipated, the U.S. sent in the First Marine Division, which quickly took over the lightly defended airfield at Guadalcanal’s Lunga Point. The Japanese soon mounted a counteroffensive that led to six months of brutal combat, during which the Marines managed to repel wave after wave of seasoned troops. After a gradual buildup of forces by both sides, the Americans finally hammered out a decisive victory.

The Thin Red Line is the story of a rifle company within the Army’s 25th Division, which arrived on Guadalcanal in November of 1942 to reinforce the Marines. At that point in the battle, the thousands of Japanese troops who were still on the island had adopted defensive tactics, retreating into the territory’s grassy hills. There, they would face a torturous attrition exacted by malaria, starvation and the Americans, who were ordered to flush them out.

This historical event served as the backdrop of James Jones’ 1962 novel, a semi-autobiographical work which offers some searing insights into the human condition. Director Terrence Malick (Badlands, Days of Heaven), who hadn’t helmed a motion picture since 1978, made the book the basis of his screenplay, which generated a loud buzz in Hollywood. Malick’s long-awaited return to active duty lured in some of the industry’s biggest stars, including John Cusack, George Clooney, Woody Harrelson, Nick Nolte, Sean Penn and John Travolta, as well as such capable but lesser-known actors as Adrien Brody, Jim Caviezel, Ben Chaplin, Elias Koteas, Jared Leto and John C. Reilly.

In selecting a director of photography for his haunting, elegiacal war drama, Malick chose two-time Academy Award-winning director of photography John Toll, ASC (Legends of the Fall, Braveheart), whose work on The Thin Red Line recently earned him both the New York Film Critics’ and National Society of Film Critics’ awards for Best Cinematography. Toll recently spoke with AC about working with the reclusive director and supervising the lengthy and often arduous location shoot.

 

How did you land the assignment to photograph The Thin Red Line?
I knew one of the producers, Grant Hill. He’s from Australia, and he worked on the first picture I shot, Wind, which was filmed there. After that project, he came over to the States, where he’s been [a unit production manager] on films like Titanic and The Ghost and the Darkness. He’d been working with Terrence Malick on The Thin Red Line for about six months, and he called me when they began looking at directors of photography. Terry had already talked to several cinematographers when I finally got on the phone with him, but we just happened to hit it off.

Was that call your first encounter with Malick?
Yes, I didn’t know anything about his personality. I’d seen Badlands and Days of Heaven, of course, and they’re both great pictures. Whenever you see films like those, you always think, ‘Well, it would be great to work with a director like that, because he’s obviously interested in making films, as opposed to just commercial product.’ Back when Terry made those pictures, there wasn’t such a clear line between commercial pictures and ‘thinking’ pictures; nowadays, there’s a real distinction between those types of films. I understand that the film industry is a business, but we don’t all want to go through our careers just making commercial projects. The idea of making the type of picture that Terry seemed to be going for with The Thin Red Line was obviously desirable. I’m sure that the other cinematographers he spoke to were just as enthusiastic about working with him as I was, but I just happened to get lucky.

When did you finally meet Malick in person? What were your first impressions of him?
I was actually working in Tennessee, and I had to come back to L.A. one weekend. Terry was living in Austin, Texas, so I stopped off there and we spent a day talking about the project. I didn’t know what to expect, but I found him to be very low-key, personable and unpretentious. He’s a straightforward person, and he was extremely collaborative right from the start. It was always, ‘Well, what do you think? Here’s what I’m thinking.’ He never said anything like, ‘Okay, we’re going to do this and this and this.’ His approach is a bit more nonlinear. He doesn’t have a precisely defined vision of things from the very beginning, but he’s intuitive and knows where he wants to go with the material. The specifics are things that he finds along the way. He feels the direction, can see it out there, and knows that as he moves toward it things will become more clearly defined. He attempts to plot every stage of the trip before you begin, and then sort of fine-tunes his approach on the journey. It’s a process of discovery, and he feels that it’s a bit pointless to define the parameters any further until you’re closer to your objective.

 

Did your director’s 20-year absence from the industry have any effect on the production?
Not really. One of the great things about this project was that several key members of the filmmaking team [production designer Jack Fisk, assistant director Skip Cosper, casting director Dianne Crittenden and editor Billy Weber] had worked with Terry on his previous films. So even though it had been two decades since Terry had made a picture, he came back into this core unit. They just sort of picked up where they’d left off, and we didn’t really feel that 20-year gap. Of course, there was 20 years of technology that he wasn’t particularly familiar with [laughs], but he’s a great filmmaker and he picked up those types of things very quickly and intuitively.

