WHAT WENT WRONG - The Thin Red Line

Episode Date: September 13, 2022

In this week’s episode, Chris & Lizzie learn how Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line broke nearly everyone’s heart, but no one's more so than Adrien Brody. Go deep on a film that will inspire or sedate you; the ultimate anti-war war movie, starring… everyone?Go Ad-Free - Join Our Patreon!Check Out Our Merch!Follow Us on Instagram!What Movie's Next? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello and welcome back to what went wrong. We're back. We're still back. We haven't bailed yet. We're very excited to be here. This is your favorite podcast that discusses everything that goes wrong behind the scenes on both your favorite Hollywood blockbusters and big time floppers. This is kind of neither of those. Well, Chris, you didn't like big time floppers. All right. I have a child now. I need to clean this thing up. Do you want me to take that again? No, I think we keep it as is. That was a real winner. Big time floppers was Lizzie Bassett. As Lizzie said, welcome, welcome, everyone. Yeah, still here. Chris Winterbauer.

And this week, as Lizzie mentioned, we're talking about neither a giant like blockbuster success nor a flop, but a movie that I think some people love and some people use it to fall asleep. That is 1998's The Thin Red Line, directed by Terrence Malick. To set this stage, though, Lizzie, before we. get into this because I've found that I love the late 90s in terms of movies and I was the other day trying to think is that just because that was when I was coming of age watching movies. But I actually think that empirically it was like one of the greatest stretches of movie making

and history. And I think 1999's the best year ever and we'll get to that when we get to a movie from that year. But let's just look at what's leading up to the thin red line. 1997. Titanic LA Confidential Jackie Brown, the fifth element, face off. and Conair in the same year. There's some, there's some variability. I love.

Amistad, as good as it gets, my best friend's wedding. Air Force One, liar, liar, gross point blank, wag the dog, contact, scream two, and Goodwill hunting. It's a pretty good year for movies. That's 97? Yeah, 1997. So coming off of that year, Hollywood and movie fans are a buzz, because, because we have the long-awaited return of three long-absent directors.

Stanley Kubrick's eyes wide shut. Okay, sure. I'm sure we'll cover that at some point. George Lucas is the Phantom Menace. Which I'm sure we'll cover. But perhaps most intriguing of them all, Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line, the man who had spent two decades away from directing

before returning to the screen, the longest gap of the three directors. I don't know a ton about Terrence Malick, so I am excited for this. Well, you're about to learn some about him. Yeah, I know that, I know that he loves trees. Just because of the tree of life? No, because of this movie. Are you kidding me?

Every other shot is a tree. And then there's that one little bug-eyed rodent friend in the tree that I really enjoyed. All right, we'll get to that. So really, really quickly, broad strokes, the thin red line is a World War II film. It's set in the Pacific Theater. It's written and directed by Terrence Malick, adapted the 1962 novel of the same name. It's actually the second adaptation. There was a movie in the 60s originally called The Thin Red Line.

And it tells a fictionalized version of the Battle of Mount Austin in the Guadalcanal campaign following the American soldiers of Sea Company, First Battalion, 27th Infantry Regiment, 25th Infantry Division. And it's based on James Jones' experiences in Guadalcanal. So the story follows a lot of these different soldiers as they monologue their way through this battle. As you will can tell,

it kind of lacks a conventional plot and will get to that. I would broadly describe it as it's an anti-war war movie. Here's how I'll pitch it to you, Chris. Please, let's hear it. What if you took just the first 10 minutes of saving Private Ryan,

the landing on the beaches in Normandy D-Day section and then tacked on old Matt Damon sat at the grave and then just went back and forth between those two for three hours on loop. See, I have a feeling we have very different thoughts about this movie and I'm excited to debate it. I will say I really did not like this movie the first time I watched it. This is not the first time I've seen it. I was extremely bored and I was very angry by the end

at how many times I had to listen to these men monologue at me. me. I actually really appreciated it significantly more this time. I wonder if it's because we've been through the last two years of just hellscape that I was like ready to let it wash over me. Maybe. But it's very different movie than Saving Private Ryan. And it's a very different movie than what we typically would expect from a war movie. And that's for very specific reasons that we'll get into. What most people notice the first time they watched this movie, what I noticed the first time I watched it was, oh my God, this cast. The cast is absolutely loaded. It's loaded with people who were no names then, who became big names as a result of the movie,

but as well as people who were big names, them, who had surprisingly small roles in the movie. Literally, there are people that show up for two minutes in this where you'll be like, oh, Tom Jane. Oh, Tom Jane's gone. Yeah. That's it. Yeah, a couple others. I don't know if you noticed, Mouse from The Matrix, who I've, like, never seen in any other movie. I did not.

He is in the background of some of these scenes as well. Jared Leto. Jared Leto dies during the raid. I'll just go through it really quickly. So Sean Penn as Sergeant Edward Welsh, Adrian Brody, Jim Caviziel, Ben Chaplin, George Clooney, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, Elias Cateus, one of my favorite character actors of all time. Jared Leto, Dash Miok, Tim Blake Nelson, Nick Nolte, John C. Riley, John Savage. I love him. He's the sergeant that kind of loses his mind.

Oh, he's so good. And then obviously John Travolta as Howard Quintard in the beginning of the movie, who never comes back, but he's great. He is great. Spoiler alert, this season of what went wrong is going to be all John Travolta. Yeah, he was actually, he shot this and immediately went to go shoot Battlefield Earth. That is actually true. So there were also some folks that ended up on the cutting room floor. We'll get to that in a moment. The movie was lensed or the cinematographer was John Toll, who I thought did an incredible job. It was scored by Hans Zimmer, as well as a number of Melanesian chants. And we should give those credit, where their credit is due. Is that the song that you hear, the sort of like very choral piece that keeps coming up?

Yeah, that's a Melanesian chant. Yeah. And a number of them were written in 1990 by a gentleman named Benjamin Tuchlu is his name. And they were licensed for the movie. So credit was wondering if Hans Zimmer had written those. So he did not. He may have written one of them. But I don't think the rest of them.

