CANNES, France — Terrence Malick, the reclusive filmmaker who dislikes having his photograph taken and has not given an interview since the 1970s, could hardly be more out of place than amid the swarming media circus that is the Cannes Film Festival. But thanks to his scarcity of output, his sphinxlike reticence and the near-religious fervor of his fans, the elusive Mr. Malick also provides exactly what Cannes thrives on: mystique and anticipation.
His new film, “The Tree of Life” — which had been expected to show at last year’s festival and is only his fifth feature in 38 years — was finally unveiled on Monday to an eager press corps, before its U.S. release on May 27. “The Tree of Life” has big stars, celestial spectacles and a few digital dinosaurs, but it is no one’s idea of a summer blockbuster. Even more elliptical than Mr. Malick’s previous two films, “The Thin Red Line” (1998) and “The New World” (2005), the film tells the story of a 1950s Texas family (the parents are played by Brad Pitt and the relative newcomer Jessica Chastain) whose oldest son grows up to be a morose Sean Penn. But it also tackles, metaphysically speaking, the whole kit and caboodle: the origins of life and the history of the universe. The intrigue surrounding “The Tree of Life” has much to do with the stories and rumors of its long gestation. Before he vanished off the filmmaking map in the late ’70s, after two well-received films, “Badlands” (1973) and “Days of Heaven” (1978), Mr. Malick, who turns 68 this year, had been developing a movie called “Q,” for which he reportedly dispatched cameramen to far-flung corners of the world to capture an array of natural phenomena. (The cinematographer of “The Tree of Life,” Emmanuel Lubezki, confirmed that some images in the new film date from earlier periods of exploration.)
Mr. Malick’s films have returned to the mythic scenario of a lost Eden, but while they have linked the metaphorical Fall with historical eras — the advent of the industrial age (“Days of Heaven”), the establishment of the American colonies (“The New World”) — “The Tree of Life” treats the loss of innocence as part of the eternal human condition. The available evidence suggests that this passion project is also, for its fiercely private auteur, a deeply personal film. Some aspects of the movie correspond with the morsels of biography that have surfaced over the years: the Texas childhood, a strict father, the death of a brother.
“I was shocked by how personal the story was when I first read it,” said the production designer Jack Fisk, who has worked on all of Mr. Malick’s films and has known him since they were students at the American Film Institute. “But when I watched the film I just think how universal it is.” A recurring refrain among Mr. Malick’s collaborators was the degree to which the script is a mere starting point, extensively revised, even discarded, once shooting begins. Bill Pohlad, a producer of “The Tree of Life,” compared Mr. Malick’s screenplay to poetry; Mr. Lubezki likened it to a Russian novel.
Since “The Tree of Life” is less bound to dialogue and plot than Mr. Malick’s previous films, Mr. Lubezki, who also shot “The New World,” said he was able to more fully embrace Mr. Malick’s preferred approach, avoiding traditional camera set-ups and instead emphasizing handheld mobility, natural light and the search for the unrepeatable moment. Because the interior spaces are not lighted, Mr. Fisk typically adds windows to houses or cuts holes into ceilings on Mr. Malick’s sets; on “The Tree of Life” Mr. Lubezki consulted paintings by Vermeer, in which shadowy rooms are illuminated by a window’s soft light. Three houses were used for the principal location; the production moved from one to another depending on the direction of the sun. “Terry’s not really a stickler for continuity,” Mr. Fisk said.
Despite his reputation as a perfectionist, Mr. Malick by all accounts strove for a documentary-style spontaniety on “The Tree of Life.” “It’s more found than planned,” Mr. Lubezki said. “Terry would say, don’t worry about getting a piece of dialogue or an interaction of the actors, but try to get the feeling of the first time being in a room with them.”
The mood on the set matched the subject of the film: a heightened alertness to the world. “When you’re shooting with Terry, everybody’s very aware of their surroundings,” Mr. Lubezki said. With their birdsong soundtracks and their signature images of nature and the elements — light through tree tops, windblown grass, flowing water — Mr. Malick’s movies are more concrete and more abstract than most. They pay close attention to the sensual materiality of flora and fauna, places and things (“Tree of Life” locations include the California redwood forest and the Utah salt flats), but they also seek “to put emotions on film,” Mr. Lubezki said, “which is something there’s no manual for.”
It can be hard for actors to find their place within the willful, perpetual flux of a Malick production — some cast members were unexpectedly sidelined amid the large ensemble of “The Thin Red Line,” or even eliminated.