Were you immediately drawn to the script?
The idea of this particular project was really interesting to me, and not just because it was a war movie. I remembered reading the James Jones novel when it first came out, and finding it to be just fantastic. I wasn’t in the film industry at the time, but I recall thinking that it would make a great motion picture. A film adaptation was actually made in 1964, but it was a pretty low-budget version, and I was a bit disappointed with it. The book is an incredibly realistic depiction of the experience of combat. Jones was a member of the Army’s 25th Division; he was at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii during the attack on Pearl Harbor, and he also participated in the Battle of Guadalcanal, so From Here to Eternity and The Thin Red Line are both based on his firsthand experiences. The most interesting thing about The Thin Red Line is the way it gets into all of these soldiers’ different personalities. While we were shooting the picture, Terry and I kept talking about how interior the narrative was; there’s an enormous amount of material in the book about what the characters are experiencing internally—as opposed to what comes out in their conversations, which usually represents an entirely different aspect of their personalities. Terry wanted the viewers to know what was happening within the minds of the characters without necessarily presenting those thoughts through dialogue. The characters in this story are very well-drawn and diverse. Some are heroes, some aren’t, and some are just there to do their job and get out as quickly as possible. It’s really a story about the tragedy of war. I got very caught up in the book when I read it, particularly the realistic aspects of being involved in that kind of experience. It was a very truthful story that presented all of the good stuff and all of the bad stuff. You just knew that Jones had been there.

 

From what you’ve said about Malick’s personality, I’m assuming he isn’t big on storyboards.
Actually, we did storyboard a few sections of the film. At the beginning of the picture, the troops are on a transport ship on the way to Guadalcanal, and there’s a big landing sequence. We storyboarded that because we didn’t have the resources to have the numbers of real ships and transports that we needed; we had to do some CGI, so we used the sketches to simplify our lives. Whenever you have a sequence on the water, you can immediately get into trouble if you’re not prepared.

What other kinds of prep work did you do?
There were a lot of conversations, and we also scouted in Guadalcanal, which was an unbelievable experience. The place has changed, but not a whole lot. It’s a beautiful island, but it’s extremely tropical and not very developed, because the region has one of the highest malaria rates in the world. During the war, enormous numbers of people came down with malaria; it was worse for the Japanese, because they weren’t well-supplied. That was one of the biggest drawbacks in their battle plan, and many of those crack troops wound up just starving to death. It was a basically a win or die situation, because the Japanese simply would not surrender. One of the things that struck us immediately during the Guadalcanal scout was how loaded with color this tropical environment was; after all, we’re used to seeing black-and-white newsreels of World War II combat. At one point, we did talk about shooting the picture in black-and-white, but that notion didn’t really take hold. The idea of all of this violence taking place in such a rich and colorful environment was very striking, and we felt that representing the story any other way just wouldn’t be accurate. We got a lot of ideas about tones and colors as we explored the area.

Eventually, you opted to shoot most of the film in Australia. What led to that decision?
We didn’t want to work in Guadalcanal for all of the same reasons that you wouldn’t want to go there during a war. There’s still a 50 percent rate of malaria, and it just wasn’t feasible logistically if we wanted to have the kind of technical support we knew we’d need. It’s still a bit difficult to get on and off the island, and we had some scenes that involved 200 or 300 extras. We would have had to bring everybody to Guadalcanal, and financially it just didn’t make sense. The real battlefields depicted in the book basically consist of grassy hills, and we began looking all over the world for that type of terrain. When we went to Australia, which is just 1,000 miles from the Solomon Islands, we found the same types of terrain—beaches, beautiful coral reefs, and grassy hills on the north coast near Queensland. Australia also has some great crews and resources, and a good lab, Atlab, right there in Sydney. It made an enormous amount of sense to shoot there. I still knew a lot of people from my experience on Wind, such as gaffer Mick Morris and key grip David Nichols, and many of them were hired for this picture. In the end, we wound up shooting for 80 days in Australia and another 20 in Guadalcanal.