Billy Weber was the lead editor, along with Leslie Jones and Sarr Klein. It was filmed in Queensland, Australia, in Cairn, which is where the wonderful island of Dr. Moreau was filmed, and the Solomon Islands in Melanesia. It was released less than six months after Saving Private Ryan. So Saving Private Ryan was a summer blockbuster released, and this was released in December of 1998. Tough to follow. The Thurred Line is often remembered as the more philosophical art house, less financially successful. War movie of the year. It was nominated for seven Academy Awards. Best Picture, Director, adapted

screenplay, editing, score, and sound, yet snagged none of them. It lost directing, editing, sound mixing, and, in my opinion, most criminally, cinematography to saving Private Ryan. And famously, it lost Best Picture to Shakespeare in Love was... Oh, man. What? Really quickly, before we get into it, Lizzie, the first time I watched this movie, I hated it, too. I thought it was so boring. I watched it in high school. I've rewatched it a couple of times since, and then I rewatched it this time now that I'm a dad.

I like this movie more than Saving Private Ryan. Really? Yes. I find now that Saving Private Ryan feels very America gung-ho, patriotism, to be blunt, cliche. It's a technical marvel. It's an achievement of a movie. It's incredible.

I'm not saying I could ever do anything like it. But the philosophy of the thin red line as an anti-war movie, as anti-violence, is not trying to glorify or glamorize it in any way, to just show the pointlessness of it, the destruction of nature in man versus man. I just find it very moving and I found it more interesting, especially on this rewatch than Saving Private Ryan, even though Saving Private Ryan's amazing, not saying it's a bad movie. I just, my perspective has flipped since I watched it in high school. It does merit a rewatch if you've watched it once and like both of us,

thought it was the snooziest snooze of all time. Yeah. When I was younger, I was like, when are they going to kill each other? But now I was like, Oh, they're killing each other The whole movie. I don't know what you're waiting for. Well, that's... Yeah, in a different way

than I was used to, I guess. But... Yeah, I mean, there's no fun fighting in this. No, no. Of course, as you mentioned, Lizzie, at the beginning, our story begins and ends with every film student's favorite ultra-reclusive director,

Terence Malick. And as you said, you don't know much about him. And that actually is not unique. Very few people seem to know much about him. In fact, few photographs of him. exists. He almost never gives interviews, and he has a very slim filmography, considering how long he's been around. Thin red line, even though he'd been making movies since 1973, was only his third movie in 25 years. Whoa. So he kind of birthed this myth that exceeds the man. He's

sometimes referred to as the film world's J.D. Salinger, and rather than read you his biography, he was born in 1943, he spent time in Texas and Oklahoma. I'd like to share a few traits of note that I just found really interesting that give a sense of the man. First, while working on the thin red line, he refused to let producers Bobby Geisler and John Robredow keep copies of his own handwriting for fear of plagiarism. Michelle Morat, his late ex-wife of 13 years, said that while they were together, she wasn't allowed into his office. He would rather buy her a copy of a book than let her read his.

He also liked to leave his books and cassettes face down so people wouldn't see what he was reading or listening to, and he only listened to music on a Walkman most of the time. Okay. He kind of came from a family of tragedy. His youngest brother, Larry, was a guitar prodigy. I went to Spain to study with this guitar master, and he was so frustrated by his lack of progress that in 1968, I believe, he broke his own hands and then committed suicide. Whoa. Terry's other brother was in a car accident the same year. with his wife, he was horribly burned and disfigured, and his wife died. In the accident,

Terrence would often argue with his father over family photographs, preferring not to be photographed. And in fact, in his contract with 20th century Fox on the thin red line, he said that the studio was not allowed to use his likeness in promoting the film. So they could never use a photo of him in promoting the film. But even though he's secretive and people think he's this like Zen god of cinema, I do think he has a sense of humor. And that's because his colleagues have said that he is an unapologetic, unironic, huge fan of the movie Zoolander. And so I sent Lizzie a fake trailer, Zoolander, if it were directed by Terrence Malick. And you guys can find on YouTube. And to prove this, here's Ben Stiller on the matter. Do you know if it's true that Terence Malick loves

this film? I've been told that. He's never told me personally. But I've been told my numerous people, some people who've worked with him, and the message has gotten relayed to me. And I was asked to do a birthday greeting for him once as Derek, which I did. I keep on waiting for him to cast me a movie. It's not happening.

So, yes, he did in fact, before King. cameo, he recorded a birthday message as Derek Zoolander for Terrence Malick, which made me... Listen, Zoolander is a great movie. It's really fun. I'm thrilled. So Terrence Malick is extremely intelligent. He went to Harvard and then Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He left Oxford without a degree after a dispute with his advisor.

And I'm just going to dig into some philosophy stuff for two seconds because I think it's really important and understanding Terrence Malick and where the thin red line gets its philosophical outlook. So Malik had wanted to do his thesis on Martin Heidegger, and I apologize if I pronounced it incorrectly. He's a German philosopher who was active during and after World War II, and he was criticized because he was a member of the Nazi party from 1933 through the end of the war. He later seems to have changed his views. But despite this association, I think it's important to understand about his philosophies insofar as I understood them in order to better understand Malik. So Heidegger was this farmland philosopher who, like Malik, hated television, airplanes, and processed food.

Malik famously hates television. And amidst his beliefs was the idea that we'd forgotten to notice that we were alive. And he called this the Das scene or being. And he's like, we're rarely confronted by the strangeness of our own existence, and we use modern life as a way to distract ourselves from Das Nix or the nothing. So basically, he's into stoicism. And so the second thing that we've forgotten, and you'll start to see. some thematic ties to the thin red line, that all beings are connected. We view other life as means

rather than ends, and only sometimes are we able to step outside of ourselves and notice the unity of being. We are all united by the basic fact of our common being. And I think this really gets to what the thin red line is ultimately about. And so the third problem is that we forget to be free and live for ourselves. He basically suggests that we're thrown into a set of extremely rigid circumstances beyond our control. These are like our personal circumstances, our beliefs, our society's beliefs. I'm not going to pronounce this, but it's in German throne and this. And the only way to move beyond it is to understand it. And then we can rise above it to a more universal perspective. And this seems to be the Jim Cavizal. Yes, Jim Cavasel's character. Exactly.

