The Man Who Wasn’t There
When Austinite Terrence Malick’s “The Thin Red Line” opens in theaters this month, Hollywood’s most famous disappearing act will come to an end. Or will it?
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Later, Geisler moved to New York, where he met Roberdeau, who is from Austin. The two men brought Strange Interlude and Aren’t We All? to Broadway, but they longed to translate their stage experience into prestige in Hollywood. In 1988 they tracked Malick down in Austin and asked him to write a screenplay of The White Hotel, by D. M. Thomas. Malick declined but suggested The Thin Red Line. He’d become intrigued with the way James Jones had dealt with courage. After charming Jones’s widow, Gloria, Geisler and Roberdeau secured the rights to the novel.
So began a curious collaboration. Eager to promote themselves, Geisler and Roberdeau now claim responsibility for Malick’s return to film—though apparently Malick came to find them preposterous. His contract on The Thin Red Line stipulated that no one could visit the set without his permission, which he never granted to Geisler and Roberdeau. At the same time, clearly the producers invested a lot of time and effort in the project’s early stages. Without them, it might never have gotten off the ground. “It didn’t take, as we had presumed it would, two or three or even four years for Malick to bubble back up,” says Geisler. “It occupied most of the decade.”
“Bubbling,” Roberdeau chimes in. “Feeding the fire.”
“Constant feeding of the fire,” says Geisler.
“Stew doesn’t bubble of its own accord,” says Roberdeau.
Malick completed a first draft in April 1989. In May the three men met in Paris for a script session. They sat in a park; Malick draped a handkerchief over his head because of the sun. “At first, maybe humoring us a little bit, he took out his screenplay and wanted to know what our thoughts were,” remembers Geisler. “We said, ‘That’s not where we begin. Let’s start with the novel.’ On every page, we had isolated some nugget or theme that we felt Terry had erroneously omitted.” It’s hard to believe that Geisler and Roberdeau shaped the script to the degree they imply, but no doubt they made a large number of suggestions. Malick remained unhappy with the screenplay, however, feeling that it lacked a climax, so he put it aside. The two producers then commissioned him to write a play, Sansho the Bailiff, based on the Buddhist legend. “We wanted to keep the machinery moving, because we felt like we were on to something together,” explained Geisler. “If he wasn’t yet ready to direct The Thin Red Line, then, Lord, let’s not let him out of our clutches.”
Eventually, Malick worked alternately on The Thin Red Line, Sansho, and a third project, called The English-Speaker. In total, the producers paid him $1 million, money they had obtained from a wealthy investor named Gerry Rubin. Juggling three projects allowed Malick to pick something up and put it down, which suited his creative process. If a vast gulf separated Geisler and Roberdeau from the Hollywood moguls they longed to become, that must also have appealed to Malick. He could take their checks and never feel he was doing business with the people he had left behind. Perhaps Malick didn’t understand that Geisler and Roberdeau were banking everything on the dream of orchestrating his return to moviemaking.
Malick’s friends believe he told Geisler and Roberdeau that he had no intention of directing The Thin Red Line, but Geisler and Roberdeau maintain that he had in fact pledged to direct it. Perhaps the truth is that Malick answered in language open-ended enough to allow Geisler and Roberdeau to hear whatever they wanted. And so it seems they constantly reassured people that Malick would direct the movie, even though Malick maintains that he never committed to do so. Various parties would despair of him, and the gabby producers would persuade them to wait a little bit longer. After a while, Gloria Jones started calling Malick “Hamlet on the Brazos.” Everything finally unraveled in 1993: Upon learning that Malick was writing an adaptation of The Moviegoer, Rubin pulled out. It seems he thought Malick had promised not to work with anyone else without getting approval, though it’s not clear that Malick made such a vow. At that point, the producers’ financial house of cards fell apart. According to The New York Observer, they proceeded to bounce a number of checks, until an irate caterer they owed $30,000 went to the police. The producers have since made full restitution to the caterer, but other parties still haven’t been paid.
