Malick's latest

HitFix In Contention

Review: 'To the Wonder' is Terrence Malick's typically enchanted Tree of Love

Heartfelt song to personal and spiritual intimacy proves predictably divisive

By Guy Lodge Sunday, Sep 2, 2012 10:16 AM

Critic's rating B+

VENICE -- Stop the presses: There's been booing at a screening of the new Terrence Malick film. Whether they came from the same small-but-loud faction of supposed journalists who vocally expressed their displeasure at "The Tree of Life" in Cannes last year, or a fresh batch of doubters, such jeers are unusual for films that feature no purported moral transgressions, nor any sheer ineptitude of craft. (Films aren't booed at festivals simply for being bad, you know: a year ago, Madonna's "W.E." heard not a one.)
Rather, Malick is one of the few senior A-list filmmakers who can get razzed in this fashion for being too sincere, too lyrical, too himself. And he is all of those things, to both bewitching and bemusing effect, in "To the Wonder," a follow-up to "The Tree of Life" in more senses than mere proximity. With not even 16 months separating their premieres, they are by far the nearest-born works in a filmography otherwise thick with white space, underlining the impression of two sister films: both iridescently pictorial, ambiguously self-focused and inclined to lure critics into terms they should normally feel self-conscious about using. "Tone poem." "Meditation." "Elegy." "Prayer." Ghastly words when abused, the lot of them. Malick's cinema somehow wears them well.
So why, given this tonal and textual consistency, did I feel admiringly detached from "The Tree of Life," finding its explosion of formal beauty a discontinuous front for its unnourished human expressions, but far more stimulated and moved by his latest? "To the Wonder" is structurally a more modest, more linear film than "Tree" -- no dinosaurs here, folks, though fans of sea turtles should prick up their ears -- but it's no less vulnerable to charges of excessive preciosity, particularly from those whose secularity applies to churches beyond the House of Malick.
Though not evangelical, "Tree" was unapologetically steeped in the director's Christianity, its hushed negotiation of nature and grace culminating in a rapt celebration of the afterlife. The more earthbound "Wonder" isn't as fixated on such unknowables, but it's no less faith-based, and not just in the secondary presence of Javier Bardem as a Catholic priest  struggling to bring comfort to an economically famished Oklahoman community.
Its lean primary narrative, too, amounts to an investigation of sin, forgiveness and devotion in the domestic space, as Midwest engineer Neil (Ben Affleck) and his French lover Marina (Olga Kurylenko) struggle to build a moral foundation for their relationship, and subsequent marriage, on the unwelcoming, wind-blown plains of his home turf. (The "Wonder" of the title is the French island of Mont St. Michel, where the couple are shown frolicking in halcyon days.) At different stages of the protracted breakup, both fall prey to other people's arms: Marina, fleetingly, with a street acquaintance at an Econo Lodge; Neil, with more lasting and troubling impact, to former high-school flame Jane (Rachel McAdams).
Seemingly inspired by the dissolution of the director's own second marriage in the 1980s, the story forms a less far-reaching basis for spiritual investigation than its predecessor's classical, era-hopping war between father and son, but there's dramatic satisfaction in watching these otherwise opaque characters emerge through their tussles with more contained moral decisions and consequences: it's the rare film that feels more affecting for the stakes being slightly smaller. Though Malick's requisite rolling landscapes and infinite bruise-colored skies are still very much present and correct (Emmanuel Lubezki devotees should prepare for, well, the wonder), it's the director's most intimate film since 1978's "Days of Heaven," as well as his most gaspingly romantic. If the title "Tree of Life" loftily bracketed a branching journey through mortality and beyond, this is his Tree of Love.
"Everything's so beautiful here!" cries Marina's pre-teen daughter from a previous liaison, as the makeshift family wheels its way through a cavernous, hard-lit supermarket. The line prompts one of the few laughs ever likely to be heard during a Terrence Malick film, but it's indicative of the earnest enchantment coursing through "Wonder"'s veins that he and Lubezki themselves seek to beautify everything in this onscreen environment: the first fully contemporary setting of his career, and one even more grayishly forbidding than that explored in his 1974 debut "Badlands."
As befits the title, everything is a gaze-demanding spectacle in this simple world, be it minutiae like the shadow-box theater created by a gaudy chandelier in an underlit corridor and the technicolor tangle of real-life tattoos on Affleck's biceps, or more extravagantly surreal flourishes like the stormy herd of bison closing in on Affleck and Kurylenko as they embrace in a wheaten field. Speaking of which, we hardly need reminding at this point that no one shoots swaying expanses of grass like Malick -- and Lubezki's further virtuosic-yet-specific wizardry here marks a happy extension of their own professional romance. (Chalk up one non-negotiable Oscar nomination for a film that looks unlikely to be garlanded as generously as "The Tree of Life.")
Like Malick's customary accompanying swirl of highly recognizable classical scoring -- selected composers this time range from Tchaikovsky to Shostakovich to Arvo Part, with young Kiwi-born, Texas-based composer Hanan Townshend doing the bridging work -- this super-aestheticized approach is bound to aggravate as many as it enthralls, but in a film dedicated to ideal but elusive forms of love, it feels thematically grounded. Ditto the casting: with their vocal contributions limited to the same strain of hushed, ecstatic voiceover ("I open my eyes... I melt into the eternal light," and so on) delivered predominantly by Jessica Chastain in "The Tree of Life," the four stars aren't performers so much as motifs.
One could wonder why a director as famously indifferent to actors (and commerce) as Malick -- Rachel Weisz's role, incidentally, has been given the old Adrien Brody heave-ho here -- continues to hire such big-name actors. (You might think he of all directors would be in favor of non-pro casts.) The combined attractiveness of this star quartet runs the risk of making the film's least integrated or resonant sequences -- those in which Bardem wearily calls on all manner of buck-toothed, poverty-stricken local parishioners -- the teeniest bit condescending to boot. Even this faint absurdity, however, seems parcelled up in Malick's restless, tender, unfashionable quest for beauty in its highest physical and spiritual forms. Never, to crib a line from "A Clockwork Orange," has a Terrence Malick film felt more like gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh.

