Terrence Malick (born November 30, 1943) is an American film director, screenwriter, and producer. In a career spanning almost four decades, Malick has directed six feature films.
Numerous critics consider Malick's films to be masterpieces. Some critics have even hailed his movies as among the greatest films ever made. Malick was nominated for an Academy Award for both Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Director for The Thin Red Line.
Early life
He was born in Waco, Texas to Emil Malick, a Lebanese immigrant to the United States, and Irene Malick. His birthplace is one of the settings of his film The Tree of Life. His father was an oil company executive of Assyrian descent. Malick grew up in Bartlesville, Oklahoma and Texas, working on oil fields as a young man. He moved to Austin, Texas and graduated from St. Stephen's Episcopal School.
Malick studied philosophy under Stanley Cavell at Harvard University, graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1965. He went on to Magdalen College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. After a disagreement with his tutor, Gilbert Ryle, over his thesis on the concept of world in Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, Malick left Oxford without a doctorate degree. 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, Malick taught philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology while freelancing as a journalist. He wrote articles for Newsweek, The New Yorker, and Life.
career
Malick got his start in film after earning an MFA from the AFI Conservatory in 1969, directing Lanton Mills. At the AFI he established contacts with people such as Jack Nicholson and agent Mike Medavoy, who procured for Malick freelance work revising scripts. He is credited with the screenplay for Pocket Money (1972), and he wrote early drafts of Great Balls of Fire! (1989) and Dirty Harry (1971).
After one of his screenplays, Deadhead Miles, was made into what Paramount Pictures felt to be an unreleasable film, Malick decided to direct his own scripts. His first work was Badlands (1973), an independent film starring Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek as a young couple on a crime spree in the 1950s. After a troubled production, Badlands drew raves at its premiere at the New York Film Festival, leading to Warner Bros. Pictures buying distribution rights for three times its budget.
Paramount Pictures produced Malick's second film Days of Heaven, about a love triangle that develops on the croplands of the Texas Panhandle in the early 20th century. The film spent two years in post production, during which Malick and his crew experimented with unconventional editing and voiceover techniques. Days of Heaven went on to win the Academy Award for Best Cinematography, as well as the prize for Best Director at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival.
Following the release of Days of Heaven, Malick began developing a project for Paramount, entitled Q, that explored the origins of life on earth. During pre-production, he suddenly moved to Paris and disappeared from public view. During this time, he wrote a number of screenplays including The English Speaker, which was about Josef Breuer's analysis of Anna O., adaptations of Walker Percy's The Moviegoer and Larry McMurtry's The Desert Rose, a script about Jerry Lee Lewis, and a stage adaptation of Sansho the Bailiff that was to be directed by Andrzej Wajda, in addition to continuing work on the Q script. Malick finally returned to film directing in 1998 with The Thin Red Line, a loose adaptation of the James Jones World War II novel of the same name, for which he gathered a large ensemble of famous stars. The movie was nominated for seven Academy Awards, and won the Golden Bear at the 1999 Berlin Film Festival and received critical acclaim.
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 that 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. Consequently, he left the Guevara project in March 2004. Soderbergh would go on to direct Che.
The New World, which featured a romantic interpretation of the story of John Smith and Pocahontas, was released in 2005. Over one million feet of film was shot for the film, and three different cuts of varying length were released. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Cinematography, but received generally mixed reviews during its theatrical run, though it has since been hailed as one of the best films of the decade.
Malick's fifth feature, The Tree of Life, was filmed in Smithville, Texas and elsewhere during 2008. Starring Brad Pitt and Sean Penn, it is a family drama spanning multiple time periods. It is scheduled to premiere In Competition at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival before being released in the United States on May 27, 2011. Heath Ledger was signed on to the project before his death.
Malick recently finished shooting his sixth feature in Bartlesville, Oklahoma and Pawhuska, Oklahoma. Filming in Pawhuska took place in two locations, a Catholic church, and a building known as the Triangle building, which is a three-sided, three-story building. In one scene, Ben Affleck is shown outside the church, holding a baby and talking to a priest. Other than those bits of information, details about the film are being kept closely guarded, with no title or plot information as yet announced, although it has been described as a romance. There has been talk about it having something to do with Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect of the Price Tower in Bartlesville, OK. The film will star Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams, Olga Kurylenko, Javier Bardem and Rachel Weisz.