Terrence Malick talks filmmaking at a rare public… | Little White Lies

Ter­rence Mal­ick talks film­mak­ing at a rare pub­lic speak­ing event

27 Oct 2016

Two men in black leather jackets and hats, one older with a moustache, standing together.
Two men in black leather jackets and hats, one older with a moustache, standing together.
The enig­mat­ic direc­tor described the lure” of dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy at a recent live Q&A.

Ter­rence Mal­ick looks dif­fer­ent in per­son. With­out the broad hat, sun­glass­es, and bag­gy attire with which he is usu­al­ly arrayed in the hand­ful of on-set pho­tos which exist online, he cuts a trim­mer fig­ure than you would expect. Clean shaven and dressed in a com­fort­able beige suit, he could pass as Peter Boyle’s lit­tle broth­er. His voice, how­ev­er, sounds exact­ly as you would expect it to: warm, slow, ever so slight­ly ner­vous. It has soft­ened a bit since his brief cameo in Bad­lands, but retains a mild twang which betrays his child­hood in Okla­homa and his cur­rent res­i­dence in Texas.

Once you get over the ini­tial shock of see­ing one of the cinema’s most elu­sive fig­ures in the flesh, you are quick­ly struck by how hum­ble and unas­sum­ing Mal­ick is, how gen­tle and accom­mo­dat­ing both his voice and his body lan­guage are. Mal­ick is shy, yes, but he is no recluse as is often said, and one imag­ines that those lucky enough to be wel­comed into his inner cir­cle recog­nise a thought­ful, gre­gar­i­ous, and gen­er­ous soul some­what at odds with the image cre­at­ed by the press, who com­pare him to Big­foot almost as often as they do oth­er filmmakers.

One such per­son is Pacho Velez, a doc­u­men­tary film­mak­er and Prince­ton Fel­low who arranged for Mal­ick to vis­it the cam­pus as part of the Lewis Cen­ter for the Arts’ Cin­e­ma Today series. Velez, who ear­li­er in the day had met and spo­ken with Mal­ick over sor­bet in the stu­dent cen­tre, opened the dis­cus­sion by quot­ing a pas­sage from Nathaniel Dorsky’s Devo­tion­al Cin­e­ma’ about the expe­ri­ence of see­ing Jour­ney to Italy in the the­atre with an audience:

After the film, the audi­ence entered the ele­va­tor in order to descend to the street, and I noticed that every­body was unusu­al­ly avail­able to every­body else. Peo­ple had tears in their eyes. Usu­al­ly the time in an ele­va­tor is a no’ time. We either stare up at the num­bers or down at the floor, try­ing to deny the inti­ma­cy of the sit­u­a­tion. We wait for this no’ time to be over so that we can resume our lives. But in this case every­one was com­plete­ly acces­si­ble and vul­ner­a­ble to one anoth­er, look­ing at each oth­er, all strangers with­in the inti­mate com­part­ment of the elevator.”

Though Mal­ick admit­ted that much to our shame,” he and his wife had ear­li­er watched Jour­ney to Italy on a small portable Blu-ray play­er, he stressed that even just com­ing into the the­atre for the last few min­utes of the film remind­ed him of the affec­tive dis­crep­an­cy between see­ing a film on a lap­top or a tele­vi­sion and expe­ri­enc­ing it pro­ject­ed in a the­atre. They say you look up at cin­e­ma, you look down at the tele­vi­sion,” Mal­ick said, assert­ing that for him, going to the cin­e­ma involves not sim­ply watch­ing a film, but look­ing up in shared awe.”

The direc­tor likened the expe­ri­ence of watch­ing movies on a lap­top or cell­phone to that of see­ing the great works of art in the Lou­vre or the Met repro­duced on a post­card, which he referred to as sim­ply a memen­to of the expe­ri­ence” of see­ing them. Speak­ing specif­i­cal­ly of Jour­ney to Italy, Mal­ick elab­o­rat­ed that while you would have seen it, you could repeat the dia­logue, and it would be the same infor­ma­tion,” the film wouldn’t have its true pow­er on a TV set, and cer­tain­ly not on a cell phone.”

