Happy 77th Birthday, Terrence Malick! Born today in 1943 as Terrence Frederick Malick, this American screenwriter, producer and film director began his career as part of the New Hollywood filmmaking wave.
Born in Ottawa, Illinois, Malick spent many of his formative summers working as a farmhand, an experience upon which he would draw extensively in his films.
Year later, Malick went to school in Austin, Texas. He did his undergraduate work at Harvard University, graduating summa cum laude with a degree in philosophy in 1965.
A member of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society, he attended Magdalen College, Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship, but did not finish his thesis allegedly because of a disagreement with his advisor.
In 1969, he was accepted into the first graduating class at the American Film Institute's Center for Advanced Studies. He had financed his studies by rewriting screenplays (one such being 'Dirty Harry').
Malick later earned his first feature screenwriting credit on one of Stuart Rosenberg's ('Cool Hand Luke') films.
Upon completing his AFI studies in 1972, Malick then began his career at twenty-five. He became a part of the New Hollywood wave, emerging during the golden era of that decade of American filmmaking.
That same year, Malick began production on his directorial debut. This was in writing, producing and directing the first film of which he is best known, being the 1973 American neo-noir period crime/drama film 'Badlands'.
Released in 1973, the film was an iconic and loose retelling of the Starkweather/Fugate murder spree set in 1950s America.
Rejecting all studio offers, Malick gathered financing through a partnership agreement with a group of several small investors, shooting with a non-union crew on a budget of less than $350,000.
Malick then fell silent for five years. In 1977, he spent a year as a lecturer at MIT.
When Malick finally resurfaced, he had written and directed the second film of which he is best known.
This was with the 1978 American period romance/drama film 'Days of Heaven'. It was shot with impeccable beauty by Spanish cinematographer Néstor Almendros and co-composed by Ennio Morricone.
Also, during that time, Malick's companion was American film director and screenplay writer Michie Gleason. She had served as the assistant director for 'Days of Heaven'.
The following year, 'Days of Heaven' won an Oscar for Best Cinematography.
It was also nominated for Best Score, Best Sound and Best Costume Design. However, it didn't win. This occurred at the 51st Academy Awards in early April 1979.
One month later, Malick won the Best Director Award. This occurred at the 32nd Cannes Film Festival in May 1979. Afterwards, the critical praise for 'Days of Heaven' was even more thunderous than with Malick's debut.
Post the release of 'Days of Heaven', Malick relocated to Paris, France. This was where he lived in virtual seclusion without publicly commenting on his past movie work or on the possibility of future projects.
Suddenly disappearing, Malick had gone into self-imposed exile at a time when he was at the height of his command.
Rumors then abounded as to his whereabouts, until it finally became clear that he took up residence in Paris and proceeded to live in semi-seclusion, emerging only for uncredited rewrite work on several films.
Despite this, 'Days of Heaven' still continues to appear in polls of the best films ever made, and appeared at #49 on a BBC poll of the greatest American films.
In 1993, four years after the United States National Film Registry was established, 'Badlands' was selected for preservation by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Finally, after nearly two decades of silence, in 1997, Malick announced his return to filmmaking. This was in writing and directing the third film of which he is best known, being the epic 1998 American/Australian war/drama film 'The Thin Red Line'.
The film was an adaptation of American novelist James Jones' 1962 war story fiction novel of the same name.
Though highly anticipated, while not the long-awaited masterpiece many were expecting, the film was met with positive reviews.
Martin Scorsese ranked 'The Thin Red Line' as his second-favorite film of the 1990s. On At the Movies, Gene Siskel called it "the greatest contemporary war film I've seen".
One year later, 'The Thin Red Line' was nominated for seven Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Original Score and Best Sound. However, it won none of these.
This occurred at the 71st Academy Awards in late March 1999.
While the common conception of Malick as a recluse is inaccurate, he is nevertheless famously protective of his private life.
His contracts stipulate that his likeness may not be used for promotional purposes, and he routinely declines requests for interviews.
The stylistic elements of the director's work have inspired divided opinions among film scholars and audiences; some praised his films for their cinematography and aesthetics, while others found them lacking in plot and character development.
His first five films have nonetheless ranked highly in retrospective decade-end and all-time polls. These, among others, have been noted by critics for their philosophical themes.
