Actor: Sean Penn
Film: “The Tree of Life”
How Badly Was His Role Affected: Role reduced, and substantially changed from script stage.
Bitterness Level: 5/10 lemons
What Happened & How He Reacted: Sean Penn, one of the actors who survived the Great ‘Thin Red Line‘ Cull, obviously had developed some sort of relationship with Malick on the set of that film. “It took me a little bit of time to adjust to it, it took me a couple of weeks and some heart to heart conversations with Terry about what contribution I could make because I had never been involved in something [so big],” he said about it, in the 2002 documentary “Rosy-Fingered Dawn.” So his disappointment and befuddlement at his role’s alterations in “The Tree of Life” may have been all the greater. As he said to Le Figaro: “I didn’t at all find on the screen the emotion of the script, which is the most magnificent one that I’ve ever read. A clearer and more conventional narrative would have helped the film without, in my opinion, lessening its beauty and its impact. Frankly, I’m still trying to figure out what I’m doing there and what I was supposed to add in that context! What’s more, Terry himself never managed to explain it to me clearly.”
That last bit especially seems damning, but in fact his next sentence in that Figaro interview, less frequently quoted, roughly translates as: “But this is a film that I would recommend, if you can go in without preconceived ideas. Everyone can find there a personal, emotional or spiritual connection. Those who do generally emerge very moved.” So it seems he himself may be admitting that it’s his preconceived ideas of what the film might have been that find him less than in love with the finished product.
Actor: Rachel Weisz
Film: “To the Wonder”
How Badly Was Her Role Affected: Excised completely
Bitterness Level: 2/10 lemons
What Happened & How She Reacted: Well if A-list Oscar-winner Rachel Weisz can be cut out of a Malick movie, no one’s safe. But Weisz, who was to have played Dinah, a close friend of Ben Affleck‘s character Neil, seemed to go into the film with her eyes open, and so to be quite stoic in her reaction to being cut. “I did it for the experience of working with him, but one never knows with Terrence Malick. You can shoot for three months and end up not being in the movie,” she told SFGate. And since she was only on set for a few days, she probably felt closer to to the guillotine than others. In interview with Italian magazine La Stampa she says much the same thing but a little note of disappointment creeps in — possibly in translation? “It seems that my part has been cut, so I had the experience of working with him but I will not have the pleasure of seeing my work.” So what was her storyline exactly? Well the bare bones in the early plot description were that Dinah advises Neil’s new flame Jane (Rachel McAdams) to leave when his wife Marina (Olga Kurylenko) comes back on the scene…and is surprised to learn that her brother has now fallen in love with Marina. So, yeah we can see how she might not exactly be crucial.
Actor: Michael Sheen
Film: “To the Wonder”
How Badly Was His Role Affected: Excised completely
Bitterness Level: 1/10 lemons
What Happened & How He Reacted: Having let slip that he was excited to be working with Malick while on the press tour for Woody Allen‘s “Midnight in Paris” few further details emerged about Michael Sheen‘s role until after it was cut. But Sheen’s involvement seemed casual enough from the beginning, “I played Ben [Affleck]’s boss, but that side of the film got cut down so much,” he said in interview. “I just went to visit my girlfriend Rachel [McAdams] on the set, and then Terry asked if I would do a day’s filming on it, so I was like, ‘Yeah, sure.’ It was just that I was around, and at the end of the day, you know, it was only two scenes.” And, showing similar equanimity to fellow Brit Rachel Weisz, he said of hearing the news he was cut: “The producer sent me a nice email just saying, ‘This is what’s happening…’ But it wasn”t like I had gone through the whole thing of auditioning for a Terry Malick film and then saying, ‘Oh, I’ve got the part!’ That’s happened to me before — I’ve done films where a lot of it gets cut and then it’s kind of really disappointing.”
Actor: Amanda Peet
Film: “To the Wonder”
How Badly Was Her Role Affected: Excised completely
Bitterness Level: 1/10 lemons
What Happened & How She Reacted: Well the lemon rating is a guess, because we don’t have any news of Amanda Peet‘s reaction to her role being cut, and indeed we sort of suggested this might be the way things go in an eerily prescient post from 2011. However she also seemed to have subscribed up front to the Weisz school of “wanting to work with Malick, not necessarily expecting the earth.” “I wasn’t there for very long, and we worked really long hours, so I didn’t really get a huge taste of it,” Peet explained to LA Story “but it was really beautiful. [Malick] couldn’t have been lovelier.” In fact she likened his shooting practice to jazz: “He has a very, very particular way of shooting. He calls things out to you while you’re shooting, and it’s very, very different than other work that I’ve done… He’s like a jazz musician. There’s a lot of variety, and he doesn’t do the same thing twice. He improvises and he lets you riff, and then he’ll shout something out to you that he wants you to say in the middle of the scene. It’s a very mysterious and wonderful, magical process.” Well they do say jazz is as much about the notes you leave out as those you leave in…