Brad on Malick

Brad Pitt talks about Terrence Malick and The Tree of Life

What happened when Hollywood's most photographed actor teamed up with Terrence Malick, its most reclusive and paparazzi-shy director? Brad Pitt tells all

Steve Rose
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 30 June 2011 22.00 BST

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That Pitt's real family were staying close by also presented complications. He and Angelina Jolie take it in turns to look after the family (at that stage four children; Jolie was pregnant with twins) while the other works, and they travel as a unit. But where Pitt and Jolie go, legions of paparazzi follow. For a recluse such as Malick, it's a different world – possibly his definition of hell. "It was terribly, terribly uncomfortable for him," Pitt admits, recalling the time a photographer ambushed them together at a local restaurant. Does he envy Malick's well-maintained privacy? "Sure I do! He gets to just make things. It took me a good decade of hiding in my house and not going outside to even, like, get my arms around this idea of celebrity, where suddenly people are looking for you to pick your nose or get a shot of you kissing some woman. It's a very discombobulating thing. But Angie and I have got it down pretty well. We have to hide behind some walls, but we're good."

On a theological level, Pitt and Malick were also in different worlds. As its title suggests, The Tree of Life is shot through with biblical, or at least spiritual, symbolism. It begins with a quote from the Book of Job and ends with what could be construed as some form of rapture or afterlife, with much musing on nature, grace and God in between. Would Pitt describe his own upbringing as religious? "Are you kidding me? I grew up in the fuckin' buckle of the Bible Belt!" He replies. "Terry and I, we have our areas where we meet and we have our respectful disagreements. He sees God in science and science in God, and I respect that. But this idea of an all-powerful, watching being that's controlling our moves and giving us a chance to say he's the greatest so we get into some eternal heaven – that just doesn't work for me, man. I got a real problem with it. I see the value of religion and what it offers to people as a cushion and I don't want to step on that. On the other hand, I've seen where I grew up how it becomes separatist, and I get quite aggravated and antagonistic. I see religion more as a truck stop on your way to figuring out who you are."

