Terrence Malick is a massive fan of Zoolander,… | Little White Lies

Ter­rence Mal­ick is a mas­sive fan of Zoolan­der, apparently

15 Mar 2017

Words by John Wadsworth

An elderly man wearing a straw hat smiling and laughing with a younger woman who is also laughing.
An elderly man wearing a straw hat smiling and laughing with a younger woman who is also laughing.
Read this and oth­er sur­pris­ing rev­e­la­tions in a fas­ci­nat­ing new pro­file of the director.

Ter­rence Mal­ick is noto­ri­ous­ly cam­era-shy. Few pho­tographs or videos of him exist, and his press activ­i­ty is even scarcer – his last on-the-record inter­view was back in 1979, for Le Monde.

This reclu­sive rep­u­ta­tion makes Eric Benson’s 5,000-word pro­file of the direc­tor in Texas Month­ly all the more fas­ci­nat­ing to read. Through­out the piece, Ben­son drops snip­pets of con­ver­sa­tions with Malick’s friends – Richard Lin­klater among them – and pro­vides a num­ber of fas­ci­nat­ing insights into the man behind such films as Bad­lands and Knight of Cups.

Some of these relate to Malick’s past occu­pa­tions as a wheat har­vester and con­struc­tion work­er. Oth­ers ref­er­ence his seem­ing­ly omniv­o­rous pop cul­ture inter­ests. While his ear­ly admi­ra­tion of Ing­mar Bergman and François Truf­faut is not that sur­pris­ing, a cou­ple of more recent favourites stick out.

Ben­son reports that Mal­ick fre­quent­ly quotes Zoolan­der – Ben Stiller sent an in-char­ac­ter Hap­py Birth­day’ video to the film­mak­er when he learned this – and once remarked that he had nev­er heard a love song like Jason Derulo’s Talk Dirty’.

Unsur­pris­ing­ly, giv­en the publication’s Tex­an focus, much is made of the impact that Austin has had on Malick’s out­put. The city’s green, undu­lat­ing hills” inspired Days of Heav­en, while its out­door music fes­ti­vals – Austin City Lim­its and Fun Fun Fun Fest – serve as the back­drop for his lat­est film, Song to Song.

His old board­ing school, St Stephen’s, is pre­sent­ed as a lin­ger­ing spir­i­tu­al influ­ence. Mal­ick has since returned to the school, both off­screen – he now lives 15 min­utes from the front gate – and onscreen, in an alter­nate end­ing to The Tree of Life.

An unre­leased ver­sion of that film closed with Jack, its pro­tag­o­nist, arriv­ing at St Stephen’s to find refuge in the sense of calm and kin­ship there. Ben­son draws par­al­lels to Malick’s own biog­ra­phy – in par­tic­u­lar, his stern father and angel­ic moth­er, and the death of his broth­er as a young man.

For the director’s friend, Joe Con­way, He’s hav­ing this intel­lec­tu­al and spir­i­tu­al awak­en­ing. If you take Jack as in any way reflect­ing Ter­ry, well, St Stephen’s is where he found a com­mu­ni­ty that he embraced and that embraced him.”

Some­thing tells us this is unlike­ly to be Malick’s last Austin-inspired work – if our first look at Song to Song is any­thing to go by, there’s plen­ty of the city left to explore.

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