Terrence Malick has a way of slipping through your fingers. He is known as the unfathomable creator of two works of genius and as an assiduous recluse. His only films - Badlands (1973) and Days Of Heaven (1978) - constitute less an oeuvre than a religion: his followers respond to criticism of his work as if it were sacrilege. Gary Oldman says he would play a shadow on a wall in a Malick film, and George Clooney has offered to carry the cameras.
Both actors were hired for Malick's first film in 20 years, The The Thin Red Line, which has been nominated for seven Academy Awards - including best director - and which is due to open here on March 5th. Malick has been called the J.D. Salinger of the cinema, and also its Thomas Pynchon. He can out-Kubrick Kubrick. And his debut was said to be the best by an American since Citizen Kane.
As the facts about Malick accumulate - from accounts of friends and colleagues, from documentaries, from old interviews in French magazines, he seems only to disappear further from view. Malick never adds up, just splinters off, and fades in and out like a fiction.
He was born in Illinois in 1942. Or in Bartlesville, Oklahoma in 1945. Most likely it was Waco, Texas, 1943. His father was an executive at Phillips Petroleum, and Terrence, the eldest of three boys, was sent to an Episcopalian school in Austin.
The family is thought to have moved to Oklahoma, but by the end of high school Terry was a star American football player at school back in Texas, working in oil wells during the summer.
He could, some say, have made a career out of football, but in 1961 he left to go to Harvard, where he majored in philosophy. On graduating, he won a Rhodes scholarship and went to study philosophy at Magdalen College, Oxford. During that year, he is thought to have visited philosopher Martin Heidegger in Germany. In 1969, he would publish a translation of Heidegger's The Essence of Reasons.
Malick gave up philosophy to become a journalist, then gave up journalism to teach philosophy. He worked in the London bureau of Newsweek - or was it the Miami office of Life? - and apparently wrote for the New Yorker, although I can find no trace of his contributions. Assuming his articles were unsigned, we might wish to believe the rumour that the New Yorker's obituaries of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were written by Malick. Four months of 1967 can possibly be accounted for by a trip to Bolivia to cover the activities of Che Guevara. Nothing came of the story.
He taught philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but gave up after a year and enrolled at the American Film Institute in its first year (1969). "I wouldn't get in now," he later told French movie magazine Positif, "but then they were taking almost anyone." While there, he made a short, in which he acted with Harry Dean Stanton, and re-wrote several scripts, apparently specialising in road movies. He acquired a reputation for script-doctoring, and is said to have worked on early versions of Pocket Money, Dirty Harry, Jack Nicholson's directorial debut - Drive, He Said - and a number of Warren Beatty films.
The year he left college, he made Badlands, for $350,000 in out-of-pocket costs. He was 30 when it was released. Universally revered and repeatedly imitated, Badlands is taken from the true story of spree killer Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate, played in the film by Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek.
The real pair hit the road in 1958 after Starkweather murdered Fugate's family, and eliminated anyone else in his way. He got the electric chair the following year, and she was imprisoned for life.
The names and some of the facts are changed in Malick's version, but what gives the film its strength is the protagonists' curious detachment from their actions, and the viewer's corresponding detachment from the characters, so that it all seems to pass as in a daze. It is an experiment in how innocence as much as guilt can lead to murder, the wide-eyed blankness of these kids propelling them purposefully, pointlessly forward.
In a Moving Pictures documentary on British television's Channel 4 last year, Sheen said Malick had given him one image for his character's weapon - it was a magic wand. " `You disappear people,' he said. `People are in the way, nothing personal but - I disappear you. Bang. You're gone'." Malick also said he wanted to preserve a "fairy-tale atmosphere". It's a sign of his sophistication that he sees fairy tales as something akin to the violence of Badlands.
In the only interview he has given on this subject, Malick speaks so clearly that one wonders why he hasn't spoken more. Holly and Kit are like children, he says, because "they don't think death is definitive". Holly, who narrates the story in a voice-over, doesn't know who her audience is and isn't sure of what they want to know, so speaks like someone who "wants to make as favourable an impression as possible". Her "pose isn't simple, it's contradictory", and Malick's favourite line in the film, he says, is when she tells us that sometimes she wishes she could fall asleep and be carried off to a magical land, adding, as if this were necessary, "but that never happened".
If Badlands is a neatly threaded cluster of ambiguities, it seems of a piece with Malick's earlier concerns. In his translator's introduction to Heidegger's The Essence of Reasons, Malick writes: "Our confusion is not anarchic; it has its own discipline . . . And only if we know how we stand related to (Heidegger) will we also know what to make of our confusion." He writes cleanly, carefully, and leaves things open. He is not in the business of explaining away difficulty, and confusion is something he recognises as a valid, even useful, response. There are echoes here of the delicate, hands-off voice-over he wrote for Holly Sargis.
A Heideggerian analysis for Days of Heaven has been put forward by Stanley Cavell, professor of philosophy, writer on film and Malick's old tutor at Harvard. The "extremities of beauty" in the film, Cavell argues, can be seen as a "realisation of some sentences from Heidegger". Human subjects are reduced to insignificance in the face of nature. The film offers a metaphysical vision of the world and, Cavell writes, "one has never quite seen the scene of human existence realised this way on film before."