The Tree of Life is probably too unconventional to reach audiences in America's Christian heartland, but it would be interesting to see what they would make of it. They could find little to object to in its tone and content, but it is led by two of the country's most notorious "Hollywood liberals": Pitt and Sean Penn, both of whom seem to be red rags to the Christian right (among other causes, Pitt has campaigned for same-sex marriage, and once declared that he and Jolie would not marry until gay couples were allowed to). Alongside the biblical overtones, The Tree of Life also advances a Darwinist history of creation. The movie could give churchgoers a serious headache. But like Malick, Pitt has no time for critics of the movie – and there are many. It was both booed and applauded at Cannes.

Pitt has moved on. His and Jolie's twins were born straight after the movie had been shot – "I remember because we were thinking up names during the shoot" – then he went on to Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. He's currently shooting the action thriller World War Z. "I like extremes. A little highbrow, a little lowbrow." He talks of wanting to pursue his love of architecture, but his time working with Malick seems to have stayed with him, and not just because he's still operating as the director's media ambassador. It seems to have brought his own beliefs into sharper focus: "Watching the film, and I've seen many cuts, I'm a guy who fights the idea of heaven but what I do respect is that there is a greater power than anything we understand, and for me the film is about that. Perhaps we don't need these religious concoctions to pillow the fear of death. Just the fact that there is an unknown, and something greater, can bring a feeling of peace. That's enough for me."

TOL - Fincher and Nolan discuss Malick

Terrence Malick: Hollywood’s poet returns

With Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life – only his fifth film in 38 years – about to open, Tim Robey marvels at the mystique that surrounds this reclusive US director.

By Tim Robey 7:00AM BST 09 Apr 2011

Follow Tim Robey on Twitter

Last week it was announced that Terrence Malick’s new film The Tree of Life will open in Britain next month, on May 4.

One can only imagine the shock among Cannes Film Festival organisers, who had been expecting to welcome stars Brad Pitt and Sean Penn to the Croisette for the world premiere a week later. The news won’t have pleased other distributors handling the film’s global rollout, either. I suspect we haven’t heard the end of this saga.

Somehow, among the world’s leading film-makers, only Malick could have inspired such mayhem. There’s no other director alive whose work is the object of such awestruck and jittery anticipation, fuelled by the long wait his devotees must endure as he pieces each new offering together.

By Malick’s standards, the period that has elapsed since his last film, 2005’s underseen Pocahontas epic The New World, is little longer than the blink of an eye – his 20-year absence between Days of Heaven (1978) and The Thin Red Line (1998) is the stuff an entire legend is built on. Still, when you bear in mind that shooting for The Tree of Life began in early 2008, and the film was first tipped for release during in 2009, the delay has been torture enough.

What’s more, Malick has supposedly already finished shooting his next project, tentatively entitled The Burial, with Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams, Rachel Weisz and Javier Bardem in key roles. At his current work rate, we can expect to feast our eyes on that one some time around 2017.

Partly because of his devotion to a meticulous, artisanal approach to film-making, and partly because of the sheer secrecy in which his projects are enshrouded, a Malick film is more than an event – it has the religious quality of an ecstatic unveiling.

He has only four films under his belt, with two still to be assessed, but some argue he has yet to make anything less than a masterpiece. The sheer quality of filmography places him in cinema’s very select perfect-achievers’ club, up there with Jean Vigo (L’Atalante, Zéro de Conduite) and Charles Laughton (The Night of the Hunter), each of whom had far shorter-lived directorial careers.

