Terrence Malick

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Terrence Malick (2011)

Terrence Frederick Malick (born November 30, 1943 in Ottawa , Illinois ) is an American screenwriter , director and film producer . His film The Tree of Life (2011) won the Palme d'Or at the 64th Cannes Film Festival .

Malick's films are known for exploring topics such as individual transcendence, nature, and conflicts between reason and instinct. They are typically characterized by broad philosophical and spiritual overtones and the use of meditative voice-overs from individual characters. The stylistic elements of the director's work have sparked divided opinions among film scholars and audiences; Some praised his films for their cinematography and aesthetics, while others found them not very graphic and characteristic. Nonetheless, his first five films have achieved high rankings in retrospective polls over the past decade and at all times.

Life

Beginnings and debut film

The son of an executive at an oil company, he grew up in rural Oklahoma until he got a degree in philosophy at Harvard University. After graduation, he received a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University , where he began his doctoral thesis on Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein . However, he broke this off because of differences of opinion with his dissertation supervisor Gilbert Ryle and returned to the United States, where he temporarily worked as a freelance journalist in New York City . At the same time he got a job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , where he took a film course. It was here that his interest in filmmaking was aroused and in 1969 he moved to the newly established Center for Advanced Film Studies of the American Film Institute in Los Angeles .

He financed his film studies by revising existing scripts by Deadhead Miles , Drive, He Said , Pocket Money and Dirty Harry , but none of his changes were taken into account in the final script for the latter. In 1969 Malick's English translation of Heidegger's book Das Wesen des Grund was published . In the same year he wrote his 17-minute first work Lanton Mills , an unusually comedic dismantling of the classic western genre. This may be one of the reasons the film was never released. The cast consisted of veteran actors Warren Oates and Harry Dean Stanton .

In 1972 he and John Gay wrote the screenplay for the modern western Two Warriors on the Move with Paul Newman and Lee Marvin in the leading roles.

In the same year he also began work on his debut film Badlands - Zerschossene Träume , for which he both wrote the screenplay and directed. In order to avoid the possibly disruptive influence of a film studio , he collected the film budget from various smaller investors and founded his own production company for the film with the Badlands Company . Although he had only a limited budget of around 500,000 US dollars by foregoing financial support from a studio , he was able to win the rising actor Martin Sheen for the male lead and Sissy Spacek for the female lead .

The film was completed in 1973 and released in October of the same year. The film was hailed by critics as the best debut film by an American director since Orson Welles ' Citizen Kane . Badlands uses a script inspired by Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde and Sam Peckinpah's Getaway to tell the story of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate , who committed a series of brutal murders in 1958 in Nebraska and Wyoming . Critics praise the inventive camera work by another debutant, namely the cameraman Tak Fujimoto , which contrasts the deserted land of the badlands with the acts of violence of the main characters. The film had a huge impact on later directors and screenwriters such as Tony Scott , Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino . Oliver Stone made a homage to Badlands with Natural Born Killers ; Quentin Tarantino wrote the original script.

Malick wrote the script for the gangster film Gravy Train, starring Stacy Keach and Frederic Forrest , the following year , but retired from filmmaking for the next four years.

"In the glow of the south"

It wasn't until 1978 that he returned to the big screen with In der Glut des Südens , which is also about lawbreakers on the run. Well-known actors were Richard Gere , Brooke Adams and Linda Manz . With Néstor Almendros in front of the camera, he carried out a visual experiment: the outdoor scenes were filmed in what is known as the Magic Hour , the short period of sunrise and sunset that bathes the sky in a reddish hue, also known as golden light . In order not to disturb this effect, no artificial light was used to illuminate the scenes. However, this approach also had the disadvantage that the shooting became very tedious, as the time that could be used for filming was only about 30 minutes per day.