Also, this will start to explain why Terence Malick seems like an asshole later in this story when he doesn't seem to care about what other people think. He's very much living this philosophy. So in 1961, when asked about how we could better spend our lives, Heidegger famously said we should spend more time in graveyards. So hopefully you can see how some of these themes resonate through the thin red line. Sure. So Malik finishes up his schooling. This is in the mid-60s. He taught philosophy at MIT.

He freelanced as a journalist, but he decided he wasn't very good at teaching, so he would take a crack at the movies. In his words, I was not a good teacher, so I decided to do something else. I'd always liked movies in a kind of naive way. They seemed no less improbable a career than anything else. I came to Los Angeles in the fall of 1969 to study at the AFI American Film Institute. I think it goes to show A, he's a little bit maybe wide-eyed at this point, but also B, it was like the Wild West in movies. It wasn't quite as crazy to break into as it is now, I think. So he goes to AFI and it is brand new.

Malik is in the first class. Oh, wow. Yeah, his classmates in. include David Lynch and Paul Schrader. Whoa. Yeah. While there, he also formed a relationship with agent Mike Medavoy, remember that name, who got Malick work revising scripts for studios.

He was a big agent. So Malick graduates. He makes a short film. Harry Dean Stanton was in it. Nobody saw it. But he writes a few scripts, sometimes credited, sometimes not. And then after one of his screenplays, Deadhead Miles, was made into a movie that Paramount deemed unreleasable, Malik decided to direct his own work.

He's like, these guys don't know what they're doing. I'm going to do it myself. So with no experience and only one short film to his name, he put down $25,000 of his own money. And then he and producer Ed Pressman rounded up another $275,000 to make Badlands, his first movie. Okay. Which is the story of Holly Sargis, a 15-year-old girl who goes on a killing spree with her lover, Kit Caruthor, based on the real-life murder spree of Charles Starkweather and Carol Ann Fugate Fugatti in Texas in the 1950s. If you haven't seen Badlands, it's great. It's a great movie. I love 73.

Sissy Spacec was an unknown. She's the lead female role. And she was apparently cast because she was from the Austin area and could twirl a baton something the character needed to do. Hell yeah. I love Sissy Spasic. She's great. And then kind of veteran character actor Martin Sheen,

who had not yet been an apocalypse now, who was trying to break in as lead man, was cast opposite her. I don't want to go into too much detail. This movie could be its own episode, but a couple of things that are going to come up again. Several crew members classed with Malik, apparently a few left midway through filming, despite a promising sale to Warner Brothers for just under a million dollars. Remember, the movie was made for $300,000. The studio clearly didn't really know what to do with the movie and they initially previewed it on a double bill with blazing saddles. Audiences were very confused. Yeah, that feels wrong.

Not a fan of the whiplash. The movie was the closing feature at the New York Film Festival in 1973 and apparently critically overshadowed Martin Scorsese's mean streets. So this movie was a big critical hit at the time. It is now considered one of the greatest American films ever made. And it was Malik's first film. So he follows up this movie relatively quickly for Malik with 1978's Days of Heaven, which is technically his first studio movie. It was made with Paramount, although kind of produced independently of Paramount.

Paramount just paid for it. It starred Richard Gear, Brooke Adams, and Sam Shepard. Again, amazing movie. Check it out. I mean, some of the best cinematography you'll see. It's remarkable. It tells the story of a doomed love triangle between Emmanuel Laborer, his girlfriend and a rich farmer. kind of filtered through the lens of the girlfriend's little sister in the movie.

Again, I don't want to get bogged down on this. A few other things to note that'll come up again, very Malikian. The farmer's mansion, Sam Shepard's Mansion, was not a facade. Usually you'd build the facade for the exterior shots and then do the interiors on a soundstage, but it was actually fully built and authentically recreated inside and out. Daily call sheets were really vague because Malik would just decide what they would shoot based on the weather. They decided to use all natural light.

This was at a time when that wasn't really done. So a lot of the crew just sat around. The movie was shot entirely during magic hour, which is that 30-minute period between when the sun pressed the horizon and night falls. So there's light in the sky, but the sun is no longer in it. Malik was so disappointed by the dailies after two weeks that he threw the script out. And then just shot whatever he thought they should to push the story forward. Hey, that sounds like what he did with this one. Yep.

they went nearly a million dollars over budget and the producer bert schneider had made a deal with paramount where he had to pay for any overages so he actually had to mortgage his house to continue to pay for the movie they went so long that the d p had to leave to do another movie he'd committed to and then the movie took two years to edit uh billy weber was the editor who ended up editing uh the thin red line gear was actually cast in another movie based on a rough cut that was shown to that other movie's director that other movie was shot and released before the edit for Days of Heaven was done. Movie was released, won an Oscar for Best Cinematography. Malick signed a development deal with Paramount. He spends a few years and a ton of money developing a project called Q, exploring the origins of life on Earth, tree of life. He then abruptly quit that project. I'm not watching that.

He quit that project when Paramount was like, write as a script with the beginning, middle of N&N. Oh, no, he can't. So he moved to Paris and kind of disappeared from view. So meanwhile, 1978, producer Bobby Geisler approached Terence Malick about working together. He's a novice producer. He has no credits to his name at this point. But he loved Badlands and he desperately wants to work with Malik. So what I can tell, Malik kind of turns him down on the projects that he's offering him. But Geisler is kind of his dilettante and Malick

didn't mind having someone in L.A. who was willing to pay for his dinners. So they kind of form a relationship. They start talking about making a movie about the elephant man, but then David Lynch's elephant man, Lord gets out. So they solve that idea. They fall out of touch. Geisler says of the time, I thought Terry was a genius and artist and I was completely mesmerized by him. I felt better when I was with him and more than anything I wanted to learn from him, swore that I would produce a play or a movie of Terry's if it was the last thing that I did. Ten years after Bobby Geisler, producer Not So Extraordinaire, first reached out to Terrence Malick.

He reaches out again. And at this point, he's partnered up with another producer, John Robredo, another Texas native and another Terence Malick acolyte. They have a mixed reputation, according to a 2010 Vanity Fair article that says they were praised by many for their taste and generosity to artists, but disliked by others for their tireless self-promotion and record of running up bad debts. So let's remember the bad debts. We've talked a lot about some shady producers so far, Battlefield Earth, obviously.