The myth of Malick extends back even before his first feature, Badlands (1973), which was hailed as the greatest debut by an American director since Citizen Kane. He was born on November 30 1943, either in Ottawa, Illinois, or Waco, Texas, depending on which sources you believe.

A second-generation Assyrian, he grew up working on oilfields before graduating from St Stephen’s Episcopal School in Austin, studying philosophy at Harvard under musician-turned-thinker Stanley Cavell, and then continuing as a Rhodes scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford.

The tenets of 20th-century philosophy inform Malick’s cinema more than anything else – certainly more than other people’s movies. Both calm and troubled, his sensibility is so unusual in a Hollywood context as to make his films as exotic as tropical birds; indeed, ornithology plays a more integral role in his work than any jumped-up editing tricks or nods to Hitchcock.

It can be said with cast-iron certainty that he is the only man to have both coaxed Colin Farrell into giving his subtlest film performance (in The New World) and also published a translation of Heidegger’s The Essence of Reasons (in 1969). It’s Malick’s esotericism, wedded to a near-impenetrable reclusiveness, which lends his work such tantalising mystique.

How did he end up in film-making at all? After stints of journalism and teaching, he made good contacts at the American Film Institute, leading to jobs doctoring scripts in Hollywood. These are the highly prized, well-paid gigs for the industry’s most bankable writers.

It’s another mysterious Malickian contradiction that this intellectual giant of the cinema has paid the rent with this most lucrative form of hackwork. Indeed, the invisible hand Malick has had on other directors’ films has been a rumoured constant throughout his career.

He has the writing credit on Stuart Rosenberg’s crime Western Pocket Money (1972) and – these are the most persistent theories – is said to have written early drafts of both Dirty Harry (1971) and the Jerry Lee Lewis biopic Great Balls of Fire! (1989).

On set, his reputation for prickly perfectionism and mercurial inspiration rivals that of Stanley Kubrick – he’s famously capable of departing from script and shooting schedule to chase a sunset, capture grass swaying in the wind or document parrots for half a day, leaving the actors to sit around in their trailers, waiting for their moment.

He feels his way into a film and through it, to the bitter end of the editing process, perusing endless reels. Few directors truly “find a film in the edit” like Malick. The stone-cold depiction of a true-crime murder spree in Badlands perhaps stands as his most taut and disciplined piece of storytelling, thanks to the economy its small budget imposed.

Story, though, is frequently the last thing on his mind. His quest for a poetic cinema, threatening to cast off narrative moorings altogether, has aggravated mainstream critics as often as it has earned him disciples.

When you consider why actors still queue up to work with him, you have to weigh the facts. It’s not an easy ride: his fights with Richard Gere, who played an itinerant turn-of-the-century labourer in the astonishingly beautiful Days of Heaven, were notorious even before its release.

And yet look at the performances he gets – Martin Sheen is quite something in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, but not half as good as he is as restless greaser Kit in Badlands, wearing the character’s gangly, careless bravado like well-worn jeans. Sissy Spacek gives Malick credit for plucking her from obscurity and moulding her into the actress she became. Her narration as Holly, Sheen’s teenage moll, is a marvel of eerie affectlessness, a feat also pulled off by Linda Manz, who plays Gere’s younger sister in Days of Heaven.

The success of these first two films established Malick as an important and original artist at a time when Hollywood was unusually interested in the breed. Days of Heaven, even so, had been a nightmare. Malick and cinematographer Nestor Almendros insisted on shooting most of the film in the 25 minutes before sunset, which gives the movie its slanting light and evanescent glow, and won it the Best Cinematography Oscar, but drove it considerably over schedule and budget.

One thousand locusts had to be shipped in to the Alberta prairie, while peanut shells, dropped from helicopters simulated the big swarm. The editing process, setting the pattern that still persists, took two years to complete.

