Tag: days of heaven

FAN WRITES LETTER TO TERRENCE MALICK ASKING HIM TO STOP

HOLLYWOOD – A fan has written Terrence Malick a letter asking him to stop making films.

With the release of Song to Song, Terrence Malick continues his race to the bottom with another star-studded wander fest. 75 year old Ayrton Conseesee – a lifelong Malick fan – felt moved to write the following letter:

Dear Mr. Malick,

I have been with you from the beginning. I remember the excitement I first felt when I saw your debut movie – Badlands – starring then unknown Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen. What amazing talent is this!? You turned a tawdry tale of a serial killer and his girl into a meditation on life and childhood and nature and America’s innocence. With Days of Heaven, we were once more in a period of American history and following the little known Richard Gere into a world of almost Greek tragedy. The film was stirring in the lyricism of its images and the beauty of the soundtrack.

Then came the hiatus at which point your reputation grew. The Thin Red Line showed that your power had not diminished. And even The New World gave us a new version of American innocence and its loss.

The problem seemed to start when you decided to swap history for autobiography and your innovations staled into traits.

Tree of Life was visually unbelievable but one occasionally longed to stop the ever moving camera and to allow the characters to actually speak to each other. To have dialogue. Without conventional blocking, your actors actually became more stilted as they wandered about not knowing quite where to stand.  Instead of bringing in fresh faces you were now able to command true star power with Brad Pitt. This didn’t always benefit the film. To the Wonder had Ben Affleck in it! Knight of Cups starred Christian Bale. It was like you were collecting Batmans. 

Song to Song has followed swiftly on and this is with a documentary in the middle, which I also saw. It looked like a reel they put in a TV store to convince you that 4K is worth selling a limb to buy. 

And now Song to Song. Please Mr. Malick would you stop making films. It’s like supporting a terrible football team. You know they’re going to lose but you have to watch anyway. Or buying a Bob Dylan album in the 80s. Which gives me hope. Maybe you can come back. Maybe you can do it again. But you need to ditch the voiceovers, block your actors and write a fricking script this time. 

Yours Sincerely.

A. Conseesee.

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FANS PREPARE TO PRETEND TO LIKE ANOTHER TERRENCE MALICK FILM

HOLLYWOOD – Terrence Malick’s Song to Song premiers at the SXSW Festival.

There was a time that a Terrence Malick film was a rare thing of beauty. Now he seems to be trying to match Marvel Studios.  Unfortunately, the quality has dropped precipitously from the Days of Heaven when we used to visit the Badlands. The New World was the beginning of the rot with a tree hugging Pocahontas who made the Disney version seem like Joan of Arc. Then the ‘masterpiece’ Tree of Life which began to divide audiences. Half saw a technical mastery,  a beauty, an unconventional but grandiose ambition. Others thought it looked like an advert for a credit card company that wanted to corner the whispery demographic. To the Wonder made us feel sorry for Ben Affleck. And Knight of Cups… Oh good God, shoot me already.

Even his documentary Voyage of Time, which ought to have been right in his wheelhouse, managed to be annoying shit. Now Song to Song has premiered and we’re back at it. The remaining Malick fans now have a critical Stockholm Syndrome that forces them to like anything he does. The problem is that with each new film that comes out, one feels that the other films are getting worse. Re-watching the Tree of Life after To the Wonder for example takes the first film down a good few notches.

With Song to Song, it seems Malick is doubling down on his modus operandi and best of luck to him. But this might well be the first one that I give a miss.

TERRENCE MALICK DOCUMENTARY VOYAGE OF TIME ‘ALL ABOUT F*CKING’

HOLLYWOOD – Voyage of Time, the new Terrence Malick IMX documentary, is all about f*cking, it was revealed today.

It emerged today that the new Terrence Malick documentary Voyage of Time will be all about sex, shagging, bonking, banging, screwing and cunnilingus.

A source close to the reclusive filmmaker told the Studio Exec:

This is the sauciest you’ve ever seen Malick do.  Badlands and Days of Heaven had very little sex in them and what there was happened off screen. Likewise The Thin Red Line and Tree of Life. There was the tiniest bit in the New World but no one went to see that, but more recently he’s been getting into some internet porn and it has had an influence.

What kind of influence?

Well, aside from the fact he’s lost a lot of weight and he doesn’t read Heidegger anymore. He put some sex into To the Wonder and you should see the version of Knight of Cups that he wanted to release!

You mean he compromised his vision?

He listened to advice that said it would damage his reputation. But this new one is just wall to wall banging and screwing to the sounds of Arvo Part. It’s amazing. And over it Brad Pitt narrates a salacious commentary. Sometimes just repeating words which shouldn’t be rude but given the context suddenly become rude. Like ‘Elbow – marmalade – itch’. See what I mean?