Yes. So they've completed only one movie at this point. It's called Streamers. It's a Robert Altman film. And it ended with Altman not speaking to them anymore. So not a good sign necessarily going forward. but in 1980s. Is streamers about the Vietnam War and was it also a stage play?

Because I'm pretty sure that my grandma accidentally took my dad to this as a play at like the Arundel Barn Playhouse and was alarmed to find out that it was about gay soldiers in Vietnam. I don't know if it was a play. It was about the Vietnam War. Sounds like a great family fun time at the playhouse. I don't think they loved it. But, you know, maybe they should have had a more open mind. I was going to say.

So, Gaisle and Roboto, who don't really have any money, They fly to Paris to meet Malik. This is almost the equivalent of me calling up Spielberg and being like, hey man, let's get a movie going. What do you say? They asked him to adapt another book, The White Motel this time, and they offered him $2 million to write and direct it. And this is money that they don't have. Again, Malik says no, but he says maybe it's time for me to get back into the movies. And so he says that he would be willing to adapt James Jones's World War II saga, the thin red line.

Geisler and Robert are like, great. love the thin red line. Here's $250,000 to write a script. That's roughly $600,000 in today's dollars. Okay, that's a lot. Just over four times the WGA scale for a project of this magnitude to give you guys a reference for how much they're paying him. Just cold, point blank. This isn't set up at a studio. They are just giving him money they have raised themselves and or their money to go write this screenplay. So January 1st, 1989, Malick sits down at his type and he starts cranking on the script. And five months later, how long do you think the draft is that gets turned into the producers?

I'm going to go like minimum 500 pages. Well, it wasn't quite that long, but it was 300 pages. And to give everyone in the audience a point of reference, I would say that the average produced script, although Marvel has made things longer, 100 pages is a good benchmark. Hit 100 pages. They like to say a minute a page, so 100 minutes. So apparently, Malik would agonize over every DVD. he made from the original script, and he would call James Jones's widow, Gloria, and ask her

permission for every change. And eventually she got so tired of him calling that she says, Terry, you have my husband's voice, you're writing in his musical key, now what you must do is improvise. I do want to mention two changes that may or may not be related to Malik's faith and philosophy. Apparently in the original book, there was the suggestion of a homoerotic element to some of the characters that was removed for the final film. Interesting. And, and And the character played by Elias Cotéus, Starros, whose Greek in the film was originally a Jewish captain. And the subtext of the men not supporting him initially and Nick Nolte's character

kind of being addicted to him was anti-Semitism. Trying to show the anti-Semitism in the military that Jones himself had seen. That's interesting. That's a weird thing to remove. Removes. Yeah. I don't know exactly why. Just wanted to flag it.

So Geisler and Robredo are like, oh my God, we have a script in, we give him a bunch of notes, but Malik is notorious for like backing away from projects, right? So he'll just like be interested in something and leave. So they're like the best way strategically for us to keep him on the line to do a Thinred Line is to just spend more money on him adapting other projects too. So he has to keep staying in contact with us. So they developed a play with him, which they ended up spending $800,000 on and was a complete bust. And then they also bought another script that he'd written called the English speaker for $400,000

and his contract stipulated that he was the only person that would be allowed to direct it and that he would only make it when he wanted to make it and that that would be in perpetuity. So they basically gave him an interest-free $400,000 loan forever. Yeah, these are not good deals. No, I'm not good with money. Basically, guys with Robert are like, what do we have to do to get you to work for us? And Malik's like, give me all of your money. I mean, cheers to you, Terence Malick.

These guys are not doing it right. Yeah. So just to be clear, in the end, Robert Owen Geisler spent nearly $1 million on this play with Malik and then nearly a million dollars in writing fees for Malik across the thin red line and the English speaker. And at this point, it's the mid-90s. They're dead broke. They're in debt everywhere.

They had creditors getting them arrested. They were evicted from their home. They sold all of their personal belongings, their furniture, their CDs and their books, but they kept at it. And I just love this image of the two of them being like, it's Terrence Malick. We got to do it. You know they're living in like a studio in West Hollywood

that's just like falling apart. Yes. Oh, they live in New York. So, yeah, Soho. So in January of 1995, they're broke and there's this pivot point. So Mike Medavoy, if you remember from the beginning of the episode, he was the agent who had gotten Malick work doing rewrite. at the very beginning of his career.

So he's turned into a producer and he's setting up his own company, Phoenix Pictures. And Geisler and Robitor are like, we have to get somebody else involved financially because we are bleeding out on the table right now. And so they go, Terence, please let us try to set up one of your movies here. And apparently Malik never responds.

So they say screw it. And they take the thin red line to Medavoy and he gives them $100,000 for the rights to make the movie with his company, with them as producers. So like, they've already spent a million and then he buys the rights for 100K just to show you like things are not going great.

But this actually gets the ball rolling. So to be clear, Geyzer first approaches Malik in 1978. We're now 17 years later. It's March of 1995. From what I can gather, the script had been cut down to about 200 pages and they hosted a reading at Metavoy's home.

Martin Sheen wrote screen direction. Check out this cast. Kevin Costner, Dermit Mulrooney, Peter Berg, Lucas Haas, and Will Patton, amongst others, read all the parts. Wow. People will show up for Malik.

After that, reading, word gets out like wildfire. Terence Malick, the reclusive, J.D. Salinger of the film world, is back and he's making a war movie, and it's going head-to-head with Steven Spielberg's

Saving Private Ryan. So these two movies are now weirdly competing for the cast of Hollywood, and every actor wants to be in the thin red line. But Malik doesn't want name actors, because he says, If somebody sees Brad Pitt, they know Brad Pitt doesn't really die when he gets killed in the movie. I just want to say, like, the vast majority of the cast of the Thin Red Line is now extremely famous.

Was not at the time. And there is something to be said for watching that. I actually do really love watching a bunch of unknowns versus watching a lot of. It's, honestly, it reminds me of the first season of Game of Thrones where the only name was Sean Bean. And what they did was so smart is they're not going to kill Sean Bean. the first thing they do is kill Sean Dean. And I do like that, so I think he's right. Wanted to just also mention that, guys,

if you can get your hands on the Criterion Collection Blu-ray, you can watch a behind-the-scenes video with the casting director Diane Crittenden, who's wonderful. And you can see some of the other auditions. Philip Seymour Hoffman, Wow. Josh Hartnett, Neil Patrick Harris, and Crispin Glover all pop up in auditions for various roles.

