11. Caviezel and Penn’s relationship in the film mirrored their real-life ones. Caviezel the sincere and earnest man, Penn the cynic.
In a New York Daily News profile, the writer described Caviezel as someone who “doesn’t seem to have an insincere bone in his body,” which doesn’t sound far apart from his gentle, earnest and compassionate Pvt. Witt character, the heart and soul of the innocence lost amongst the madness of war in Malick’s film.
“He can be cynical and brutal and hysterical. He’s all those things, he can turn on a dime and be mean, and then he’s the sweetest guy in the world,” Dash Mihok said in an Inside Film interview about Penn, again not far off the mark from his 1st Sgt. Edward Welsh character.
One day Terry asked me, ‘What do you think of Sean Penn?’ ” Caviezel recalled in the “Rosy-Fingered Dawn” documentary. “I said, he’s a rock, one day you can go and talk him the next day you go up to him and he doesn’t even know who you are – that’s Sean Penn. When we were shooting that scene Terry said, ‘Tell him that. Tell him what you told me.’ ”
Watch parts of “Rosy-Fingered Dawn” where the two actors discuss working with one another.
12. Malick has insane memory retention.
“He shoots a lot of film and he’ll remember specific moments and six people will run out screaming trying to find the shot that Terry remembers and no one has logged in,” Malick’s production designer Jack Fisk said on the Criterion Commentary track.
Producer Grant Hill elaborated on this story in hilarious detail. “There was a sequence that Terry had not been able to crack, he had been working on it for six or eight weeks, different editors, and one day he walks into the lead editor Billy Weber and said, ‘Billy, I know that somewhere after cut had been called — so it must have been early in the film – there are about 10 or 12 frames’ and he described what they were,” Hill said. “And of course Billy – who had 1.2 million of feet in front of him – said, ‘You’re crazy.’ But it took 10 days or so, he found the frames, put them in the sequence and I was in the room, and the sequence did just come alive. It was some weird sense of what it took to complete it.”
13. Billy Weber gave Malick an inspired piece of advice that he’s employed to this day.
Malick’s always wanted a near-silent film and his close collaborators know this all too well. “Days of Heaven” took two years because Weber and Malick were constantly “whittling away” at the dialogue scenes and those difficulties gave Weber an idea 20 years later. On the “Days of Heaven” Criterion DVD commentary, Weber recalled some sage advice he gave him that most Malick-philes knows he uses now constantly: shoot the scene once with dialogue and then the same once again without dialogue. “And so we did a lot of takes like that on [‘Thin Red Line’]. Because he and I both knew he would want the shot like that,” he said, but unfortunately, it does not speed up the editing process one bit. “No it doesn’t speed up the editing at all. As a matter of fact it slows it down, but it does allow for actors that aren’t very good to come off a lot better than they really are.”