 

Did you have any specific visual inspirations for the look of the film?
During the shoot, Jack Fisk brought us this book called Images of War: The Artist’s Vision of World War II [1992, edited by Ken McCormick and Hamilton Darby Perry], which presents 200 paintings by many different artists. These were artists who spent time in the front lines and came back with this fantastic artwork depicting the scenes they had witnessed, including many combat situations. All of the artists had different and unique styles. We didn’t necessarily try to reproduce these pieces of art, but they did give us good ideas about color schemes and so on. The illustrations basically served as a guide to the kind of atmosphere we were after. We’d looked at many photographs from the war, but they seemed too detailed somehow, and I wanted the imagery of our film to be a bit less clearly defined. The paintings were great because they were much more impressionistic and abstract in a way that I found more interesting than the photographs. For example, there was one drawing of Japanese prisoners sitting on the ground, and the light they were drawn in—bright contrasty sunlight which left their faces in shadow—looked very similar to the light conditions we were shooting in. There was detail in the prisoners’ faces, but the highlights of the background were bright and burned-out. I thought it looked fantastic. In some scenes [that I’d shot to that point], I had lit the actors’ faces or had used fill in situations with heavy contrast, but I’d begun doing it less and less because I started to like the way the film looked when I didn’t use fill—overexposing quite a bit, getting detail in the shadows and letting the highlights burn out. It looked much less controlled in an interesting way. After seeing the drawing, which was a much more exaggerated version of what we’d been doing photographically, I went with less and less added light.

How did those ideas factor into your overall stylistic approach?
Terry has a basic honesty, which is part of the reason that we get along. We were trying to re-create this historical event in a way that was truthful. The film is not a documentary, but we wanted it to have the integrity of a great documentary. We didn’t necessarily want to shoot it like a documentary, but we tried to lend the story a natural kind of realism. We sought out to capture the book’s honest depiction of the various types of reactions to the combat experience—the full range of human emotions. War itself, and the infantryman’s experience of it, is probably as fundamental and basic as you can get in terms of the human condition and how people react to its extremes. It pushes people to their limits, and what emerges can be very surprising in both good and bad ways. Somehow, we had to weave that sense of honesty into the visual presentation. Terry and I agreed that this film really needed to feel as realistic as possible. Naturally, there is a certain amount of visual stylization in the film, but we tried to lend the images an integrity so that viewers could believe that they were watching a real event—without feeling as if they were being overly manipulated by a great filmmaker. I sometimes see great visual films that are obviously so well-stylized and well-controlled that I feel slightly overmanipulated; it might be fantastic, beautiful work, but in my mind I don’t feel as if I’m watching reality.

 

Why did you choose to shoot in true anamorphic rather than Super 35?
We chose straight anamorphic over Super 35 because I don’t really like the idea of having an optical step at the end of the answer-print process. I want to know that what we’re seeing during dailies is definitely what we’re going to get in our original neg prints. Terry and I had always planned that this would be a widescreen picture because we wanted to see the characters within their environments; after all, that’s the major focus of the story.

What kind of camera package did you assemble for the shoot?
Everything came from Panavision in Los Angeles. We took a couple of lightweight Platinum camera bodies, one for the Steadicam and one for the handheld stuff. I still really like the Gold camera, so I used one of those as my primary sound and dolly camera. [Cinematographer] Gary Capo headed up our second unit, and he had a couple of Panastars and an Arri. In terms of the lenses, we used Primos as well as C-series lenses on the Steadicam. We also had 3:1 and 11:1 zooms, but we didn’t use them very much. It was pretty much a wide-angle movie, so we shot mainly with wider lenses, like the 40mm and 50mm. Our close-ups were mainly done with the 75mm or 100mm. We were constantly fighting to get as much of the geography into the frame as we could. Every time we put on a tighter lens it just felt as if we were missing something.

There’s quite a bit of camera movement in the picture. Were you trying to create a subjective point of view?
Right from the beginning, we talked a lot about making the viewers feel as if they were watching this story from close up, almost as if they were participants. A lot of what the characters go through emotionally is unspoken, so it was necessary to convey those moments in a visual way. We wanted the camera to tell the story and yet somehow be part of the story—almost as if the audience was making the same journey as the characters. Terry and I talked extensively about creating a sense of movement throughout the whole picture. He loves to speak in metaphors, and he kept saying, ‘It’s like moving down a river, and the picture should have that same kind of flow.’

How did you achieve that sensation technically?
During prep, we had talked about various ways to create that kind of style, but we never settled on a single approach. On the first couple of days of the schedule, we shot some scenes with a moving camera on a dolly, and some with stationary cameras incorporating conventional coverage and angles. It was all technically correct, and there was nothing wrong with the scenes, but when we viewed the footage, it sometimes felt very ‘staged’ and overly structured for the camera. We knew we wanted something more, so we decided to loosen up our approach a bit. As a result, there’s a lot of Steadicam and handheld work in the picture. We had a great Australian Steadicam operator named Brad Shields. We allowed the camera to explore a bit, and Terry encouraged the actors to try something different if they felt like it. At times, the camera would drift from one actor to another; we might not get conventional masters or coverage, but it didn’t seem that important. Every scene became a unique situation, and we just shot what seemed to be most appropriate for a particular sequence. We allowed the camera to follow the emotional thread of a scene without worrying about much else. What seemed to emerge from that was a feeling of unpredictability which completely supported the idea that Guadalcanal was a strange and dangerous place that these characters suddenly found themselves in.