Despite Malick’s belief that dig­i­tal means of dis­tri­b­u­tion have been work­ing against cin­e­ma” and under­min­ing it,” a great deal of the evening was spent dis­cussing how dig­i­tal cam­eras have rev­o­lu­tionised film­mak­ing in gen­er­al and Malick’s work in par­tic­u­lar. Mal­ick, who has shot his last sev­er­al pic­tures on a mix­ture of 35mm, 65mm, and dig­i­tal for­mats, said that dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy is a lure,” and sug­gest­ed that the impro­vi­sa­tion­al and impres­sion­is­tic style which found its fullest flower in last year’s Knight of Cups would have been impos­si­ble to realise on film.

Draw­ing a line between Jour­ney to Italy and Malick’s own work, Velez allud­ed to Mar­tin Scorsese’s descrip­tion of the film as hav­ing a neu­tral or absent style in which the audi­ence is sim­ply fol­low­ing along beside Ingrid Bergman observ­ing her process,” which Velez iden­ti­fied as an antecedent to what he called Malick’s own doc­u­men­tary inter­est in the world” and in men and women wan­der­ing through it. Mal­ick in turn spoke of the con­tin­u­ing strug­gle to make scenes feel less the­atri­cal and more life-like,” to intro­duce ele­ments of the unknown to keep actors off-bal­ance” and to, in his words, catch life on the wing.” Con­tin­u­ing the metaphor, Mal­ick likened those moments to a quail com­ing out of the grass;” the free­dom afford­ed by dig­i­tal cam­eras, which were nei­ther as time- nor cost-pro­hib­i­tive as film stock, bet­ter allowed Mal­ick and his crew to exper­i­ment, eschew­ing scripts in favour of impro­vi­sa­tion and using the cam­era almost like a hunter would.”

The down­side of this, Mal­ick con­ced­ed, is that one tends to become indul­gent, dras­ti­cal­ly over­shoot­ing and los­ing track over the course of the day” of what’s been done and what’s left to do. When shoot­ing with­out a script, Mal­ick also admit­ted, often you wouldn’t have any good ideas or the actors wouldn’t have any good ideas,” lead­ing to wast­ed days on loca­tion. Worst of all for the direc­tor was how labo­ri­ous the edit­ing process had become. Unlike Bad­lands, from which Mal­ick esti­mates he cut only one or two scenes, Malick’s recent films have been whit­tled down from hun­dreds of hours of footage, with most scenes” get­ting cut com­plete­ly. It’s become some­thing of a run­ning gag among his actors that they nev­er know until the pre­mière whether or not they’ll make it into the final cut, but that bemused frus­tra­tion extends to the filmmaker.

But Mal­ick, hav­ing recent­ly fin­ished shoot­ing his upcom­ing World War Two dra­ma, Rade­gund, in Ger­many and Aus­tria, stat­ed that he has repent­ed and gone back to work­ing with a much tighter script.” He fur­ther insist­ed that it actu­al­ly makes it eas­i­er to impro­vise when you have rails under­neath you.” Yet despite what he describes as a seri­ous ambiva­lence” with regard to dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies and their cur­rent appli­ca­tion in film­mak­ing and dis­tri­b­u­tion, the over­all tone was enthu­si­as­tic, with Velez and Mal­ick encour­ag­ing mem­bers of the audi­ence to share their own expe­ri­ences shoot­ing films dig­i­tal­ly. The direc­tors were par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed in hear­ing how audi­ence mem­bers had uti­lized the GoPro, which Mal­ick had used on Knight of Cups and which he believes will open the door to a more demo­c­ra­t­ic style of filmmaking.”

Bring­ing the dis­cus­sion back to Jour­ney to Italy, Mal­ick likened the impact of dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy on young film­mak­ers to that of the Ital­ian neo­re­al­ist move­ment upon French New Wave film­mak­ers like Jean Luc Godard and Fran­cois Truf­faut, and their influ­ence, in turn, upon Mal­ick and his peers. The Ital­ian neo­re­al­ists demon­strat­ed that all you need­ed to make a pic­ture was two actors and a car,” and that would-be film­mak­ers no longer need­ed to put in 10 years in the indus­try and work at the suf­fer­ance of a stu­dio.” Now, the ubiq­ui­ty of dig­i­tal film­mak­ing tech­nol­o­gy has made film­mak­ing open to vir­tu­al­ly every­one, like writ­ing,” which Mal­ick sees as a good thing. Aren’t you encour­aged?” Mal­ick asked the audi­ence, much of which appeared to be stu­dents of the Uni­ver­si­ty. Now the prob­lem is dis­tri­b­u­tion, not pro­duc­tion,” a peren­ni­al issue, he not­ed, in all of the arts.

