Terrence Malick

Terrence Malick
File:Terry-malick.jpg Terrence Malick on the set of The Thin Red Line.
Spouse(s)	Jill Jakes Michele Morette (1985-1998) Alexandra Wallace (1998-)

Terrence "Terry" Malick (born November 30, 1943 in Ottawa, Illinois is an American film director.

Introduction

In a career spanning decades, Malick has directed one short film and four feature-length films.

• Lanton Mills (short film, 1969)
• Badlands (1973)
• Days of Heaven (1978)
• The Thin Red Line (1998)
• The New World (2005)

Badlands and Days of Heaven are often considered masterpieces. Malick was nominated for an Academy Award for both Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Director for The Thin Red Line. His work is often characterized by naturalist cinematography and a meditative directorial and editing style; his films are full of rich, lingering, repetitive images of natural beauty. He makes extensive use of off-screen narration by his characters, as well as music, to illuminate, heighten and counterpoint the action on screen.

Although notoriously withdrawn from public life, friends such as actor Martin Sheen have always remarked that he is a very warm and humble man who prefers to work without media intrusion. His contracts stipulate that no current photographs of him are to be taken, and he routinely declines requests for interviews.

Life

Terrence was born in Ottawa, Illinois, a town located near the Illinois river. The son of an oil company executive, he grew up in Oklahoma and Texas and worked on oil fields as a young man. Malick studied philosophy under Stanley Cavell at Harvard University, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1965, and went on to Magdalen College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He had a disagreement with his advisor, Gilbert Ryle, over his thesis on the concept of the world in Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, and ultimately left Oxford without taking a doctorate. In 1969, Northwestern University Press published Malick's translation of Heidegger's Vom Wesen des Grundes as The Essence of Reasons. Moving back to the United States, he taught philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology while freelancing as a journalist, writing articles for Newsweek, The New Yorker, and Life.

Malick married Michele Morette in 1985; they divorced in 1998. He has been married to Alexandra "Ecky" Wallace since 1998, and currently resides in Austin, Texas.

Film career

Malick got his start in film after earning an MFA from the AFI Conservatory in 1969, directing Lanton Mills. It was at the AFI that he established contacts with people such as Jack Nicholson and agent Mike Medavoy, who found freelance script-doctoring work for him.

After working as a screenwriter and script doctor, Malick directed Badlands and Days of Heaven. Following the release of Days of Heaven, Malick moved to France and disappeared from public view for 20 years. He returned to film in 1998 with The Thin Red Line. The movie was nominated for 7 Academy Awards, though it did not win any.

Malick considered making his fourth project a film about Che Guevara, and wrote a screenplay for it, but later relinquished the project to director Steven Soderbergh. He chose to make The New World instead, the script of which he finished in the late 1970s but lay dormant until 2004. The film features a romantic interpretation of the story of John Smith and Pocahontas, filmed in the usual transcendental Malickian style. The film was scheduled for limited release on December 25 2005, and for general release in mid-January 2006; it was nominated for an Academy Award and received largely positive reviews during its theatrical run. Over 1 million feet of film were shot during the isolated filming schedule, resulting in a final film which ran for 150 minutes before Malick decided to temporarily withdraw the film from release and re-edit it into a 135-minute version.

It was reported in 2005 that Malick's next project would be The Tree of Life, but little has been heard about this since the initial report.

Malick is also credited with the screenplay for Pocket Money (1972), and it is claimed he wrote early drafts of Great Balls of Fire! (1989) and Dirty Harry (1971). According to reports in The Guardian newspaper in May 2006, there are rumours that Malick has been linked to a possible screen adaptation of Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger.

Bibliography

• Peter Biskind, 19981. Easy Riders / Raging Bulls, London: Bloomsbury.
• Peter Biskind, 1998b. ‘The Runaway Genius’, Vanity Fair, 460, Dec, 116-125.
• Stanley Cavell, 1979. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, Enlarged Edition, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Michel Chion, 1999. The Voice in Cinema, translated by Claudia Gorbman, New York & Chichester: Columbia University Press.
• Michel Ciment, 1975. ‘Entretien avec Terrence Malick’, Positif, 170, Jun, 30-34.
• G. Richardson Cook, 1974. ‘The Filming of Badlands: An Interview with Terry Malick’, Filmmakers Newsletter, 7:8, Jun, 30-32).
• Charlotte Crofts, 2001, ‘From the “Hegemony of the Eye” to the “Hierarchy of Perception”: The Reconfiguration of Sound and Image in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven’, Journal of Media Practice, 2:1, 19-29.
• Terry Curtis Fox, 1978. ‘The Last Ray of Light’, Film Comment, 14:5, Sept/Oct, 27- 28.
• Cameron Docherty, 1998. ‘Maverick Back from the Badlands’, The Sunday Times, Culture, 7 Jun, 4.
• Martin Donougho, 1985. ‘West of Eden: Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven’, Postscript: Essays in Film and the Humanities, 5:1, Fall, 17-30.
• Roger Ebert, Review of Days of Heaven, Chicago Sun-Times Inc
• Graham Fuller, 1998. ‘Exile on Main Street’, The Observer, 13 Dec, 5.
• John Hartl, 1998. ‘Badlands Director Ending his Long Absence’, Seattle Times, 8 Mar.
• Brian Henderson, 1983. ‘Exploring Badlands’. Wide Angle: A Quarterly Journal of Film Theory, Criticism and Practice, 5:4, 38-51.
• Les Keyser, 1981. Hollywood in the Seventies, London: Tantivy Press.
• Terrence Malick, 1973. Interview the morning after Badlands premiered at the New York Film Festival, American Film Institute Report, 4:4, Winter, 48.
• Terrence Malick, 1976. Days of Heaven, Registered with the Writers Guild of America, 14 Apr; revised 2 Jun.
• James Monaco, 1972. ‘Badlands’, Take One, 4:1, Sept/Oct, 32.
• Kim Newman, 1994. ‘Whatever Happened to Whatsisname?’, Empire, Feb, 88-89.
• Brooks Riley, 1978. ‘Interview with Nestor Almendros’, Film Comment, 14:5, Sept/Oct, 28-31.
• J. P. Telotte, 1986. ‘Badlands and the Souvenir Drive’, Western Humanities Review, 40:2, Summer, 101-14.
• Liv Torgerson, 1999. ‘Conversations with Billy Weber and Leslie Jones’, Motion Picture Editors Guild Newsletter
• Beverly Walker, 1975. ‘Malick on Badlands’, Sight and Sound, 44:2, Spring, 82-3.
• Janet Wondra, 1994. ‘A Gaze Unbecoming: Schooling the Child for Femininity in Days of Heaven’, Wide Angle, 16:4, Oct, 5-22.

External links

• Senses of Cinema: Great Directors Critical Database
• The Flicks of Terrence Malick Resource on Malick's life and work
• Films of Being Malick tribute site with a number of resources and links.
• MalickWatch Digest of Malick news and numerous links to other resources
• Trailer for The New World
• Terrence Malick at IMDb
• New York Times links to reviews of all Malick films
• Comprehensive site with links to articles re: The New World
• Frontiers: A Look at the Films of Terrence Malick