12 Things You Need To Know About The Making Of Terrence Malick’s ‘The Tree Of Life’ - Page 3 of 4

the tree of life terrence malick07. This Is Malick’s Most Revealingly Autobiographical Film to Date
All of Terrence Malick’s films, it can be argued, are deeply personal works – displaying a clear frame of mind and an array of personal, philosophical, and political fixations. But none of them are explicitly autobiographical – “Badlands” is essentially a crime movie, based loosely on the spree killings of Charles Starkweather; “Days of Heaven” and “The New World” are historical epics (dissimilar, for sure, but easily categorized); and “The Thin Red Line” is, on its most rudimentary level, a war movie. “The Tree of Life,” however, sees Malick tapping into the real life pain of his childhood and upbringing. We should probably issue a spoiler warning now, if you don’t want to know plot specifics or if you’d like to keep the mythical figure of Terrence Malick as some illusory demigod unchallenged. There are many superficial similarities – Terry’s father was an oil geologist, while the Pitt character can be seen toiling away on blueprints of unspecified origin; Terry was the oldest of three boys, who was, like the Jack character in ‘Tree of Life’ (played in the grown-up scenes by Sean Penn), deeply devoted to his mother. (According to the pre-‘Thin Red Line’ Vanity Fair piece, which contains a fair amount of this biographical detail, he wouldn’t let her read the script to “The Thin Red Line” for years because he was worried she would be offended by the amount of swearing.)

the tree of life terrence malick TREE-OF-LIFE-32But digging deeper, you see the real parallels between Malick’s upbringing and the story of ‘Tree of Life’ – Terry had a tempestuous relationship with his father, who adored taking photos (which, one can guess, has led to his complete aversion to being photographed). Chris, the middle Malick brother, had been involved in a car crash which left his wife dead and Chris badly injured, which seems to be dreamily dramatized in the film in a sequence when some neighborhood boys are setting off fireworks. More telling: Larry, the youngest brother, was a guitar phenomenon who went to Spain to study with a master guitarist and who later broke his own hands when upset about his lack of proficiency. When Malick’s father went to Spain to check on Larry, he returned with Larry’s body. The brother had committed suicide, and Terry felt, according to the Vanity Fair piece, “a heavy burden of irrational guilt.” The death of one of the brothers (the guitar-playing artistic one) is at the center of ‘Tree of Life,’ or at least one of its branches, and in a lot of ways is the impetus for much of the film’s ruminations – both cosmic and domestic. (Coupled with Terry’s love since childhood of spirituality and religion. He can quote the bible freely.) What the Vanity Fair piece reveals, also, is that Malick seems to have grown up to be a man very much like his father – rigid, compulsive, unwavering, temperamental and occasionally cruel. He seems to be working through some of his issues, from inside “The Tree of Life” out, even though he repeatedly told his partner at the time (Michele Morette, they separated for good in 1998): “I want my personal life to be completely separate from the movies.” Except when the movie is his personal life.

the tree of life terrence malick film_terrencemalick_35_780_440_90_s_c108. Yes, Malick Did Appear At Cannes After All… Quietly
While a Malick-free press conference gave us some dynamite quotes from both Brad Pitt (“[Terry] sees himself as building a house, he doesn’t want to focus on selling the real estate”) and a wonderfully snippy producer Dede Gardner (who leveled some potent zings at uncooperative moderator Henri Behar) he was not, as it turned out, absent from the festival (where “The Tree of Life” would ultimately take top honors). Luminous ‘Tree’ star Jessica Chastain told USA Today that, “I looked over and in walked Terry. The festival of course knew, but it was a last minute thing.” Cameras reportedly darted towards the ground to avoid capturing the press shy Malick, and Playlist Cannes writer Kevin Jagernauth also scored a brief glimpse at him with his own eyes — unfortunately no photo was snapped. So while he might not have shown up for the press conference, he was at the festival and here’s photographic evidence.