Okay. A couple of these things are not like the other. Yeah, that's fair. There's two in there that work. There's two that really don't. Yeah. Apparently, Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp, and Nicholas Cage all wanted the role of wit. Nicholas Cage may have almost had it, but he didn't answer Terrence Malick's phone call when Terrence called him and Terrence Malick was offended.

I love Nicholas Cage, but you can't. No, no. You can't put him in this. Bruce Willis offered to pay for the whole cast and crew, apparently, to fly first class to and from Australia just to be in the movie. Obviously, he was not. So as the movie's becoming real, Geisler and Robbertoe, the guys that have spent decades getting this thing going, are starting to get edged out because what everybody realizes is they've never made a movie, especially not a movie this size.

So Metavoy hires a senior producer, George Stevens Jr., who knew Malick. He was actually an initial investor in Badlands back in the day. He hires him to supervise the production, which is going to cost $55 million, and it's going to be shot in Australia. And at the same time, Malick's continuing to like milk Geisler and Robberto for money and rights on the other project, the English speaker that he has set up with them. And they're just like, oh my God, just please let us make a movie with you. So Sony's going to finance the movie.

Metavoy gets it set up there with Phoenix Pictures. But apparently someone at Sony realized maybe Terrence Malick isn't going to be able to deliver a war movie on time and on budget. And the reason might have something to do with Terrence Malick's philosophy on planning and storyboards. So let's hear Terence Malick on storyboarding. Well, I find it very hard to, you know, execute anything that is to preconceived or storyboards. I've never been able to work from a storyboard or, or, because it's hard. You always have a little bit of feeling you're trying to fit a square peg in a round hole and I think you work that way rec you you you let it you let it speak to you're on the day and

on the day and you hope it will go someplace and that you know you've allowed it to allow it to happen but if you if you try to make things happen they start to feel presented you know they start to feel as though they had been the action had been premeditated and was now being presented to you which starts to make it feel like theater which is wonderful in its own right

but in the movies you don't want the movies to be like theater so listen he's a brilliant director he sounds like an absolute nightmare to work with or for Yeah, I think it's tough, and we're going to get deeper into that right now, but there's an apocryphal tale about how Steven Spielberg was two weeks ahead of schedule

by the time he finished with the D-Day scene in Saving Private Ryan. And the sense I get is Spielberg and Malick are kind of diametrically opposed. Spielberg meticulously plans things, builds miniatures. He's super, super story-driven, which I would say Terence Malik is not. Yeah, he's super story-driven. Malik is very emotion-driven. you can see why a studio would perhaps get cold feet about having someone who's not into storyboards direct a war movie. So Sony drops the project.

Malick is actually in Australia, location scouting, when he gets this information via facts from like a variety headline. He flies back to L.A., they pitch the project to Fox, and they jump in with one caveat. They have to cast some stars in the movie. So basically what Malick and Diane Crittenden did is they said, okay, all the main role, roles are going to be with unknown or character actors and all the supporting throwaway roles are going to be big names. I want to just highlight the main roles really quickly because it doesn't line up with the final film exactly. So the lead, Private Fife, that's Adrian Brody's character. Oops, not the lead in what we see. Yeah. So that's going to be played by Adrian Brody. Starros,

the captain, Elias Coteas, one of my favorite character actors of all time. I friggin love him. Witt, the optimistic private, Jim Caviziel, Welsh, the cynical sergeant, Sean Penn. Sean Penn was not a no name at this point, though. No, he was not, but he was not the heavy hitter that Tom Hanks was, for example, in saving Private Ryan. And then John C. Riley's role was also much larger in the original scripts. Then you have George Clooney, Woody Harrelson, John Travolta, Nick Nolte, and John Cusack,

amongst others rounding out the cast in the smaller roles. Very small roles. Yeah. So Diane Critton and the casting director famously said, the kind of actor who works best with Terry is someone who is extremely flexible and doesn't get hung up on lines and words. Let's remember that as we go forward. So things are about to get really bad for Gaisler and Robredo,

are intrepid producers. The men who are already several million dollars in debt. Yeah, these guys, it's a tough road. So it's 97. People are starting to move to Australia for the movie. And Gisland Robredo find out not told directly that people are moving to Australia and they're going to start shooting. They call Phoenix Pictures from New York, and they're like, hey, when should we be on set?

And Phoenix Picture says, no, under no circumstances are you to ever visit set. What? And they're like, what? What are you talking about? And they said, Terence Malick put it in his contract that Geisler and Robredow were not allowed to be on set. It was one of his conditions for directing the movie. Terrence Malick is a low-key snake. He snaked them so hard.

After 10 years in development, millions of dollars invested. They say in this 2010 variety article, all we wanted to have was the honor of watching him call action. I believe them. I believe them. They spent this long just paying him to do nothing to a certain degree. Like, I bet you they did just want to go and see it.

Apparently, so apparently they confronted Malik. It gets very confusing. It's hard to know who's telling the truth, who's not. Malik claims and others claim that they were not involved in the movie for the entire year up to shooting, that they'd basically been cheerleaders and then they had nothing to do. Phone records show that Malik was calling them

sometimes up to two or three times a day all the way until production started. So we don't know. But the most clear sense that I get is that they did owe a lot of people, a lot of money. They were kind of, they had a kind of sheister-griftery vibe. And I get the sense that Terence Malick

wasn't interested in having that energy on set. And he's very particular with what his sets are like. So that's the best I could piece together because it's a little bit of a he said, she said with what's going on. That's fair, but I feel so bad. I feel terrible for them. They like got this thing all the way here. So sad. No, you're not welcome on set. And then they didn't even do a island of Dr. Moreau and show up as an extra. They just put them in like, dress them as a bush. Yeah. Like make them a little clump of shrubs and let them be there. Yeah.

Yeah. So one thing I would like to say ahead of time, so this movie finished on budget and on schedule, which is shocking. But it did so despite Terrence Malick's like maybe I would say best efforts otherwise. So Terrence Malick brought on DP John Toll to shoot the movie. I think this is the most beautiful war movie ever filmed. Yeah. They shot for 100 days in Australia, 24 days in the Solomon Islands.