Malick countered the elaborate camera work with a relatively simple love triangle that takes place in Texas at the beginning of the 20th century: The two farm workers Bill ( Richard Gere ) and Abby ( Brooke Adams ) flee from the police in Texas, where they work for a rich farmer ( Sam Shepard ). When the terminally ill farmer falls in love with Abby, the two decide to take advantage of this to get his fortune. Malick had developed a sophisticated script for this story, which he discarded after a while and instead had the actors improvise their dialogues. With Days of Heaven processed Malick impressions of his youth as a laborer on a farm in Texas. The result was a particularly visually impressive film. In the documentary Visions of Light , director Martin Scorsese highlighted this film by stating that every single frame of this film could be enlarged and exhibited as a painting in a museum. The Oscar jurors were equally impressed by the camera work and awarded Néstor Almendros the first and only Oscar of his career. Malick was named best director at the 1979 Cannes International Film Festival .

Then Malick withdrew again. The reason for this suspected John Travolta his disappointment with the interference of the production company Paramount Pictures in the cast and the editing of the film.

He got about one million dollars as an advance on his next film about World War I , but it wasn't finished. He moved to Paris , where he lived in seclusion and avoided contact with journalists and producers. At times it was suspected that he was filming the sunrises in Mexico with a team. This intensified the creation of legends about himself and his films. Until the mid-1990s, there was no current photo of him in public.

In all of his films, Malick elevates nature to a protagonist who, in constant interplay with the characters, is able to reflect their emotional state and gives the withdrawn, external film plot a poetic depth. The contrast between creative nature and destructive culture, the destruction of Paradise by violence and greed, Malick dramatized by a 20-year hiatus in his philosophical reflection on all values harrowing war: The Thin Red Line ( The Thin Red Line , 1998).

Oscar nomination and triumph in Cannes

It was 20 years before he returned to filmmaking. 1995 rumors circulated about a return of Malick, but when in 1996 his former agent and current CEO Mike Medavoy of Phoenix Pictures announced test shots for Malick's next film, made it in Hollywood sensation. Movie stars like Kevin Costner , Brad Pitt , Johnny Depp and Ethan Hawke competed for roles in this film, so this time Malick didn't have to compromise on the cast. He cast the leading roles with established actors such as Sean Penn , Nick Nolte , Adrien Brody and James Caviezel and a few more appeared in cameos .

On June 23, 1997, Malick began filming in Australia on The Thin Line , a war film about the Battle of Guadalcanal during the Pacific War . Contrary to the usual filmmaking practice, the composer Hans Zimmer should write the film music based on the script and not, as usual, based on the rough version of the film.

The script written by Malick is based on the autobiographical novel by James Jones , which was filmed in 1964 by Andrew Marton with Keir Dullea and Jack Warden . During the six months of filming, Malick directed around five hundred hours of footage. The reason for the exceptionally long duration of the filming was Malick's renewed attempt to shoot in natural light, even if it did not take on the dimensions of In the Embers of the South . According to an interview with James Caviezel, Malick is said to have concealed this approach from the producers in order not to deter them.

At the International Film Festival in Berlin he was awarded the Golden Bear for Der schmale Grat the following year . At the Academy Awards , the film competed with Steven Spielberg's war drama Saving Private Ryan and the romantic period drama Shakespeare in Love . Malick's film came out empty-handed despite seven nominations.

Against all odds, Malick did not retire from filmmaking this time around. In 1999 he produced the documentary Endurance about the career of the Ethiopian long-distance runner Haile Gebrselassie from his childhood in Ethiopia to winning the gold medal at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta .

Malick now concentrated on his work as a film producer. To this end, he founded the production company Columbine Productions with Edward R. Pressman in 1999 , which in the same year signed a contract with Sony for the development of three films by 2002. He was also involved in the development of the script for the Italian-Russian film The Kiss of the Bear .

Since he avoids public appearances, it was a big surprise when he appeared unannounced for a performance of In der Glut des Südens at the 2004 Berlinale .

With his film The New World ( 2005 ) Malick returned to the hour of birth of American history: the disruption of the balance between man and nature through the break-in of the destructive English colonialists into the Elysian world of the Indians. In 2006 the love story The New World between the British explorer John Smith ( Colin Farrell ) and the Indian princess Pocahontas ( Q'orianka Kilcher ) was released, for which he also wrote the screenplay. Previously, he was scheduled to direct the biopic Che on Che Guevara , with Benicio Del Toro in the title role. But he left this project prematurely. Steven Soderbergh then directed it .

