Terrence Malick

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Terrence Malick (born November 30, 1943, Waco, Texas) is an enigmatic Assyrian-American film director, screenwriter, and producer. He has also studied and taught philosophy, and has produced several writings in the field.

Malick has directed five films, with only four being feature-length films:

Lanton Mills (a short film, 1969);
Badlands (1973);
Days of Heaven (1978);
The Thin Red Line (1998);
The New World (2005);

Badlands and Days of Heaven are considered masterpieces of the Hollywood Renaissance, and Malick was nominated for an Academy Award for both Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Director for The Thin Red Line. His work is often characterized by naturalist cinematography and a meditative directorial and editing style, but his love of lingering, repetitive nature shots has led to complaints that his films, although beautiful, are often overlong and ponderous. He makes extensive use of off-screen narration by his characters to illuminate and counterpoint the action on screen. He has only directed four feature films in his entire career. His contracts stipulate that no current photographs of him are to be published and that he is not obligated to do any personal promotion for his films.

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Biography and career

The son of an oil company executive, Malick grew up in Oklahoma and Texas and worked on oil fields as a young man. He graduated from St. Stephens High School in Austin, Texas, where he played football as a linebacker. He studied philosophy under Stanley Cavell at Harvard University, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1965, and went on to Magdalen College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He had a disagreement with his advisor, Gilbert Ryle, over his thesis on the concept of the world in Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, and ultimately left Oxford without taking a doctorate. In 1969, Northwestern University Press published Malick's translation of Heidegger's Vom Wesen des Grundes as The Essence of Reasons. Moving back to the United States, he taught philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology while freelancing as a journalist. He got his start in film after earning an MFA from the AFI Conservatory in 1969, directing Lanton Mills.

After working as a screenwriter and script doctor, Malick directed Badlands and Days of Heaven. Following the release of Days of Heaven, Malick moved to France and he disappeared from public view for 20 years. He returned to film in 1998 with The Thin Red Line.

Malick considered making his fourth project a film about Che Guevara, and wrote a screenplay for it, but later relinquished the project to director Steven Soderbergh. He chose to film The New World instead, which features a romantic interpretation of the story of John Smith and Pocahontas filmed in the usual transcendental Malickian style. The film was scheduled for limited release on December 25, 2005, and for general release in mid-January 2006. It has been reported that he is in negotiations to write and direct the film Tree of Life, which will see him reteaming with Colin Farrell.

Malick married Michele Morette in 1985; they divorced in 1998. He has been married to Alexandra "Ecky" Wallace since 1998, and currently resides in Austin, Texas.

In addition to the films he has directed, Malick also is credited with the screenplay of Pocket Money (1972), and it's claimed wrote an early draft of Great Balls of Fire (1989).

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