That's the Melanesian tribes. Which worth pointing out that the Solomon Islands is also the actual like location location. location of the... Near Guadalcanal. Yeah. They didn't shoot at Guadalcanal. They couldn't because of malaria. Oh.

And they shot on Catalina Island in the United States as well. Oh. For three days. Malik reportedly was very disinterested in shooting the actual battle components of the movie. He would complain to people all the actors constantly that he didn't want to be doing it. He even joked that they should hire Rennie Harlan, the director of Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger, and Deep Blue Sea, to direct the action because he would do a better job than me. Okay.

The shoot was grueling for the actors. They went through an intensive. boot camp in a sad twist. Jim Caviziel recounted how one time in the middle of the night, he was freezing and he snuggled very close to Adrian Brody and delirious thinking he was his wife, kissed his ear in the middle of the night, and they got really intimate, and then he later stole his lead role. And they also had to film very intense physical scenes with little to no preparation. I want to play a quick clip from Kirk Asvedo and Dash Mok on some of the aspects of it. Not to mention it was physical, and we were dirty and no shower in a week in the bush,

and digging our own trenches and staying up half the night on lookout. I mean, it was the real deal. But, you know, when you're sleeping eight guys in a tent with each other, and it was freezing at night, and you had to cuddle up, you become pretty close. You know, you're carrying M1s, real M1s, and, you know, I think at the time, 9.5 pounds, or 9 pounds, 4 ounces, or something like that. Some of them weighed like 15 pounds, and you have to run up a hill like 40 times. That's just one day.

Because of the grass, you had no idea where your foot was going to be. There's no footing because there could have been a hole. You know, you had grass up to your chest. And then on top of that, you had to dodge, like, the fake bodies. Or you didn't know where they would put it, like, a little explosive. So you had to dodge explosives and stuff like that. So it was very difficult to see. Apparently it wasn't just physically tolling.

Terrence's communication skills with the actors was apparently a big learning experience for them. He didn't like rehearsal because he thought that that made it disingenuous when the actors would perform. So they would be told like, okay, now you have to cry. Now you have to do this intense physical, emotional scene. He didn't provide detailed call sheets in terms of like what they were going to do every day because he liked to be able to shoot what he wanted to shoot. and so he would leave scenes early to go shoot something else and then shoot a different scene than was intended.

And what's hard, like, actors prepare for these scenes in these moments so they can build themselves up. And Malik just wanted instant spontaneity with all of these actors constantly. It was apparently very, very rough for all of them as they were going through this process. Lizzie, I'm sure you can imagine as a former actor yourself. It doesn't sound like something I want to do.

Yeah. And so Elias Cateus in particular had a miserable time on set. He actually did not know that his Jewish captain role had been changed to a Greek captain until he showed up on set. Apparently even Sean Penn, who's into more intense acting styles, was thrown for a loop. John C. Riley reportedly was out of it for two weeks. He just could not adapt to what was happening. He said he was just like, for two weeks he was miserable.

The actors would set up these meetings with Terence Malik to voice their concerns. And he would just be like, oh, you guys are right. okay sounds good oh we're fine and then walk away and nothing with chains and so they all just kind of realized that they needed to surrender to his way of doing things or they'd go insane yeah and basically that's what happened with the entire cast and crew like everyone got used to the fact that malick might have 500 extras waiting tanks and planes and explosives at the ready but a beautiful red parrot flies by and he's gonna turn around and shoot the parrot instead and so like it's apparently a running joke on the sets. Apparently on New World, Colin Farrell turned to Christopher

Plummer and was like, you better fucking hope an Osprey doesn't walk by on set or he's going to shoot that thing. And so it's a real thing in all these movies. I love the New World. I cannot imagine how Colin Farrell would possibly get along with this person. Well, Christopher Plummer won't work with him again and we'll get to that. So Malick also did this unusual thing where he would shoot two versions of every scene, every dialogue scene. He would shoot one version with the dialogue and one version without the dialogue. So, meaning improvised or like silent? Silent. So this was actually a piece of advice from his editor, Billy Weber. He noticed that like all Malik wanted to do was strip out dialogue. I mean, you'll notice Lizzie in this movie. It's all just

stripped out to make room for the voiceover. Yeah, it's all monologues. And so Malik clearly wanted to make a silent film or a near silent film. So Weber told him not thinking he would necessarily take it seriously, to shoot two versions of each sequence so they'd have the footage they need to remove lines when they didn't need them. And Malik did exactly that. That is smart. Hence, Diane Crittenden's actors who don't get hung up on lines work well with Terrence Malick. Okay. So, getting into posts, again, the movie finished on time, on budget. That's a miracle. The film was edited by Billy Weber and Leslie Jones. Billy had worked on Malik's previous films. He was an assistant editor on Badlands and the editor of Days of Heaven. Leslie had film editing in her blood. She, her father,

and her grandfather would all end up being nominated for an Oscar in film editing, three generations of film editing Oscar nominees. Wow. Billy said of the process, I knew much more and could handle the situation better. My prior experience and knowledge were also helpful in guiding Leslie through the long and difficult process of working with this very creative director. So let's get to a few of Terrence Malick's quirks in post. Much of what was shot was unscripted.

Leslie once said that Terry is not really fond of dialogue, shoots takes with and without, he lost dialogue wherever possible. The final film varied greatly from the original concept. That is the understatement of a lifetime. So apparently three different photography units were shooting at any given time. For those of you who aren't aware,

when you're shooting a big budget movie, you will not just have your main photography unit with the director that's shooting, you know, your main lead actors. You'll often have a B unit or even a C unit that's going out. That's called like you'll see director of second unit photography. And they might be shooting battle scenes or in-stores. or The Bee Story.

So, for example, in The Hobbit, Andy Circus, actor who played Gollum, who's now become a director. Yeah. He was the second unit director who would film a lot of the B coverage of the battle scenes in The Hobbit. Malik, though, did not watch Daly's.

Daly's is the, once you get the footage process that you filmed of the day, you watch it at the end of the day. Apparently, Leslie rarely spoke to Terry despite being on set for most of the shoot, and she basically cut the entire first pass of the movie, which was five hours by herself. Oh my God.