In 2008 Malick directed The Tree of Life , which he also wrote the script for. Originally announced in 2009, the film premiered in 2011 in the competition of the 64th Cannes International Film Festival and won the main prize of the film festival, the Palme d' Or. The "visually stunning hymn to life and the origins of all being" focuses on an eleven-year-old boy (played by Hunter McCracken , played by Sean Penn in adulthood ) who grew up in Texas in the 1950s. While his mother ( Jessica Chastain ) teaches him to see the world with his heart, his father ( Brad Pitt ) makes it a point to always think of himself first in order to prepare the son for the harsh reality. The film was nominated for three Academy Awards in 2012 , including in the categories of film and directing. In the same year he received his first invitation to the competition of the Venice Film Festival for his subsequent feature film To the Wonder with Ben Affleck , Olga Kurylenko , Rachel McAdams and Javier Bardem in the lead roles .

Malick's first documentary, Voyage of Time , premiered in September 2016. The film was made in two versions, a 45-minute IMAX version with Brad Pitt as the narrator and a longer theatrical version spoken by Cate Blanchett .

Malick has been married to Alexandra Wallace for the third time since 1998 and lives in Austin, Texas .

Filmography (selection)

Director

producer

Screenwriter

  • 1969: Lanton Mills (short film)
  • 1971: Drive, He Said
  • 1972: Two swords on the move (Pocket Money)
  • 1972: Deadhead Miles
  • 1973: Badlands (Badlands)
  • 1974: Gravy Train
  • 1978: Days of Heaven
  • 1998: The Thin Red Line
  • 2002: The Bear's Kiss
  • 2005: The New World
  • 2011: The Tree of Life
  • 2012: To the Wonder
  • 2019: A hidden life (A Hidden Life)

Awards

literature

  • Kai Mihm: Ballads from a disappearing world. Terrence Malick as the chronicler of the American soul . In: Marcus Stiglegger (Ed.): Splitter in the tissue. Filmmaker between auteur films and mainstream cinema. Bender Verlag, Mainz 2000.
  • Hannah Patterson (Ed.): The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America . Wallflower Press, February 2004, ISBN 1-903364-75-2 [English].
  • Michelle Koch: [Article] Terrence Malick. In: Thomas Koebner (Ed.): Film directors. Biographies, descriptions of works, filmographies. 3rd, updated and expanded edition. Reclam, Stuttgart 2008 [1. Ed. 1999], ISBN 978-3-15-010662-4 , pp. 471-473 [with references].
  • Jennifer Bleek: View and World. Cinematic aesthetic constructions by the early Terence Malick . Wilhelm Fink Verlag, September 2009, ISBN 978-3-7705-4788-3 .
  • Steven Rybin : Terrence Malick and the Thought of Film. Lexington Books, 2011, 236 pages, ISBN 978-0-7391-6675-8 .
  • Dominik Kamalzadeh, Michael Pekler: Terrence Malick . Schüren Verlag, May 2013, ISBN 978-3-89472-819-9 .

Web links

Commons : Terrence Malick  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.ign.com/articles/2002/02/19/featured-filmmaker-terrence-malick
  2. ↑ cf. Summary at indiewire.com, May 22, 2011 (accessed May 22, 2011)
  3. ↑ cf. Ostwald, Susanne: The life looked at nzz.ch, May 18, 2011 (accessed on May 22, 2011).
  4. ↑ cf. Description of content ( memento from May 11, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) at film-zeit.de (accessed on May 22, 2011).
  5. ↑ cf. Terrence Malick . In: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 12/2009 from March 17th, 2009, supplemented by news from MA-Journal up to week 17/2010 (accessed via Munzinger Online )
  6. ↑ Review
  7. ↑ http://archiv.ub.uni-marburg.de/ep/0002/article/viewFile/381/333
personal data
SURNAME Malick, Terrence
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Malick, Terrence Frederick (full name); Malick, Terry; Whitney, David
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American screenwriter, film director and producer
DATE OF BIRTH November 30, 1943
PLACE OF BIRTH Ottawa , Illinois , United States