What Malick got up to in the next two decades is anyone’s guess. There was a project called Q, about the origins of life, which it seems The Tree of Life has now become. The first attempt was abandoned in 1983, after much effort and expense spent photographing jellyfish around the Great Barrier Reef and ice shelves breaking off in the Arctic Circle. Suffice to say that the dialogue-free screenplay he would send to Paramount filled them with more confusion than confidence.

He moved to Paris. He was offered an adaptation of D M Thomas’s famously unfilmed Holocaust novel The White Hotel in 1989, but turned it down. He tinkered away on abandoned projects, toying with Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, Larry McMurtry’s The Desert Rose and a stage version of Mizoguchi’s great Japanese samurai tragedy Sansho the Bailiff. In between, he notched up the most famously prolonged wilderness period in Hollywood history.

Malick’s comeback, The Thin Red Line, took shape as his most monumental endeavour yet, and was received by the industry with something between hearty applause and vague bewilderment – nominated for seven Oscars, it won none.

Overshadowed by Saving Private Ryan the same year, this rangily ambitious South Pacific war poem happens to be this writer’s favourite film, but I doubt the same could be said for Adrien Brody, who thought he had the main role until he saw it, and realised that he was the ultimate victim of Malick’s scissor-happy assembly methods. In the final cut he has about five minutes of screen time. There are trees in the film as prominent as he is now.

Among the famous names Malick had cast to help Fox bankroll the film, many others (Gary Oldman, Mickey Rourke, Viggo Mortensen) found their contributions expunged altogether. Though Malick’s original six-hour version has never been made public, the three-hour cut is still majestic and profound as a statement on man’s destruction of his earthly paradise.

One of the reasons our wait for The Tree of Life has been bearable is the hope that it will help Malick bypass the messy reception of his last release, The New World, which was screened to critics in a rush before he was entirely finished editing, then recut by a further 15 minutes for its theatrical release.

Speculation about the new film is rife, fuelled by trailers and posters that play up its abstract gorgeousness and make the plot – spanning decades in the lives of a Midwestern family, with Pitt as Penn’s father – hard to discern. It appears to be about life, death, the galaxy, the ocean, jungle canopies – and dinosaurs. Everything, in other words.

Whatever Malick has pulled off this time, his grand ambition and uncompromising methods continue to make him one of a kind, a director worth following to the ends of the earth, which is very often just where he wants to take us.

• The Tree of Life is out on May 4

The Tree Of Life: Vision Quest

The visual effects team behind Terrence Malick's long-awaited cinematic return talk exclusively to LWLies about the making of the film.

Trevor Hogg
Tuesday, March 08 2011 11:46 GMT

Considered by many to be an enigma because of his reclusive nature and the long gaps between his films, American director Terrence Malick returns to the big screen this year with The Tree of Life.

Partly autobiographical, the story revolves around a boy growing up in the 1950s American Midwest whose relationship with his strict father and nurturing mother haunts him into adulthood. Starring Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, Jessica Chastain, Joanna Going, Jackson Hurst, Fiona Shaw, Crystal Mantecon, and Tamara Jolaine, the drama ignited worldwide curiosity when word came out that it included footage involving the formation of the universe. Could this be the resurrection of the mysterious Project Q that was supposed to explore the origins of life on earth?

Given the responsibility of creating the nonexistent imagery was visual effects supervisor Dan Glass, who has worked with the likes of Christopher Nolan on Batman Begins and The Wachowski Brothers on The Matrix Reloaded, and who spoke to LWLies about his involvement in the film.

“My first discussions with Terrence began about four-and-a-half years ago and they were very vague and rather roundabout,” recalls Glass. “I remember one of the things that we talked about was trying to find a common language and approach. I asked, ‘Can you list the music that you imagine behind these sequences? Can we approach it from that angle?’ And he sent me a CD with a tonne of music that was the type of stuff that he could imagine emotionally playing across these works.”