So the editing team spent 13 months in post with four months of sound mixing. There were no previews of the film, which they didn't do because Terrence Malick had final cut. It's extremely unusual that Terrence Malick has final cut. What final cut means is that Terrence Malick has the ultimate say as to what the locked version of the movie is. Now, every studio movie that's made now, the studio has final cut. They're paying for it. So ultimately, they get the final cut. final word as to what the edit of the movie will be. And sometimes you'll hear about huge disagreements

between the director and the studio over the direction that the edit has taken. And sometimes directors will even remove their name from the movie and involve the director's guild. And you'll see someone credited as Alan Smithy. That is actually a pseudonym that is used on all movies in Hollywood where directors have removed their names. Right. This is also why you frequently see a director's cut get released separately from the theatrical cut. Yes. And usually the director's is not that great, not because the director is a bad editor, but because it's locked much earlier in the process. So, yes, sometimes studios interfere and they can make things worse, sure, but if it's a healthy collaboration, I think most directors would admit that the movie continues

to improve, even though there are things from their director's cut that they still like. The director's cut is usually turned in after 10 weeks per the director's guild guidelines. So what I want to dive into, and I'm going to cut ahead a little bit here, is that like the most interesting aspect of this movie is that it became a movie about a different character than it was written about. That's, I mean, that's what I had always heard is that Adrian Brody was supposed to be the lead and that he was a complete no name, had almost no credits to his name prior to this, right? Yes. If you have not seen this movie, Adrian Brody, he has like maybe two, three lines. He has two lines, and he's got a total of less than five minutes of screen time. Yes, he's in the background of a lot of shots to the point where you might not even notice him

unless you know to look for him at a certain point. And the lead of this is inarguably Jim Caviesel. Yeah. So Jim Caviesel was a no-name actor at this point. He had almost no credits. The only reason Diane Crittenden even allowed him to tape was that she knew Jim Cavizal's manager and she liked Jim Cavizel's manager and she said if she sees something special in him. Yeah, his face. Have you seen Jim Caviesel? He's like one of the most gorgeous. I mean,

you know, like, we're going to do the Passion of the Christ at some point. I know there's some other stuff there, but like, good Lord. Most of this movie is just like shots of Jim Caviesel looking into the sun and you're like, well, he's beautiful. I don't know what to tell you. So apparently here's what happened. From what I can gather, Adrian Brody was supposed to be the lead. Jim Caviesel's character was supporting. And they sent the B unit team. So that's not the team that Terrence Malick is directing, right, to the Solomon Islands to film Jim Caviesel with the Melanesian tribes that you see at the beginning of the movie. Those were the only dailies that Terence Malick would watch because he wasn't on set for them. So he would watch them. And as he watched

them, he fell in love with the Melanesian tribes and Jim Caviesel. And he realized, I can explore the philosophical questions I want to explore through Jim's character. And I can, can't do it through Fife's narrative. So during production, he started adding scenes and beats and coverage for Jim Caviesel's character, including the flashback to Jim Caviesel's mother on the bed, which was not in the original script. So it's not that they entered post and they changed the movie to be Witt's movie. They did it during production. There are certain things that feel underdeveloped by Terrence Malick standards. Like when he's talking with Sean Penn and there's sort of some backstory revealed about how he, like, had done, I'm not even clear what it was.

I tried to figure it out, but like he had taken some misstep and was now receiving some punishment, but there's like almost no explanation for what's going on. And it doesn't quite mesh with the rest of the movie. Yeah. So a lot of that dynamic was Malick chasing what inspired him on set. And that's because Cavizal and Penn really closely mirrored Witt and Welsh in real life. So Cavizal was this very spiritual, optimistic, open person, and Penn is this cynic, this rock. So the scene where they're talking in the abandoned house, if you remember, that scene was actually improvised and based on a conversation that Penn and Cavizal had had, where Penn asked Cavizal if he still believes in that great light and Cavizal says, I still see a spark in you.

That was pulled from a real conversation. Wow. That was one of my favorite parts of the movie. Talk about finding it on the day. He found it while they were in the middle of shooting, and he decided, this is what I'm going to chase. I mean, imagine being on a studio movie. Imagine you're shooting, saving Private Ryan, and you're like, you know what, Tom Hanks,

just not that interesting. I think I'm going to go follow Barry Pepper around. Well, it's more crushing than that because Adrian Brody did not have. He was not at Tom Hanks' level at that point. The pianist had not happened yet, right? That's like a couple years later. So, I mean, he's pretty far away from becoming Adrian Brody. This was supposed to be like his Oscar Bate, you know, huge role.

And infamously, he was not informed of the fact that his role had been cut down, which I don't really understand because John C. Riley says he did get a phone call from Terrence Malick telling him that his role had been cut down. That feels intentional. I mean, like with Adrian Brody, it's, that's a big deal, especially because you know his part was bigger than John C. Riley's was before it was cut down. Yeah. That's tough.

Yeah. I'm not going to play it here because the clip is really long, but you guys should, if you want, look up Christopher Plummer, actors' round table, Terrence Malick. He tells the anecdote. George Clooney's there too, and obviously he was in the Thid Red Line.

And it's like an actor's nightmare story that they all share about Adrian Brody not knowing. It's like this very famous Hollywood tale that he didn't know he'd been cut out of the movie. And Christopher Plummer famously will not work with Terrence Malick again because Terrence Malick cut all of his big scenes out of the new world. and or use them as background noise to a shot of a parrot. You do not cut Christopher Plummer.

Yeah, exactly. Famously, Bill Pullman, Mickey Rourke, and Lucas Haas all had small roles in the movie that were cut. They were not huge roles like some people say. I'm not going to lie. I am mad that Bill Pullman is not in this movie. Yeah, he would have been great. I'm Bill Pullman's biggest fan. Yes.

I love Bill Pullman. John C. Riley's role was much bigger, as I mentioned. And Billy Baum Thornton recorded three hours of voiceover for the movie that was never used because Malik decided instead of using a neutral narrator, he would use the various voices of the actors to tell the on-screen story. In fact, the voiceover, Lizzie, was never written in the script. I'm not surprised. Yeah, it was entirely added in post.

