As we all know, Terrence Malick‘s process on each of his features has involved shooting thousands upon thousands of feet of footage, and then finding the film in the edit. This has led to countless actors being cut from his movies, and a plethora of unseen material never hitting the big screen. However, a fascinating slice from the director’s underrated 2012 effort “To The Wonder” will soon be seeing the light of day.
At the SXSW Film Festival next month, photojournalist Eugene Richards will unveil the 43-minute short, “Thy Kingdom Come.” The New Yorker details the fascinating story behind the project. In 2010, Malick rang up Richards, and hired him to help find real residents of Bartlesville, Oklahoma to interact with Javier Bardem‘s troubled, faith-tested priest. As you might expect, only a glimmer of those sequences wound up in the final film, so Richards sought Malick’s permission to use the excised material.
Now it’s here and it promises to be moving stuff. The interview subjects shared many deeply personal and painful stories with Bardem, and the fact that he wasn’t actually a real priest didn’t seem to matter. “Most people knew him as the murderer in ‘No Country for Old Men,’ ” Richards explained. “A couple people knew him as Penelope Cruz’s husband. Some didn’t know who he was at all. And absolutely no one cared, in the end, who he was, except that he was there to listen.”
No word on how “Thy Kingdom Come” might be released after SXSW, but I’d imagine an indie-minded streaming service would want to scoop this up.