Voyage of Time will be released in 2017.

THE MAKING OF KNIGHT OF CUPS

HOLLYWOOD – In the latest in our celebrated Making of… series, we look at the behind the scenes drama that went into the making of Terrence Malick’s new film: Knight of Cups.

The Idea

Originally Terrence Malick wrote a three volume novel entitled Knight of Cups and Saucers and showed it around to some close collaborators. Sean Penn read it and immediately advised that Malick should make it his next film.

This was before To the Wonder and I thought Knight of Cups and Saucers would be a perfect film for him to do. For once he had an actual book. He had all the dialogue written and the descriptions were just so cinematic. It was funny and moving. I wept like a baby at various points. It was so touching and I could tell that it was quite close to Terry. I told him, make this film.

The script writing process took a long time and so Malick went ahead first with To the Wonder, but even as he filmed that, whenever he wasn’t giggling at Ben Affleck, he would sit down adn work on the script for his follow up film. Ben Affleck says:

He let me read an early version of the script. It was great. It made me really wish I wasn’t making To the Wonder. I’ve always admired Terry’s early films and that’s why I agreed to work with him. Why I wanted to. It was Days of Heaven and Badlands that I wanted to be in. And this To the Wonder stuff felt like amateurish garbage. He didn’t tell us where to stand and Olga just kept dancing all the time. I thought she was on mushrooms or something. The Knight of Cups and Saucers though was a solid piece of work. It had a great story and was very satirical about Hollywood.

Production

Christian Bale and Cate Blanchett were hired on the strength of the script and production began. Christian Bale tells the story of his first day on set:

We gathered around and we all had to bring our scripts and the novel that we had all been given copies of. I thought we’ll have a table read or something. But Terry takes all our scripts and books and what not and he shreds them in this big industrial shredder. Then he takes handfuls of the shredded script and he gives it back to us in little bags and he says ‘okay here are your lines’. We thought it was a joke at first, but we had to bring these bags every day to the set.

Natalie Portman talks about Terrence Malick’s technique:

It is so liberating as an actor to have a director who says to you: ‘There is no such thing as a fireproof wall’ and then you have to play the scene. We had a love scene and Terry would shout things out like ‘his face is made of bees’ and ‘Christmas is like Easter but with more chocolate’. Often I didn’t know what to do and he would shout dance and I would dance. Or wander about. We would be intently acting our roles and doing what we could with the material and I noticed that Terry and Emmanuel were in the corner and Emmanuel was filming Terry’s belly button. I mean it was literally navel gazing. Genius.

Post-Production

It has often been the case that Terrence Malick films have taken a long time to come to the light following the end of filming.

Jack Fisk long time collaborator speaks:

Terry often finds the film in the heaps of footage that he has taken. He listens to music and he has the actors read out pages and pages of voice-over and somehow he finds the film. Very much like a sculptor might find a statue in a block of stone.

Freida Pinto spoke about her role in the film:

Once filming was done Terry would call up time and time again and we’d go into the studio and he’d have me whisper the voice-over. Some of it was stuff he had written, but most of it was the Little Book of Calm by Paul Wilson.  I read that book about five or six different times and it’s all in the movie. Other actors were reading greeting cards and Christian Bale read the whole of a Sven Hassell novel but that never made it into the finished film.

For more of The Making of… CLICK HERE.

5 FACTS YOU NEVER KNEW ABOUT TERRENCE MALICK

HOLLYWOOD – Everyone knows Terrence Malick is a genius, but no one knows why.

The Studio Exec FACT Squad have spent the weekend listening to whispering voice-overs and cavorting around wheat fields during the magic hour. The Terrence Malick FACTS are as follows:

1. Between the release of Days of Heaven (1978) and The Thin Red Line (1998), Terrence Malick opened up a meat providing business called Malick’s Meats, which provided restaurants with high quality meat substances, pastes, salami, burgers and sausages. However, in 1995 Malick sickened by the stench of blood and endless killing – which he would participate in personally donning a special slaughtering apron that made his torso look like the Venus di Milo – he decided to return to film making.

Malick (1982)

2. Although he has a reputation as a recluse, Terry is actually a party animal whose favorite tipple is Jagermeister. His contract stipulates a constant supply of Jagermeister which he drinks via a feeding pipe that is hidden in his hat. His love of hats is legendary, with the director appearing as April in a free calendar given to French readers of the January 1985 edition of Chapeau.

3. Malick’s reputation as a philosopher is unearned. He doesn’t like reading and when asked about Heidegger told the interviewer that he didn’t watch much soccer.

4. Many actors credit Malick with offering them valuable career advice. Richard Gere, Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen all won early fame in Malick’s films. Jim Caviezel would pester Malick incessantly about what role he should take after The Thin Red Line. ‘Jesus Christ!’ the director finally exploded and Caviezel took him at his word.