One of my favorite bits of trivia is that the scene between Nick Nolte and John Travolta on the ship before the beach invasion, when we get this glimpse into Nulte's head, as he's telling us that he's never had a war, he's been passed over. That scene had no voiceover, and Malik hated the scene so much that he just started writing voiceover in the editing room, and they just started laying it in, and it, like, made the scene come to life. Quickly, I just want to wrap things up here, Hans Zimmer just, this movie nearly killed him. He scored the film.

It's a gorgeous score. It's a great score. Terence Malik actually had lived at Hans Zimmer Studio for the year prior to beginning work on the thin red line. Apparently, they literally drove each other insane. There's a great behind-the-scenes video of Zimmer talking about this experience. He worked on the project every day for nine months, and he wrote and recorded a total of six hours of music for the film.

And I'll just play a brief clip of him. I was part of that process up to a certain point at which Billy Weber probably quite rightly banned me from the dub stage. I remember even at the premiere, you know, Andy Nelson. pacing because you know he just wanted to catch me before I walked in because he had exchanged one piece of music for another piece of music I couldn't tell but you know everybody was very you know precious is probably the wrong word but it's probably the right word you know about disturbing the art of it I sound

very flippant about the whole thing but it was six hours of music and it was hard work and you know um i thought it was going to kill me i remember coming home crudging my chest and going i don't think i'm going to see christmas and meaning it i wasn't joking so yeah i just want to point out also that like six hours of music if you're not familiar with the process that is involved with scoring a film and obviously i am not a composer however david our producer and also my partner is a composer and the amount of work that goes into scoring 90 minutes is insane. So the fact that he basically scored three movies. Like that is the amount of music that he wrote for this.

That's awful. Yeah, it was pretty crazy. One thing that he does say saved them is there are a number of needle drops in the film. Classical pieces. The Melanesian Choir chants are not. pieces that he wrote. And what the point Zimmer was making actually at the end there is like he had been banned from the dub stage. That means the mixed stage. Probably because he and Malik were continuing to argue so vehemently. And by the time he hit the premiere, he was so tired that he didn't even notice

when one of his cues had been swapped out for something else, which like David could tell you, you would notice, you know, if you weren't so exhausted. Also, if you hadn't written six hours of music, at that point, it would be hard. Yeah, it would be hard to tell. So the movie's wrapping up and the drama seems to wrap up as well. Mike Medivoy's attorneys as a parting blow declared Geisler and Roberto are original producers to be in breach of contract. Oh my God. Leave these men alone. And threatened to remove their names from the film unless they agreed to not do interviews until after the Academy Awards. Because to be fair, they were doing the thing where they were touting themselves in interviews before the movie had released. Oh, that's embarrassing. Yeah. So the movie gets released

five months after saving Private Ryan, December of 1998. It grossed roughly 100 million. million dollars worldwide against its budget of about 55 million. So after marketing and advertising and home video, it may have just broken even, maybe. It probably did a little better than that. Yeah. And then it won the top prize golden bear at the 1999 Berlin International Film Festival. Before I play this last clip, I want, I do want to mention one thing. I think it is an absolute travesty that this movie did not win best cinematography. I think this is the most stunning war movie ever filmed, it's breathtaking. I want to end this episode with a great clip

that just really, I think, sums up Terrence Malick in about 30 seconds. And this is, after the movie has won the Golden Bear, the top prize at the 1999 Brilliant International Film Festival. And this is a clip from the press conference that follows the film with the whole film team present. And there's a question on the right side in the middle, please. Hi, this is a question for Terence,

Malik, I'm a bad spama girlfriend, Daly Mel. Will we have to wait another two decades for another masterpiece from you and tell us why it took so long? Whom do you ask? Terence Malik. He's not here. Yes, so, the question was, do we have to wait another two decades for another Terence Malick film only to realize that Terence Malick doesn't attend film festivals? He didn't even come to the award ceremony or the premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival.

Terrence Malick did not wait more than two decades. He followed us up with the new world, which I'm sure we will cover. And then the Tree of Life. Which I really enjoy. The New World, not the tree of life. To the wonder, Night of Cups, song to song. Some I like. Some I don't personally. All interesting. And that wraps up the thin red line, an unusual one in that I think a lot of the drama was actually offset, meaning not during physical production so much. A fascinating example of what it can mean to work with the people that you idolize in this case. Yeah, damn. I'm glad that this forced me to watch it again. I did have much more appreciation for it this time, although I don't know that I'm ever going to elect to watch it in the future, but I do think it's worth watching. Well, I've got that Blu-ray for you anytime that you want. That's okay, but thank you. In terms of my what went right, I generally do not care for Sean Penn. I really liked him in this movie. I found him extremely watchable, and I just thought that he, more than I think most of the other actors in this seemed to thrive with this kind of direction. So Sean Penn.

Sean Penn. My what went right, I'm going to do a two-parter. One, the cinematography, John Toll does not get the credit he deserves. This movie looks absolutely incredible. You could take any number of stills from it and turn it into an amazing photograph or a painting. It has one of my favorite shots of all time. towards the end when you're looking down the river, and it's just this gorgeous frame,

and then all of a sudden the Japanese soldiers start materializing in it. My other went right is allowing someone, and I'm not saying anyone allowed it, he just did it, but allowing someone the freedom to follow what is working in a movie. When you're creating a movie, it can feel like you're on a train that's on a set of tracks, and you are unable to change direction or even slow down,

and Terence Malick was able to refocus the film on a character that I think is more interesting, but also allowed the movie to be a more interesting movie. And that doesn't happen very often. Yeah. So that's what went right for me. Well, thanks for this one, Chris. It's significantly less harrowing than the one that we will be covering next.

So I do appreciate this little Terrence Malick breather. Thank you very much. If you would like to enjoy a little bonus content from this episode, go on to YouTube and search if Terence Malick directed Zoolander, his favorite film for a great fake trailer. And you can also look up Terrence Malick dancing for some footage of him dancing with his wife at a rodeo in Austin, Texas. It's incredibly charming. Seems just like a lovely old guy. Hit us up. Give us a rating and a review. If we like your review or we hate your review, we might read it. And as always, send us your recommendations.

We really appreciate it. Thank you guys for listening. Thank you for your continued engagement. We'll talk to you in two weeks. podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer editing music by David Bowman with cover art from Euthonio.