 

Terry got into that style of shooting immediately; he has a rather spontaneous and unpredictable personality, so the idea made a lot of sense to him. Using Steadicam and handheld camera certainly isn’t a new idea, but the challenge was in shooting scenes that way without drawing unnecessary attention to the techniques themselves. I wanted to use the fluid, mobile camera movement as part of the overall style of the film, but in a way that supported the story.

Those techniques are very effective during a key sequence in which the Americans finally overtake the Japanese in a bivouac area.
That scene is basically the Japanese soldiers’ last stand. Some of them are dying of starvation, some commit suicide, some surrender and others decide to fight to the last man. I think we really captured the chaos and tragedy of that type of battle. No one really wants to be there, but they have to follow orders, and whether given individuals survive or get killed is really just a matter of chance. The whole sequence was done with either a handheld camera and/or the Steadicam—primarily the Steadicam—and Brad Shields did a great job on it. The Americans are running into the area and the Japanese are all around them, so you don’t know if the guy next to you is friend or foe. Once we set up for that scene, we had the actors go in and improvise action. We then kept repeating the sequence over and over, following different characters through this nightmarish situation. It was semi-controlled chaos, and it wasn’t over-rehearsed to the point where everyone always knew what they were going to do. There were many extras in the scene, a lot of people firing at each other, and various guys taking some predetermined hits. We just let the camerawork be as free-form as possible.

You also made extensive and interesting use of the Akela crane in the film.
The Akela was a great asset. One of our biggest challenges was a daytime battle sequence in these grassy hills. The Japanese were in the hills, and the Americans had to go up there, find them, and kill them. To deal with those scenes, we brought in the Akela, which came with two American technicians. The terrain was very uneven; the grass was about waist-high, and underneath it there were a lot of rocks and holes. We spent weeks climbing up and falling down these hills. At times we could use the Steadicam really well out there, but at other times it became impossible because we wanted to see the soldiers actually going up the hills. One of the tougher challenges we faced was preserving the look of this waist-high grass. You couldn’t walk through the grass more than a couple of times without leaving these huge paths. It was like working in snow, where you’ve got to cover your tracks. There’s only so much you can do before you destroy the look of the location.

I was contemplating this problem long before we got to the location, because I knew what we were up against with the grass and the steep hills. I began thinking about using the Akela crane, which has an extremely long, 72′ arm that would allow us to get the camera into places where we couldn’t walk or lay dolly track. The only problem was that I wanted to install the crane on the sides of hills, which involved building some fairly substantial platforms, because the Akela weighs about 6,000 pounds. It worked out fabulously, though. The Akela’s arm does have a slight arc, but it’s a much more minimal arc than any conventional crane arm. Because of that, we could make shots that had the appearance of a dolly shot. That was the whole reason for bringing in the Akela, and we constantly had it at very low angles; I don’t think we used it more than once or twice for a high-angled shot. Our expert technicians, Michael Gough and Mark Willard, kept wanting to show off how high it would go, but I kept hammering them with my mantra: ‘It’s a dolly, not a crane.’ We basically turned our crane technicians into dolly grips, but they did a fantastic job. There are some great Akela crane shots in the film where we follow the soldiers over really long distances. We did have to train the actors to stay with the crane arm, because it doesn’t move in a perfectly straight line. If we were ahead of them, they could just follow the lens, but if we were shooting from behind, we would trace out the arc so the actors could follow it. But using the Akela really allowed us to get down in the grass and get shots that just wouldn’t have been possible with a dolly or even a Steadicam because of the uneven terrain.

 

What kind of remote head were you using on the Akela?
We attached a Libra 3 head, which worked out great for us. I’d used an earlier version of it, called the Megamount, on Braveheart. Nick Phillips, who’s based in London, designed both versions. I knew that the Libra 3 was a good remote head, and it has all of these stabilization characteristics that other remote heads don’t have, such as an electronic gyrostabilizer rather than a mechanical one. We were moving the crane arm really fast and coming to abrupt stops, and the Libra really helped to take any wobble out of the arm. Part of the initial motivation for bringing in the Libra 3 was that I wanted to have a really stable camera for the shipboard scenes in the landing sequence. We put the Libracam and head on a crab dolly with a hydraulic arm that we could raise and lower. When we set that rig up on the deck of the smaller landing craft, it stabilized the horizon gyroscopically; we got these fantastic shots where the troops and the craft itself are in the foreground, and you really get a sense of the movement because the horizon is absolutely stable. It almost seems as if the camera’s not really on the landing craft, because the boat is moving up and down all around it. You really get a sense of the sea motion. Later on in the picture, we put the Libra head in the back of a truck that was transporting some of the characters through the airfield. The road was so bouncy that you couldn’t even look through the camera, but the Libra 3 completely smoothed it all out.