In 1995, needing an infusion of cash, Geisler and Roberdeau decided to move forward with The Thin Red Line. “Quite frankly, it was getting increasingly impractical to be so solicitous of Terry,” says Roberdeau. “So we said, ‘We’re going to go make this movie now, Terry, aren’t we?’” When Geisler and Roberdeau took Malick’s script to L.A., they were smart enough to contact one of the only people in the business that Malick still trusted: his former agent, Mike Medavoy, who was then setting up a company called Phoenix Pictures within Sony Entertainment. “These guys were always living on the edge of extinction—without money,” Medavoy says, “so they asked me for $100,000 to get an option on all their projects.”
At that stage, Geisler and Roberdeau lost control of the project they had nursed for so long: Medavoy brought in George Stevens, Jr., Malick’s original Hollywood mentor, as executive producer, and the Broadway producers were eased out. Malick’s experiences with Geisler and Roberdeau probably made him more comfortable with the idea of working with old friends in Hollywood again. Asked who had persuaded Malick to get behind a camera again, Medavoy says, “I don’t know that anybody persuaded Terry to go back to work. I think it’s pretty hard to persuade Terry to do anything.” Whatever the case, after a twenty-year hiatus, Malick agreed to direct a movie that was going to cost $52 million—about fifteen times more than any other film he’d made.
L.A. values celebrity over life itself, and by a strange alchemy, Malick’s refusal to court fame (thereby attracting attention) made him, in the lingo, hot. Actors clamored to meet with him. Just before production was scheduled to begin, however, the project almost foundered: Incoming Sony chief John Calley declined to give the studio’s approval, probably because he thought it imprudent to entrust so much money to a director who hadn’t worked in two decades. Given that Calley had bought Badlands, his decision came as a surprise. The project was saved, however, when Twentieth Century Fox picked it up.
By all rights, making The Thin Red Line should have been a disaster: Malick has never had an easy time on the set, and his long break should have made him rusty. Shooting an epic war film is a thorny undertaking even in the best of circumstances. Yet apparently all went smoothly. “I would have thought there would be incredible anxiety, but I’ve heard he has been centered and relaxed,” says Brackman. “Maybe Terry’s years of prayer and meditation have brought him to a different level.”
With this project, Malick’s career takes a turn toward the conventional, at least in subject matter. His career began with a film about anti-authoritarian mayhem. Then he told the story of a love triangle that ended in murder, also a violation of the compacts that hold people together. War, on the other hand, is an arena where violence is sanctified, since it is committed by individuals who kill because their country asks them to. As it happens, several other directors approaching middle age have also been working on World War II movies, suggesting a generational preoccupation. Spielberg’s Private Ryan has been the biggest box-office smash. Curiously, this has ensured that Malick’s career will be examined beside Spielberg’s again. Coming back at all was a risk, but returning while critics are extolling Spielberg’s war movie—well, that ups the ante. “That’s exactly what I worry about: that people are going to try to compare it to Saving Private Ryan,” says Medavoy. “It’s not Private Ryan. It’s Malick’s version of the subject—it’s that mixture of poetry and prose.”
If this movie shares the strengths of Malick’s earlier works, it seems that it shares their weaknesses as well: Late in the game the director added a voice-over. Spielberg, a classic melodramatist, rarely needs help conveying his points—if anything, his characters and their motivations are too conveniently drawn. In fact, there may be no better foil than Spielberg to reveal exactly who Malick is and why his films are worth watching. “You see in Malick’s work a sense of land, a rural sensibility,” says Bill Scott, “whereas Spielberg has a West Coast sensibility that is much more interested in plot line.” Spielberg is a great technician, but he doesn’t have nearly as much to say as Malick does. If, that is, you’re willing to read between the lines.
The evening we met in L.A., Malick had seemed comfortable, even serene. His calm manner wasn’t what I had expected, given the pressure he must be under to live up to past accomplishments. On the other hand, perhaps Malick has found that the real L.A. isn’t quite as awful as the L.A. of his imagination. And in one sense, his return must be easier than his arrival was, as he is already schooled in the vagaries of fame and what it does to the ego. Finally, I came to see that Malick’s silence is an integral part of who he is. If he ever came to feel he deserved the attention that reporters are always trying to bestow on him, he would no longer be himself.
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