According to film scholar Lloyd Michaels, the director's primary themes include "the isolated individual's desire for transcendence amidst established social institutions, the grandeur and untouched beauty of nature, the competing claims of instinct and reason, and the lure of the open road".
Roger Ebert considered Malick's body of work to have a unifying common theme: "Human lives diminish beneath the overarching majesty of the world."
In Ebert's opinion, Malick is among the few remaining directors who yearn "to make no less than a masterpiece".
In the early 2010s, Malick returned with writing and directing the fourth and final film of which he is best known.
This was the epic 2011 American experimental drama film 'The Tree of Life'. The film was a philosophical essay about God, life, fate, and family that garnered a thunderous critical buzz.
The film had been shot by Mexican cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. He is a regular collaborator with Mexican film director, producer, and screenwriter Alejandro G. Iñárritu ('Amores Perros', 'Babel', 'Birdman', 'The Revenant').
After premiering and winning the coveted Palme d'Or at the 64th Cannes Film Festival in May of that same year, 'The Tree of Life' had later opened to indifferent business.
The following year, 'The Tree of Life' received three Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Cinematography. However, it won none of these. This occurred at the 84th Academy Awards in late February 2012.
Later that year, 'The Tree of Life' appeared in the 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll of the world's top 250 films as well as BBC's poll of the greatest American films, one of the few 21st-century works to be included in either.
'The Tree of Life' was also later named the seventh-greatest film since 2000 in a BBC poll of one hundred and seventy-seven critics.
While reviewing 'The Tree of Life', New York Times-based American journalist and film critic A. O. Scott compared Malick to innovative "homegrown romantics" such as the writers Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, James Agee, and Herman Melville.
Scott did this in the sense that their "definitive writings" also "did not sit comfortably or find universal favor in their own time" but nonetheless "leaned perpetually into the future, pushing their readers forward toward a new horizon of understanding".
Malick's body of work has inspired polarizing opinions. According to American professor, editor, and author Lloyd Michaels, "few American directors have inspired such adulation and rejection with each successive film" as Malick.
Michaels said that in all of American cinema, Malick is the filmmaker most frequently "granted genius status after creating such a discontinuous and limited body of work".
Malick makes use of broad philosophical and spiritual overtones, such as in the form of meditative voice-overs from individual characters.
Some critics felt these elements made the films engaging and unique while others found them pretentious and gratuitous, particularly in his post-hiatus work.
Michaels believed the opinions 'Days of Heaven' continues to elicit among scholars and film enthusiasts is exemplary of this:
"The debate continues to revolve around what to make of 'its extremities of beauty', whether the exquisite lighting, painterly compositions, dreamy dissolves, and fluid camera movements, combined with the epic grandeur and elegiac tone, sufficiently compensate for the thinness of the tale, the two-dimensionality of the characters, and the resulting emotional detachment of the audience."
American educator, writer, and non-profit leader Chris Wisniewski has regarded both 'Days of Heaven' and 'The New World'.
He viewed them not as "literary nor theatrical" but "principally cinematic" in their aesthetic, intimating narrative, emotional, and conceptual themes through the use of "image and sound" instead of "foregrounding dialogue, events or characters".
He highlighted Malick's use of "rambling philosophical voiceovers; the placid images of nature, offering quiet contrast to the evil deeds of men; the stunning cinematography, often achieved with natural light; the striking use of music".
Among his credits, Malick is also known for directing 'The New World' (2005), 'To the Wonder' (2012), and 'Song to Song' (2017).
One of the most reclusive of filmmakers, Malick is one of the great enigmas of contemporary filmmaking, a shadowy figure whose towering reputation rests largely on a very small body of work.
Malick is one of the most meticulous, original and enigmatic American filmmakers to emerge in the vaunted 1970s. His films had proved to doubtful critics that Malick was still a master filmmaker at the top of his game.
Unlike other equally gifted directors who came of age during that time (Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg), Malick's source of inspiration came from his rural, rather than urban, roots.
These were often displayed with lush photography and deeply resonant voiceovers that waxed philosophical about humanity's place in nature.
A visual stylist beyond compare, Malick emerged during the golden era of 1970s American filmmaking, bringing to the screen a dreamlike, ethereal beauty countered by elliptical, ironic storytelling.
Resonant and mythic, his films illuminated themes of love and death with rare mastery, their indelible images distinguished by economy and precision.
Nicknamed Sparky or Terry, Malick has been active from 1969–present.
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If Malick was a chef...
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