There’s a particularly interesting flashback shot of one of the American soldiers’ wives on a swing. How did you get such an unusual perspective?
We didn’t even use a head for that shot. The camera was actually upside-down; I think it was Terry’s idea. Once we put the actress on the swing, I wanted to get the camera at her eye level, so we just put the camera on top of a ladder behind her. When she swung back, she was heading right toward the camera, which was just off to the side of her; it was about two feet from the actress’s face when she got to the top of her arc. We initially tried the shot with the camera right-side up, but when we flipped the camera over and did it again it looked great.

In addition to the Australian hills, you also had to deal with a jungle. How did that affect your lighting strategy?
In those situations, scouting is everything. We would basically clear out a path to get the gear in, and then take the actors in another 100′ and let them struggle. [Laughs.] We did haul some lights into the jungle, but when we turned them on, they completely changed the character and nuances of the natural light. It was beautiful in there, but we were dealing with extremely low light levels. There were subtleties in the colors and gradations of the natural light that completely disappeared when we mixed in any artificial fill. There was plenty of contrast, though, because the sunlight that did filter in created great hot highlights. I decided to just expose into the shadows as much as possible and go for the natural falloff of the shadows to compensate for lack of detail. It worked out okay. This became a general approach to lighting most of the exteriors. I started out using some amounts of fill, but I became less and less interested in controlling contrast; I would expose for the shadow detail that I wanted and then usually let highlights go. At times, we would use indirect light bounced from muslin or beadboard to lift faces, and maybe use black for negative, but when we were working in heavy contrast, I was quite a bit overexposed from what a more normal exposure would be in those situations. When it was sunny, it was extremely contrasty, but rather than trying to balance everything by adding fill, I just ignored the highlights. I thought the film actually started looking much better when we lost the details in the highlights; it seemed more appropriate for the story. The more contrasty things got, the better, because it felt as if things were out of control—just as they were in the story.

Can you give me an example of how the lighting conditions affected your work with the actors?
There’s a sequence that I like between Nick Nolte, who plays this mad colonel, and John Cusack, who’s his adjutant. In the scene, which occurs about halfway through the battle, Nolte tells Cusack not to worry about the men and to focus on the charge up the hill. We were on top of a hill in an area with all of these burned-out tree trunks. It was extremely contrasty, but we really wanted to get into the faces and show the actors’ expressions. We chose to shoot in a direction that would allow us to take advantage of the light. We put them in areas where they were in direct sunlight that was broken up by the trees, and we also added smoke to soften the sunlight. We wanted to show the environment, but we also chose angles that were good for close-ups and dialogue. We used some white fill and black negative to give the characters some shape and contrast, but choosing the right angles was the most important consideration.

 

Days of Heaven is probably the most famous ‘magic hour’ film ever made. Were you able to do that kind of work on The Thin Red Line?
Because this is a Terrence Malick film, a lot people will just assume that we sat around waiting for magic hour, but we simply didn’t have the luxury of doing that on this picture. We had a 180-page script, and after we shot all of that we went to Guadalcanal for 20 more days of unscripted improvisations. We shot relentlessly every day, in every conceivable lighting condition, from seven in the morning until it got dark at about six p.m. Yes, there are magic-hour shots in the film, but only because we had to shoot until it got dark! [Laughs.] It’s amazing to me how often I hear cinematographers say that they think shooting good-looking day exterior movies is all about sitting around and waiting for the right light to happen, and then just pointing your camera at it and shooting ‘pretty pictures.’ Doing good work in day exterior situations means that you must be able to make great images all day long, even when the light isn’t ideal for pretty pictures. You must make choices that will allow you to take advantage of natural light in existing conditions. Even when the light is ‘bad’ it is possible to do good work by making wise choices.