The extreme beauty of that film is something I can't quite get to grips with and, sac-religiously, I wonder whether Days of Heaven would not be so lauded had Malick not disappeared immediately afterwards. Nestor Almendros won an Oscar for the cinematography, and the film looks like a cross between Dorothea Lange's photographs of families in wagons and a Corot landscape come to life.
Some migrant workers arrive for work in the wheat-fields of the Texas Panhandle in 1916 and get into a messy menage with the boss. There are blazing fires, deathly close-ups of locusts, bluish moonlit scenes and silhouettes against the light. But the film is like a gallery of these shots, changing far too fast, with a couple of lines of dialogue every five scenes or so.
This time a voice-over was a last resort rather than an original intention, and it still steals the show. The young Linda Manz is a Chicago gangster and play-school storyteller in one, clueless and knowing at the same time. Brooke Adams is another bundle of contradictions - a down-sloping mouth which frowns even when it smiles, an open baby face and a husky, womanly, modern voice. Sam Shephard is statuesque, and Richard Gere, who refused to cut his dumb wavy hair, is irredeemably waxen (Malick wanted John Travolta).
As they filmed, Malick all but discarded his script. He wasn't getting good performances, and decided just to shoot miles of film and solve the problems in the editing process (he was said to have run $800,000 over budget). Sometimes they only filmed 20 minutes a day, because Malick wanted to use the "magic" light that came between sunset and nightfall.
The film took two years to edit, and it shows. A lot of the spoken lines ended up on the cutting-room floor; every finicky cut and dropped line of dialogue chips some of the ease off Malick's vision. "Terry wouldn't let go," says one colleague, "he'd nit-pick you to death." The editor thought they'd never get to the end. What they came up with is, I think, like Chekhov on the prairie - there are long pauses between brief words in the wheat fields. The photography is wonderful but too ostentatious in relation to the stilted rest.
`He is a genius," says one co-worker, "that's the good news and the bad news." Malick's neuroses are referred to more or less affectionately, but either way, they are often noted, as if signs of genius had to be monitored. Nestor Almendros, who continually said he was only working on Days of Heaven to give credibility to Malick's insanity, plainly remarked that "blue sky bothers him". (The sky in Days of Heaven is, for the most part, white.) When referring to work in progress, people talk about a "project he's been caressing for some time". Sheen reports, rather wonderfully, that on Badlands Malick took notes all the time but never had any paper. He would write all over his hands and wrists and when he gave him a note he'd be following a trail of ink, turning his hands bemusedly before him. "Oh," he'd say, catching a scrawl on his thumb, "and I want you to do this."
Robert Geisler and John Roberdeau, his producers on The Thin Red Line, say he would fax his script to them five or six pages at a time, and required immediate corrections. Sometimes he'd just send a paragraph, or a couple of lines of dialogue. That film, which stars Clooney and Oldman, Sean Penn, Woody Harrelson, John Cusack, John Travolta, Nick Nolte, Bill Pullman, and a host of unknowns, proposes to be Malick's Iliad. Or so say the producers. It is taken from the novel by James Jones, the second in the second-world-war trilogy which began with From Here to Eternity.
The plot is centred on the battle of Guadalcanal, and Malick wants it to be an epic, with the breadth and gravity of Lawrence of Arabia.
Geisler and Roberdeau say meetings for The Thin Red Line were held in Paris. They would eat with Malick at the brasserie where the Jones family had lunch every day while the book was being written, they would stroll around the Jardin des Plantes and around the Luxembourg gardens. In the evenings they would take in some Moliere (Malick even spoke about doing an adaptation of Tartuffe).
Malick's wife, Michele Gleason, is French (his first wife, Jill Jakes, was an assistant of Arthur Penn, one of Malick's heroes and the director of Bonnie and Clyde). All this is in partial response to a question People magazine asks regularly about Malick: Where Is He Now? Where he is, or has been, ranges from Austin, Texas to Paris, France. One theory has it that after making Days of Heaven, which was in part inspired by chapter 12 of Genesis, Malick felt he had shown his version of the Creation and set off on travels that lasted years - to Paris, the Alps, to Greece and Nepal.
A recent book by Peter Biskind - Easy Riders, Raging Bulls - reveals that in 1968 Malick was asked by his father to go and rescue his youngest brother, who was taking high-powered guitar master classes in Spain and had broken his own hands in frustration. When Malick refused, his father went - and returned with his brother's dead body. Biskind says: "He always bore a heavy burden of guilt."
Sheen speaks of "pain and suffering" in Malick's "personal life," and of how he "had to heal". He is generally thought to have gone in search of some sort of spiritual relief. But now some say he is teaching film in France, others that he's working as a hairdresser.
He made one incontrovertible appearance, though, in an un-credited cameo in Badlands. He plays the person who arrives with a roll of drawings at the rich man's house, where Kit and Holly are holding the inhabitants hostage. Malick meant to find a local actor and wanted to re-shoot the scene, but he stayed in the final cut: a burly, neatly-dressed, clean-shaven young man with a chubby chin, a drawn-out, oddly-pitched voice and a concentrated but perplexed look in his eye.