Mr. Malick often calls for his actors not to create a character so much as embody a concept or a feeling. Ms. Chastain said that her audition consisted mainly of “acting out behaviors, like putting a baby to sleep or looking at someone with love and respect.”
It also falls upon the cast to deliver Mr. Malick’s distinctive voiceovers. In “The Tree of Life,” as in “The Thin Red Line” and “The New World,” the hushed, dazed narration — handed off from one actor to another — has the tone of a a prayer. From the start Mr. Malick has tried to find uses for voiceover that go against and beyond the traditional explanatory purpose. “When people express what is most important to them, it often comes out in clichés,” he said in a 1975 interview with Sight & Sound, referring to Sissy Spacek’s narration in “Badlands.” “That doesn’t make them laughable; it’s something tender about them.”
Ms. Chastain recalled that when she told Mr. Malick she wouldn’t have time to memorize the long monologues that he would present to her minutes before shooting, his response was that she should “just say whatever you remember because that’ll be enough.” But Mr. Malick’s insistence on freedom does not preclude obsessive fine-tuning: after the shoot, he called her in — by her count, more than 30 times — to record new lines and re-record old ones.
As Mr. Malick’s films grow increasingly allusive and amorphous, he seems more than ever to find them in the editing. “Our focus was to make it more of an experience and not about plot,” said Mark Yoshikawa, one of the five editors who worked on “The Tree of Life.” “The flow of the film was an ever-changing animal.” Without a linear story to guide them, the editors had to integrate live-action scenes that shift between two time periods (and more than one reality) with nature shots and special-effects sequences. Mr. Malick, an avid bird watcher, had previously used computer-generated effects only once, to add a now extinct parakeet to the Virginia wilds of “The New World.” “The Tree of Life,” which depicts the Big Bang, the beginning of pre-cellular life and the Mesozoic age of dinosaurs, called for extensive effects work. Dan Glass, the senior visual effects supervisor, said that the guiding principle was realism: “There’s not a shot that doesn’t have something natural or organic in it.” Even though entire movie worlds are now routinely digitzed from scratch, Mr. Glass and his team worked with existing satellite and space-probe imagery, and used optical tricks, like manipulating film speeds and camera lenses.
For the astrophysical sequences, Mr. Malick turned to the filmmaker and special effects veteran Douglas Trumbull, best known for his work on “2001: A Space Odyssey.” They set up a lab in Austin, Tex., where Mr. Malick lives, and essentially conducted chemistry experiments: photographing paints and liquids (like fluorescein dyes and half-and-half) in tanks of water at high speeds, which produced images that could be digitally composited to resemble astronomical phenomena like interstellar clouds. “With computer graphics everything is based on some algorithm and there’s often a predictability to it,” Mr. Trumbull said. “Terry and I wanted randomness and irregularity that seemed truly natural.”
“The Tree of Life” deepens and complicates Mr. Malick’s view of nature. Detractors make him out to be a moony New Ager, but his films are not just awestruck paeans to nature, nor are they simple assertions of man’s place in nature. “The Tree of Life” distinguishes the way of nature (equated with the father) from the way of grace (the mother). Ms. Chastain interpreted her character as a personification of “the spiritual world,” a contrast to the natural world, “which is all about survival of the fittest,” she said, and which in “Tree of Life” takes the form of both Darwinian natural selection and American bootstrap capitalism.
Mr. Malick’s work has long been discussed in philosophical terms — his background as a Heidegger scholar is often invoked — but increasingly his films bespeak an unfashionably overt interest in spirituality. Biblical references run through the films, and “The Tree of Life” opens with a quotation from the Book of Job. But Ms. Chastain, who prepared for her role by studying paintings of the Madonna and practicing meditation, said she does not see it as a film about Christianity. “I consider him more of a spiritual person than a religious person,” Mr. Fisk said.
Mr. Malick has already shot — and is starting to edit — his sixth feature. Set in the present day, the still-untitled film stars Ben Affleck and Rachel McAdams, and has been described as a romance. As always with Mr. Malick, everyone involved is tight-lipped, but Mr. Lubezki and Mr. Fisk, who both worked on it, said it is his boldest film yet. “It makes ‘Tree’ almost seem old-fashioned,” Mr. Fisk said.
Growing more radical with age, Mr. Malick seems intent on evolving the language of narrative cinema, on finding a form free and flexible enough to encompass the big, unanswerable questions of human existence. “Every film now is almost a frustration, because Terry doesn’t know if he’s said enough,” Mr. Fisk said. “But I also think he’s finally making movies exactly the way he wants to.”(source : nytimes.com)
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