The predominant day exterior lighting conditions on this film were either sunny high-contrast or soft contrast resulting from overcast conditions. Because we were shooting all day long and didn’t have the luxury of waiting for ideal light, we had to decide how to make existing light work for the scenes we were schedule to do on a given day. It was impossible to entirely control all of the light in our shots because we were using wider-angle anamorphic lenses and constantly moving the camera. None of the traditional methods of light control, such as putting up silks, were possible, because of the terrain and the nature of the shots. Sometimes, if we were doing extended dialogue and didn’t like the way the contrast was affecting the actors’ faces, we would try to create an artificial ‘overcast’ look by staging scenes under trees or in the shadow of a hill. At other times, we would stay in the open and go with the existing high contrast, exposing the faces and letting the contrast go. There were also days when we had both overcast and high-contrast sun happening simultaneously because of low clouds moving quickly and causing severe light changes. We had some days when the light changes happened so quickly that we just shot through them. It could be blistering hot one moment, and completely dark the next—sometimes in the same shot. But that represented the reality of the situation, and we just went with it. We didn’t fight the conditions; we just tried to make them part of the story. In fact, for one Akela shot of the soldiers climbing up the hills, we waited specifically for a light change to happen. The scene starts out in heavy cloud cover, but the sun comes out and reveals these guys sneaking through the grass. That particular light change worked well for us. The point I’m trying to make is that good daytime exterior cinematography is not comprised solely of making ‘pretty pictures’ at magic hour; it’s about being knowledgeable about your craft and being able to create interesting images in all of the various daylight conditions.

What kind of look did you go for in scenes that had to be lit?
There are some scenes at the beginning of the film that take place within a troop transport ship. We wanted to play those scenes really dark, and we used a lot of Steadicam. The ship interior set was actually built on a covered tennis court in Australia. We used every inch of that court, because we didn’t have anything resembling a stage. We basically lit the ship interior with practical fixtures that were outfitted with really hot incandescent globes. It was mostly hot toplight that created little pools of light. In areas where we didn’t have a practical fixture, we just cut a hole in the ceiling and popped a light down through it. Once again, we tried to create as much contrast as possible; the light was about three to four stops overexposed, and the shadow areas were very dark. I used more light in those scenes than I would have if it was a spherical picture; I was shooting at about T4.5 to get as much depth as possible. We were trying to really capture the claustrophobic feeling that exists within that type of ship.

 

There were also a few tent interiors in the picture with a nice look. There’s one scene that I really like with Sean Penn and John Reilly. We just got well back and bounced an enormous amount of light [into the tent] from a distance. Throughout the picture, we were attempting to re-create the look of the natural-light situations that we were encountering.

Which film stocks did you use?
It was primarily a day exterior shoot, so I used Kodak’s [100 ASA EXR] 5248 outside. For the lower-light situations and interiors, I used the Vision [500T] 5279. I would basically switch to the faster stock when we started to get a light reading below 2.8; I didn’t want to shoot 48 wide open on anamorphic lenses because of the lack of depth. I used the faster stock to maintain my depth of field. I find that the sharpness of the Vision stock worked well for this picture, because we were after a sense of hard reality. I still feel that the Vision stocks are slightly too contrasty, though. I prefer the older T-grain stocks like 5293, which is a really great stock. Of course, I should point out that 90 percent of the film was shot on the 48.

Do you have an ‘optimum’ T-stop that you prefer to work at?
I don’t normally like to work deeper than an 8, and I never work wider than 2.8 in anamorphic. I feel much more comfortable working at around 4. Shooting wider than 2.8 in anamorphic is pointless, I think, because at that stop there’s just not enough information in focus.

Did you use any filtration on this picture?
No, we shot everything clean. Every once in a while we’d throw in a grad filter if we got into some heavy, burned-out backgrounds, but we had so much camera movement that we didn’t use them a lot.

Have you applied any special lab processes?
I did a lot of testing at Technicolor before we left to go on location, and I was initially planning to do ENR prints because I really wanted to get the richest blacks possible. At the last minute before we answer-printed, though, I tested the new Kodak Vision print stock and it looked great. The blacks were very good, and I felt that the color rendition of the Vision stock was more appropriate for this picture than ENR. The ENR process is a great look, but it does desaturate some colors to a certain extent. I wanted to maintain the richness and variety of all the natural color we photographed in our tropical environments, and therefore switched to the Vision stock. Kodak was great, and we were able to get enough Vision print stock for the entire release. While I’m on the topic, I must mention the work of color timer David Orr at Technicolor. He did a great job timing this movie on a very tight schedule. He was able to match the light in some sequences, which I was slightly nervous about. I actually was blessed on this picture with two great timers, because my dailies at Atlab in Australia were supervised by Arthur Cambridge, whom I’d first met on Wind. Arthur is the premier color timer in Australia, and I couldn’t have been in better hands.