5. The quality of each Terrence Malick film goes down in inverse proportion to the number of editors who work on the film. Badlands = 1 editor. To the Wonder = 5 editors. Knight of Cups = 243 editors.

For more FACTS on everything from this to that click HERE! 

FULL CANNES LINE-UP INCLUDES ONLY FILMS FROM 1970S

PARIS – This morning 11 am Paris time, the full line-up for the 68th Cannes Film Festival was announced, which will break with tradition by only featuring films made in the 1970s.

Outgoing president Thierry Frémaux said that usually the film festival shows exclusively new films:

The whole raison d’être of Cannes is to promote world cinema in its current form, but recently we’ve been looking around and it’s pitiful. So we decided in order to ensure ten days of creme de la creme cinema we thought why not use films that we know are good for sure.

The full list contains The Conversation, Chinatown, Deliverance, Taxi Driver, Barry Lyndon, Aguirre Wrath of God, Dog Day Afternoon, Days of Heaven, Le Cercle Rouge, Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Big Bus, Solaris and The Spy Who Loved Me.

Pierre Lescure, the new Cannes president, said that it was an exciting time for Cannes:

We’re really pleased to have such outstanding film-makers such as Stanley Kubrick and Terrence Malick included in this year’s competition. Hopefully one of the famous recluses will make a surprise appearance!

Defending the lack of women directors in the list, Lescure shrugged and blew air through his lips.

C’est la vie! It was the seventies.

Cannes will take place from the 13th to the 24th of May, 2015. 

A STUDIO EXEC APPEAL: MALICK FAN FILM

HOLLYWOOD – George Lucas has had them, Peter Jackson has had them and now it is the turn of Terrence Malick.

I’m talking fan films. Just as the Phantom Menace and more recently the Hobbit have been re-edited and re-imagined by enthusiastic fans who dare to second think the genius of their original creators, so it is time for Mr. Malick’s works to be taken out of his hands. The Studio Exec would like to appeal to anyone out there with the basic software and skills to make a series of fan film versions of Mr. Malick’s latest work. We’re not asking for excessive editing, or narrative manipulation. There’s no Jar Jar Binks to get rid of, it’s just … well… take out the voice overs.

All of them, take them all out. It is our contention that The New World, The Tree of Life and To The Wonder would all be vastly improved by an absence of voice over. I’d even be curious to see what The Thin Red Line, Badlands and Days of Heaven would play like. I have a feeling that the luscious visuals, the swaying camera, the ‘visual poetry’ would be all more bearable without the platitudes and Heidegger, the endless irritating whispering. I might be wrong but it would be really interesting to see.

If anyone is up for it, we can publicize your efforts on the site and repay you with sloppy wet kisses and potentially life destroying legal problems.

Who shall take up the gauntlet?

TERRENCE MALICK: LOOK AT MY HATS

AUSTIN – People often say ‘Hey Terry, what’s with the motherf*cking hats?’ and I say ‘The f*ck you want? Get the f*ck out of my wardrobe! Get outta there ‘fore I kick yo ass!’ But you know – pon reflection – I kinda get the question so here’s an answer. If’n you want it.

Okay first off this photo of me (above) directing The Thin Red Line is f*cking iconic, don’t you think? Look at me rock that bad boy. I look like Indiana Mother-F*cking Jones, boo-ya! I got my tunes on my Sony Walkman (Cypress Hill, bitches). And I’m happy because I just saw Sean Penn step in a rabbit hole and break his ankle. Har-Har!

Now this photograph over here is my first ever film role. It was Badlands. I wanted to play Martin Sheen’s character. He’s such a bad actor. Really poor. And I was all like let me do it, but the studio were nervous cause it was my first film and they were all, ‘Hey Terry, wouldn’t it be best if you focused on directing this time out.’ Then they even cut my role here. It was three hours of screen time in the original. Assholes. Still the hat is a smooth little Panama number, which despite the name are actually made in Venezuela. HAT FACT!
 
 
Let me be clear about one thing: I don’t wear a hat cause I’m folically challenged, no. It’s because I’m as bald as a motherf*cker, is what it is. Look at that globe. I’m balder than Jennifer Lawrence’s knee cap. You can see in my eyes, I’m thinking ‘Where’s my Goddam hat?’ It’s obvious. 
 
 
Now this is just flat out embarrassing. Honestly, I have to hold my hand up and just say that was the day Woody Harrelson visited the set and I was stoned as a motherf*cker. I honestly don’t know what I was thinking there. I got my shades that Michael Jackson (a dear friend) gave me and I’m saying to Ryan Gosling, ‘Just wander round looking sad and we’ll fix it all in post’. He didn’t care. We got well and truly wasted that night.
 
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