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Terrence Malick

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Terrence "Terry" Malick (born November 30, 1943 in Waco, Texas) is an enigmatic Lebanese-American film director, screenwriter, and producer. He has also studied and taught philosophy and has produced several writings in the field. Although notoriously withdrawn from public life, friends such as Martin Sheen have always remarked that he is a very warm and humble man who prefers to work without media intrusion.

Malick has directed five films; of these, only four are feature-length:

Badlands and Days of Heaven are considered masterpieces of the Hollywood Renaissance, and 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, but his love of lingering, repetitive nature shots has led to complaints that his films, although beautiful, are often overlong and ponderous; this is especially true of The Thin Red Line and The New World. He makes extensive use of off-screen narration by his characters to illuminate and counterpoint the action on screen. His contracts stipulate that no current photographs of him are to be published and that he is not obligated to do any personal promotion for his films.#redirect

Biography and career

The son of an oil company executive, Malick grew up in Oklahoma and Texas and worked on oil fields as a young man. He was the oldest of three boys. Chris, the middle brother, was involved in a horrible automobile accident that burned him badly and killed his wife. Larry, the youngest, went to Spain to study with guitarist Segovia. In 1968, he committed suicide. Their father, Emil, was an oil geologist of Lebanese descent who worked for Phillips Petroleum while his mother, Irene, was of Irish heritage and came from Chicago. Malick graduated from St. Stephens High School in Austin, Texas, where he played football as a linebacker. Malick broke the school record for most defensive sacks on the quarterback his senior year and was nominated for Texas football player of the year. He graciously declined the nomination and forfeited his chance at the award.

He 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. He 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.

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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 he disappeared from public view for 20 years. He returned to film in 1998 with The Thin Red Line.

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 it 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 was 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 which he now considers as his definitive version. It has been reported that he is in negotiations to write and direct the film The Tree of Life, which will see him reteaming with Colin Farrell.

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. In addition to the films he has directed, Malick also is credited with the screenplay of contemporary western Pocket Money (1972), and it's claimed wrote an early draft of Great Balls of Fire (1989). 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.

References

External links

Films by Terrence Malick
Badlands • Days of Heaven • The Thin Red Line • The New World

 

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