The presentation of violence in the film isn’t quite as visceral as the battle scenes in Saving Private Ryan. Was that by design?
The combat was certainly important to the story, which is about men experiencing warfare for the first time. However, the graphic and visceral aspects of that experience weren’t nearly as important to Terry as the individual soldiers’ reactions to the situation. Therefore, our presentation of that type of action isn’t as hyperreal as it is in Private Ryan. I was initially interested in taking that kind of approach, but it wasn’t Terry’s focus. Gary Capo and the second unit did a lot of the combat footage, and they did a great job, but we weren’t aiming for the same degree of intensity that Private Ryan has. This is a different kind of movie.

 

Were you keeping tabs on Private Ryan while you were in production?
We were shooting at the same time. My wife, Lois Burwell, was the chief makeup artist on Private Ryan. She was in Ireland and England while I was in Australia, and we would talk by phone or send e-mails back and forth. She was very excited about the work they were doing. She was designing amazing prosthetic devices and making elaborate blood rigs. She would tell me something like, ‘I can’t believe how great the dailies look. It seems so real; it’s like you’re actually watching the war. I’m really excited.’ And I would say, ‘Oh, that’s really wonderful, dear. You must be so happy.’ Of course, I was really thinking, ‘My God, no, that’s what I wanted to do on this film!’ I had been trying to get Terry to do more graphic combat right from the beginning, but he didn’t see the picture that way. After talking to my wife, I’d tell him, ‘Hey, Lois is doing all of this graphic blood stuff on Private Ryan. And he’d reply, ‘Oh, really? I don’t think I want to do anything like that.’ We were obviously interested in seeing how Private Ryan turned out, but it didn’t have any influence on what we were doing. Now, after seeing Private Ryan, I must say that I think Steven Spielberg, Janusz Kaminski [ASC], and the crew of that picture created a whole new level of expertise with that type of action and effects work. They did the best job ever of creating that kind of combat experience on film. Ryan is a fantastic film.

Did you use multiple cameras for any of the battle footage?
We didn’t do that as much as I had on Braveheart. There was only one day when we had a combined first and second unit and we shot with four cameras. The majority of the time, the first and second units shot with two cameras. I was almost reluctant to do this movie because of Braveheart; I thought that the last thing I should be doing at this point in my career was another day exterior battlefield movie [laughs], but I was drawn to the material and the idea of working with Terry. I tried not to think about Braveheart while we were shooting, and this movie didn’t have that kind of scale. It didn’t involve the same numbers of people, and we didn’t put as much emphasis on the fighting itself. The battles weren’t as grand in scope.

How extensive were the practical effects in those sequences?
Again, it wasn’t quite as involved as the work in Private Ryan. We had a great special effects team, headed by an Australian named Brian Cox; they did a terrific job, but [the combat] wasn’t the most important aspect of the picture. We had several mortar and artillery barrages that were fairly big, as well as nighttime pyro effects for a bombing raid on the airfield. All of our lighting in that sequence came from the explosions themselves; we played the soldiers in silhouette as the ‘bombs’ went off. We did some tests with the effects guys to determine how hot their explosions were going to be, and then exposed at around T4.

What kind of footage were you after when you went back to Guadalcanal?
One aspect of Guadalcanal that wasn’t in the book, but which interested Terry very much, was the ethnographic aspect of the island. The story of the Melanesian people who lived there during the war is really interesting. They had existed for centuries in this very peaceful and tropical place when they were suddenly invaded by all of this large-scale violence. Even today, it’s a fairly isolated environment.

When we went back to the island, we wanted to find some native people to put in the picture. One of the lead characters, Witt [played by Jim Caviezel], spends time in a Melanesian village, and that’s where the picture opens. Terry wanted to introduce this idea early on, and he wanted to present these people in their traditional lifestyle, as it had existed back in the 1940s. We did a lot of research, and we discovered that this culture no longer existed in the areas of Guadalcanal that were logistically accessible to us. We therefore put together a special third unit to find a village and shoot anthropological footage. The unit was headed up by Reuben Aaronson, who had done a lot of National Geographic shoots. He and his team went to this traditional village on the south side of the island, and stayed there for a couple of weeks.

 

How did the Melanesians react to having a camera crew in their midst?
Sometimes it worked out, and sometimes it didn’t, but that’s the nature of ethnographic work. Reuben had an anthropologist with him, Christine Jourdan, who has made a career out of studying the people of the Solomon Islands. She really knew the people, and how to blend in with them. They shot footage of these people existing with no trace of modernity around them, and some of it’s in the picture. Reuben had never shot 35mm, and he suddenly found himself working with a Panaflex and anamorphic lenses. He did a great job, though. When the first unit went in later, we re-created a portion of the village in an area that was accessible to us, and got some of the locals to come in and interact with our actors. They spent a few days getting to know each other, and then we improvised a few sequences. The people were very natural, because all they had to do was be themselves. We used a very reduced unit to make them feel more comfortable.