Even though Glass points out that each movie production has its own unique set of creative challenges, he readily admits that Terrence Malick, “was like no one else I’ve ever worked with or imagine I will work with again.” The London native explains, “If I sat down to write out what I thought would be ideal for a director of a visual effects film, especially a lot of complex visual effects, he would probably not tick any of the boxes. Whilst you can say that was the challenge it was also very much the best and the most exciting thing about the project.”

One of the big differences on The Tree of Life was the source material, as Glass explains. “The script, if you can call it that, was really more like a set of notes that he has written and built up over some 35 years. He has been working on this project since the ’70s. And we actually have negatives that he shot in the 1970s that we incorporated into the movie. So it really becomes a lifting of notes and ideas.

“The first person we brought on was a very versatile digital FX supervisor by the name of Brad Friedman,” Glass continues. “Brad helped build a small team in Austin to work closely with the director, editorial and myself to interpret, previs and ultimately complete many shots for the production. This team was critical as an experiment lab right next to Terry at all times to evaluate, to try things out. Production also set up a Research department gathering tons of imagery and scientific data for reference, and included a garage workshop where they would shoot chemical experiments and various things from Petri dishes to fluids in tanks; that was in conjunction with the stuff we did on a bigger scale with Doug Trumbull.”

Of major importance for the VFX supervisor was the selection of the visual effects companies. “The way we had to approach the film was really very piecemeal,” reveals Glass. “Aside from bringing in many people I have worked with over the years, that I trusted greatly to be able to interpret what was needed, we also brought in some very fine artistic sensibilities from several companies from around the world that approach things in a particular non digital fashion.”

From here a plan was implemented to delegate the visual effects workload. “The material was divided into four broad categories we termed Realms: Double Negative in London handled the majority of the Astrophysical Realm led by supervisor Paul Riddle, journalist Michael Benson consulted and provided extraordinary source imagery from actual probes and telescopes. He and a colleague initially selected and stitched the images together, cleaned them up, and created huge resolution images of 30,000 pixels which we then broke into layers and dimensionalised over very slow exploratory camera moves. For the Microbial Realm we hired a small London boutique company called One of Us headed by Tom Debenham and Dominic Parker that do beautiful work; they have their own little studio where they shoot practical pieces and elements and combine them with very photographic looking CG.

“We also commissioned work from Peter and Chris Parks [at Image Quest 3-D] who are a father and son duo in England. They do these richly detailed visual flows of colour which are very hard to describe and can imply things at any scale. We then had a couple of things that arose later in the schedule that really needed a very fresh approach.”

Regarding the topic which has garnered a lot of internet attention, Glass answers, “I can confirm that there are dinosaurs.” Given the responsibility of bringing the prehistoric animals back to life in the Natural [History] Realm was Frantic Films under the guidance of Mike Fink, which took on a new name after commencing work on the project. “I came onto it after it was already underway at Prime Focus,” states Bryan Hirota, who served as a visual effects supervisor at the VFX facility. “The company worked on it for maybe eight months.”

Hirota goes on to say, “Terrence Malick is notoriously secretive… I don’t know much about this movie. I don’t really know how the work fits in.” This comes as no surprise to Glass. “I would sometimes deliberately misguide the intention,” he admits. “An animator would want to know, ‘What’s the purpose here? What’s my motivation?’ So I would deliberately misguide a little and push in one direction and say, ‘Now adjust it and do this,’ just to try to get that zone where you have a little bit more of an ambiguity and something that’s more animal than human in its characteristics.

“We used a tremendous amount of practical and scientific work,” reveals Glass. “Terrence would insist that every frame be attached to some amount of live action or practical content. It’s fantastic. I love that as an approach. Doug Trumbull, who is a good friend of Terry’s, came on board to help and consult in setting up a series of practical shoots that we did. We did three in all that we called the skunkworks and which were done over long weekends in Austin, some of the techniques dating back to 2001. Techniques that Doug had used but then incorporating many of the things he has developed or worked with over his career, we would capture this terrific library of abstract, strange forms, and shapes. Those contributed to elements or in some cases the majority of an image within the movie; we would augment it with additional detail… mixing it up so it was never really clear what scale, or what was the origin of the material. Where it wasn’t possible we would include aspects of the ‘real.’”

