December 1998
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?
“Boy,” Maggio said as they watched him go. “That guy kin really play a bugle. Whynt he never play? He should ought to be in the Bugle Corps.”
“He was, you jerk,” Andy said scornfully. “He quit. He wouldn’t play in this old Corps.”
—From Here to Eternity, by James Jones
WHEN I MET TERRENCE MALICK, he was in Los Angeles, editing his new movie, The Thin Red Line, which opens on Christmas Day. The project marks his return to directing after a twenty-year break spent mostly in Austin, his hometown. Unfortunately, when we arranged the meeting, Malick had asked me not to write about it, which places me in a bind. Let me say this much: We had a drink on the patio of a restaurant in Beverly Hills. Red hibiscus trailed down the walls, and its flamboyant beauty mirrored the general feel of the place. The people around us were stunning, and the European cars outside were expensive. I had picked the location. Malick seemed at ease, but his humility told me that this was not his true setting.
I’d read a lot about Malick in the preceding weeks, and almost every story had depicted him as an unfathomable recluse. He’s often compared to writer J. D. Salinger, another genius who won’t share himself with the public. My homework had given me the sense of a ghostly eminence, so it was startling to encounter Malick as a corporeal being. He has a bearish figure, a cropped white beard, a bald dome, and a vertical, Spanish-looking nose. My general impression was that he is the most reserved warm person, or the warmest reserved person, that I can recall ever meeting. The recluse label fits him poorly, as everyone who gets to know Malick finds him gregarious. Still, he remains steadfastly oblique: Even old friends say he rarely asks for personal advice, rarely divulges his deepest feelings. This does not stop them from feeling close to him. “Terry is thoughtful,” says someone who has known him for decades but asks not to be quoted by name for fear of causing a rift with Malick. “He has a seriousness about him that does not suppress his humor but is always there. I think it comes from his appreciation for how philosophical life is, and how tragic. How deeply tragic. That’s what is so endearing about him: He reacts to you with that level of concern.” His charismatic personality inspires an unusual loyalty, demonstrated by the lengths to which friends have gone to further his career and to maintain his privacy when he decided to abandon moviemaking.
With his friends, Malick typically talks about books, birds, and travel. These are the interests of someone engaged with the empirical world, not someone engrossed in Hollywood, a realm dedicated to illusion. Still, he must have a steely side, because Hollywood isn’t the kind of place where an intellectual drifter can accomplish much. In time, I came to appreciate the degree to which Malick needs to feel in control. It explains his struggle with procrastination: As long as he hasn’t made up his mind, he can hold on to all of his options. The closest he came to an answer regarding an on-the-record interview, for example, was several weeks after our meeting, when he called me from his car. “I’m still very shy about this sort of thing, from a wish to lead as normal and simple a life as possible,” he said. “I wouldn’t want you to be under any impression that I’ll change about this. But I’ll continue to think about it.”
I had wanted to meet Malick to learn why he had returned to film, but as it turned out, the answer did not present itself that evening. Eventually I decided that the key to his intermittent moviemaking can be found in the work of the novelist he’s chosen to interpret. The Thin Red Line is based on James Jones’s book about a company of young men who take Guadalcanal. It’s a sequel of sorts to his first novel, From Here to Eternity, whose protagonist is a soldier named Robert E. Lee Prewitt. Proving his stubborn autonomy, Prewitt will not bugle, although he is one of the Army’s greatest buglers. It’s a story of character and institution converging: Jones uses Prewitt to reveal truths about the Army and vice versa.
Like Prewitt, Malick has baffled admirers by refusing to practice an art in which he is preeminent. For anyone trying to puzzle out what motivates him—what led him to Hollywood in the first place, what caused him to quit the movie business, and what has now brought him back—it helps to recall that he arrived at a time when filmmakers possessed an unparalleled measure of freedom. Legend has it that he walked away from it all, but in reality, by the time he vanished, the freedom he had enjoyed was fast disappearing.
The path back to L.A. was a crooked one. Given the degree to which he prefers to abstain, Malick might never have made another movie but for the persistence of two obscure Broadway producers who courted him for a decade. When it became clear he was going to direct again, every male lead in Hollywood scrambled to get a part, drawn by the idea of working with an icon of the seventies film scene. “I told Terry I would carry the hammer box if he wanted me to,” George Clooney told a reporter. Malick cast Clooney, Sean Penn, John Cusack, John Travolta, and Woody Harrelson, among others. This princely lineup of celebrities, combined with Malick’s return, would have been enough to guarantee press attention, but then Steven Spielberg complicated matters by entrancing critics with Saving Private Ryan, which led the media to conclude that this was the year to make a war movie. And so Hollywood’s most retiring director is about to endure a particularly splashy comeback. It’s not how he would have planned it.
“On the set it seems like the sky’s the limit. But it usually comes out as anxiety, because when you see what you’ve done you’re aware of what you could do if you knew how. The hardest thing to accept is that it leaves your control so quickly.”
—Terrence Malick, Women’s Wear Daily, 1974
OF COURSE, MALICK’S FIRST DANCE WITH HOLLYWOOD WAS splashy too—and coincidentally, it also involved Spielberg. Malick moved to L.A. in 1969. That was the year Easy Rider came out, introducing the nation to cocaine, Dennis Hopper’s maniacal side, and a radically different type of film. As Peter Biskind documents in his recently published history of moviemaking in that era, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, the studios were abandoning conformity out of desperation; it wasn’t selling anymore. Hoping to appeal to a generation weaned on rock music, they created a period of ferment. Hotshot young directors like Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Robert Altman hired unusual-looking actors, aimed for a grittier realism, and talked about capturing the real America.
Malick made his debut in 1973 with a haunting movie based on the lives of an infamous pair of ne’er-do-wells: serial killer Charlie Starkweather and his fourteen-year-old girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate. In 1958 they did a bloody two-step across the Midwest that left ten dead. Malick called his movie Badlands, after the countryside they ravaged. On first glance, Badlands looks like a perverse western, or a road movie that took a wrong turn, but under those conventions lies the story of a young girl going astray. In a time given to stories of rebellion, Badlands stood out for its twisted lyricism. “It has the appearance of a fairy tale,” says Bill Scott, who was the movie’s production manager. “It has the ephemeral quality that all of Terry’s work has.” Narrated in a deliberately eccentric manner by Sissy Spacek, who plays the Fugate character, the movie conflates violence with sexual awakening. “I wanted to do a film on what it meant to be fourteen in the Midwest in 1958,” Malick told Women’s Wear Daily in 1974, in his last interview. “I think there are things you’re open to as an adolescent that close up forever afterward. I wanted to show a kind of openness, a vulnerability that disappears later, when you get a little savvier.”
Overnight, at age 29, Malick found his name in every newspaper in the country. His fame stemmed from the sense that he’d produced something fine and also that he was in tune with the zeitgeist. Almost every review considered Badlands in conjunction with the debut of another director, 26-year-old Steven Spielberg, who’d just made The Sugarland Express, also about a couple on the lam. Critics split over which film was better. In the New York Times, Vincent Canby called Badlands “ferociously American” and “profound.” He thought Sugarland was otherwise. But The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael preferred emotional films, and the ironic distance of Badlands disturbed her. Of Spielberg, she wrote, “He could be that rarity among directors, a born entertainer—perhaps a new generation’s Howard Hawks.” Of Malick: “Badlands is an art thing, all right, but I didn’t admire it, I didn’t enjoy it, and I don’t like it.”