What else did you shoot on Guadalcanal?
We were able to get some shots that established the geographic continuity between Savo Island, the beach, the palm trees and the hills. Savo Island was the site of several horrendous naval battles, and the huge coconut groves on Guadalcanal really had the signature look of the South Pacific. In addition, the hills on the island are within a mile or two of the beach, but those areas didn’t exist in Australia. By shooting on Guadalcanal itself, we were able to establish that connection.

How did that experience affect you personally?
Going to Guadalcanal was the best thing we could have done to get a sense of the real circumstances of the war. In fact, there are still a lot of artifacts from the war lying around. The locals showed us pieces from their collections, which included weapons, uniforms, helmets, and so on. We were constantly finding remnants of the battle at some of our locations. One of the assistant directors even tripped over a spent artillery shell that was buried in the ground. Being there also helped to give us a better appreciation for what everyone there must have gone through. The jungle on the island is an extremely uncomfortable environment—it’s very hot and humid. We visited the sites of many of the battles described in the book, and they were pretty amazing. You just cannot imagine how horrible it must have been. The idea of these men living out there for months at a time in such dangerous and brutal combat situations seems just incredible to me. I think we all came away with a real sense of the sacrifice that was made by everyone who participated in the war. Hopefully, our film works as an illustration of that. As much as any film I’ve ever worked on, this picture was about an idea. I believe that what Terry wanted the film to be about, most of all, was that the real enemy in war is the war itself. War, and not necessarily one side or the other, is the great evil. It isn’t often that one gets to work on films of this nature, and I’m grateful that I had the opportunity to participate in making it. —John Toll, ASC details his experiences on The Thin Red Line

 

Sir Roger Deakins and James Deakins have a great talk with cinematographer John Toll.

 

THE EDITING OF THE ‘THE THIN RED LINE’

“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” —Conversations with Billy Weber and Leslie Jones

A look at the editing of Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line.

 

CONCEPT AND STORYBOARD ART

A special mention should go to Mark Bristol’s storyboarding efforts, which helped bring to life one of the most important films of the nineties. Mark is a brilliant brilliant artist.

 
“With the release of The Tree of Life I am featuring my work on this amazing masterpiece that I was very fortunate to have worked on. As a result of all the recent interest in this collection I dug into the archives and posted more boards from the film. Enjoy.” —Mark Bristol

 

 

NICK NOLTE

“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.” —Nick Nolte on Malick

 

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

 

Conquest of Paradise is the second chapter of the Directors Series’ examination into the films and career of director Terrence Malick, covering his pair of experimental historical epics: The Thin Red Line (1998) and The New World (2005).

 

HANS ZIMMER

“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. The 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.” —Hans Zimmer

 

“HE’S A SCREEN POET, THERE WAS NO OTHER WAY TO DESCRIBE IT”

Rosy-Fingered Dawn is a film on Terrence Malick. It is about the making of Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, and the personal involvement of some of the most representative figures of the American culture itself. The testimonies of Sam Shepard, Arthur Penn, Martin Sheen, Sissy Spacek, Sean Penn, Jim Caviezel, Elias Koteas, Ben Chaplin, John Savage, Penny Allen, Haskell Wexler, taking the cue from some of the most salient themes that inspired Malick’s production, converge in a passionate portrait of contemporary America, amplified by the voices of the characters who have been called up and often recited by the actors themselves. This medley of voices has given origin to a journey throughout the whole United States, from California to Colorado, from Virginia to Minnesota, passing by New York and Los Angeles. Every stop represents an ideal set in which all the characters of the films come to life once again giving place to a growing flow of memories. The narrative dimension of Malick’s cinema resounds and opens a new horizon on the visible contradictions of the American culture; no easy judgement but a critical consciousness is what emerges from this coral speech, together with a definite need: the necessity of art. A need that Terrence Malick was able to satisfy.

Open YouTube video

 

War is hell: video essay explores the cinematic landscape of war movies by Adam DJ Laity.

 

Here are several photos taken behind-the-scenes during production of Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line. Photographed by Merie Weismiller Wallace © Fox 2000 Pictures, Geisler-Roberdeau, Phoenix Pictures. Intended for editorial use only. All material for educational and noncommercial purposes only.

 

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