An important part of the production for The Tree of Life was the effort devoted to portraying science realistically. “We were always very respectful,” emphasises Glass. “For example, to do some of the cosmological simulations of very early space there’s obviously little that we could have shot practically for that. But we paired up with some of the leading scientists in their respective fields, like Volker Bromm who specialises in Population III stars, the first to theoretically form in the Universe. So there’s this very deep, rich science behind the imagery. We also had the help of Donna Cox and Robert Patterson of the NCSA [National Center for Supercomputing Applications], who would take a base simulation, and start to create visualisations which were then fed to Double Negative, guided visually by contributions from a concept artist called George Hull. We would craft the thing into picturesque imagery based on literal science.”

Questioned on how a unified look was achieved, Glass remarks that was not something that Malick initially desired. “He preferred the idea of a patchwork quilt. He might shoot something on a Super 8 camera, then an IMAX camera, then on a digital camera, but in space you might have something based on magnetic resonance imaging or infrared photography from the Hubble. Each would have its own character, and that in his mind would lend to authenticity because you weren’t trying to smooth it, shape it and make it conform.”

Known for his stunning cinematography, Malick wanted to make the most of the imagery featured on the screen. ”We had one shot we were working on for the longest time that was nearly two minutes long,” says Glass. “It is there to give you time to take in what you’re looking at. Part of his focus is always rich, detailed images, generally keeping as much depth of field as possible so it gives your eyes plenty to wander around and take in.” After spending many months finessing a shot, Malick, Glass and his visual effects team would view the end result in one of the theatres in Austin. “We’d reach a stage where we were happy with it,” he says. “Then sometimes weeks later he’d ask, ‘Can we put that back up again? Let’s think about this again.’ And he’d consider trying to experiment on another track. There was always this element of the piece continually evolving and developing, which was very different to what you normally have a chance to do in a lot of the bigger visual effects pictures where it can all too often be a case of ‘That’ll do. That’ll do. Move on. Move on.’”

Bryan Hirota observes, “Malick, it seems to me, needs to see stuff, and then brings his film to life in the editorial process; it’s not necessarily clear to him exactly where his film is going to take him. It’s like a process of discovery for him.” Informed of Hirota’s comment, Glass responded, “With Terrence… his vision is strong. He knows where he’s going but because his goal is much more esoteric, it’s less tied down to any literal representation. That’s why the editorial process is critical to him, even with his live action; he shoots a lot of footage that can play in many different contexts, and some of his favourite moments are things where they’ve yelled, ‘Cut!’ and the actors almost break character. Those are the pieces he’ll love. Similarly, in the visual effects…you’re working for days, weeks, sometimes months trying to make something so precise. And yet for Terry that could work against the very organic nature of the material so we had to spend more time to free it from itself.

“Each shot is unique and crafted as such; they’re really approached from every angle as an individual piece,” Glass continues. “At one point we were approaching 60 minutes of footage that we were completing, of which somewhere between 12 to 15 minutes was ultimately used.” The IMAX format was chosen because they wanted to retain an incredible level of detail. “All of the work in Tree of Life is done to 5 1/2 K resolution… There’s a genuineness to that; it’s really trying to more closely represent the photography of the real thing. And the music and sound I would say are tremendous. The sound design I was really bowled over by, in terms of how it helps emotionally taking you through the piece.” Summarising the final cinematic experience, Glass states, “It’s a very powerful movie about memories, emotions, and our place in the world.”

As to what he thought The Tree of Life was going to look like, he confesses, “I don’t know in some ways what I was expecting it to be… I think the thing that was constant throughout the experience of working with Terry was that you know not to expect anything. There’s always something mysterious to be found.”