Respond­ing to an audi­ence mem­ber who spoke of attach­ing his GoPro to cars and skate­boards as a poor man’s dol­ly shot,” Mal­ick elab­o­rat­ed upon the artis­tic as well as prac­ti­cal virtues of the GoPro, name­ly that it can go places where a 35mm cam­era can­not. He recalled an exper­i­ment he con­duct­ed many years ago with an unnamed cam­era­man in which the two attempt­ed to find a new way to shoot the inte­ri­or of a car: we shot some­thing like thir­ty angles and all of them were total clich­es – you couldn’t find a new angle.” With the mar­velous­ly designed” GoPro, how­ev­er, Mal­ick found he was able to film his actors from a num­ber of unortho­dox angles. The only reser­va­tion Mal­ick voiced was the GoPro’s ten­den­cy to dis­tort his actors’ faces when used in extreme close­up, owing to the camera’s very wide lens, but qual­i­fied it by say­ing he was encour­aged by and impressed with the vari­ety of after­mar­ket lens­es cur­rent­ly being manufactured.

To the best of my knowl­edge, the only oth­er time Mal­ick par­tic­i­pat­ed in an event of this sort was at the Rome Film Fes­ti­val in 2007, and it was appar­ent that he has a great affec­tion for mid­cen­tu­ry Ital­ian cin­e­ma, par­tic­u­lar­ly from the black-and-white era.” He men­tioned I Vitel­loni and The White Sheik as his favorite Fed­eri­co Felli­ni pic­tures, with the lat­ter being one of the fun­ni­est films I’ve ever seen.” He spoke nos­tal­gi­cal­ly of see­ing these films as a boy in Okla­homa and com­ing out into the light and mak­ing vows to be a bet­ter son or broth­er, or work hard­er,” rem­i­nisc­ing how those films – and the expe­ri­ence of see­ing them in a the­atre – strength­ened you.”

Mal­ick also spoke affec­tion­ate­ly of the silent era and made spe­cial men­tion of Ménil­montant, the 1926 Dim­itri Kir­sanoff short which crit­ic Pauline Kael named as her favourite film of all time. Apro­pos of his own films’ fix­a­tion upon the nat­ur­al world and their vague­ly pan­the­is­tic bent, Mal­ick likened silent cin­e­ma to a tree that was cut down pre­ma­ture­ly, and described Ménil­montant as an indi­ca­tion of how the medi­um may have evolved had talkies come around ten years lat­er. In an amus­ing aside, he also expressed his admi­ra­tion for Joe Carnahan’s Smokin’ Aces, which he described as quite well direct­ed,” and said he tips his hat to film­mak­ers who know how to keep sev­er­al sto­ries going at once.”

Of course, hav­ing released four films in the past five years, with anoth­er due in March, one in post­pro­duc­tion and sev­er­al oth­ers in pre­pro­duc­tion, Mal­ick seem­ing­ly knows some­thing about keep­ing muti­ple plates spin­ning. When asked what the end­ing of Jour­ney to Italy meant to him in light of his recent out­pour­ing of work, Mal­ick was coy about his per­son­al dri­ve and phi­los­o­phy, and about the sug­ges­tion that time, its pass­ing, and death – all fre­quent tropes in his films – weighed heav­i­ly upon his thought. Instead, he focused on the bond between George Sanders and Ingrid Bergman’s char­ac­ters, and the need to recog­nise and nur­ture such con­nec­tions in our lives. It’s not just death,” but rather the recog­ni­tion of how pre­cious love is” and our oblig­a­tion to over­come our pet­ty prob­lems with each oth­er” in ser­vice of that love. Some peo­ple will find it improb­a­ble,” Mal­ick admit­ted, but it was quite con­vinc­ing for me.”

Christo­pher Bruno is the edi­tor of con​sid​er​ing​film​.com

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