The_Tree-of-Life_Terrence_Malick_still_photo_03 Tree-of-Life13alt09. No Matter How Weird You Think “The Tree of Life” Is, His Next One Is Going to Be Weirder
The cinematic syntax that Malick has been developing since his debut “Badlands” — emphasizing moments and emotional clarity over narrative coherence and concrete story beats — seems to have reached its pinnacle with “The Tree of Life” with its occasionally stirring, occasionally alienating structure that has a small town drama interspersed with moments that document the formation of life as we know it, as well as an overlay of spirituality in which memory, and the barriers of the past, present and future, crumble and fade. In other words: it’s not “The Hangover Part II.” “I’m very proud of the film, and I think it’s am important film and I want as many people as possible to see it. But I would also tell my friends who aren’t big film buffs or film aficionados that this isn’t a normal movie,” producer Bill Pohlad said recently. “But it’s a powerful movie, and a moving movie.”

The_Tree-of-Life_Terrence_Malick_still_photo_03 039561_wide-803a5daeb56c4a3dcbf50cab333db01436f1b92f-s900-c85The fact that Fox Searchlight is releasing this on Memorial Day weekend, usually a place reserved for Tom Cruise vehicles and superhero sequels, is a bold move that will leave many audiences bewildered. But apparently, to paraphrase the song, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Malick’s next movie, which is still untitled but has been speculatively called “The Burial,” stars Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams, Rachel Weisz, Javier Bardem, Olga Kurylenko and Barry Pepper, and early descriptions of the plot had it as a small town drama (Bardem plays a priest – we only know this based on on-set photography). The Los Angeles Times movie blog 24 Frames, however, in a piece about “The Voyage of Time,” states that Malick’s next narrative feature could be even stranger than ‘Tree of Life.’ They cite a source that claims the new film is “even more experimental than ‘Tree of Life.’” Of course, “experimental” is one of those catchall phrases that could mean many different things to different people (we could describe “Speed Racer” as experimental, for crying out loud), and as always, we’ll have to wait and see. Maybe the jumbled outrageousness of ‘Tree of Life’ isn’t the zenith of his stylistic obsessions; maybe it’s the beginning of something newer and even more out-there.

the-tree-of-life-terrence-malick-tree-of-life10. No One Really Seems To Know How Much ‘Tree of Life’ Actually Cost (Or They Aren’t Saying)
It’s pretty common for studios to release, sometimes grudgingly, at least ballpark estimates for how much their big movies cost ($200 million, for instance, for this latest “Pirates of the Caribbean,” is the official studio number while most have it closer to $250 million), while nobody has even thrown out a number for “The Tree of Life.” Just thinking about how much it could have cost is sort of amazing – it’s been in post-production for approximately three years, with four credited editors (including Malick mainstay Billy Weber) and a fifth cited on IMDb with reshoots that took place intermittently during that time. Malick dragged Douglas Trumbull, a visual effects pioneer who helped Stanley Kubrick realize “2001: A Space Odyssey” back in 1969, out of retirement to work on the space sequences, which are almost wholly computer-generated and last for what seems like the better part of an hour and include fully-rendered dinosaur characters. Malick shot on IMAX, 65 mm and 35 mm and relocated the massive tree that sits in Pitt’s backyard from a neighboring town. Nothing about “The Tree of Life” is “little” or easily manageable, and while we’re fairly certain no one has consistently worked on the film since its embryonic “Q” days (except, of course, for Malick), there have been teams of people who have drifted in and out of the production in the years since. And while it’s no secret that Malick takes advantage of people that want to assist him (particularly young film student-types in Austin just looking to say they worked on a Terrence Malick movie), he still has to pay someone. If we took a random guess, we’d put the budget at around $30 million, although we can’t lock down anybody to comment officially. What’s even more astounding, when you think about “The Tree of Life” from a budgetary standpoint, is that while you might see the familiar 20th Century Fox/Searchlight logo when the film begins, Fox is just the distributor – budget-wise, it was cobbled together from a small pack of independent production companies (even if Pohlad claims to have known that Malick was going to take over two years to edit). Investing in Malick, it seems, is like investing in art. And sometimes that art costs lots and lots of money.