Why Do Actors Keep Publicly Dissing Terrence Malick?

Aw, don't be a sad panda!

It seems as though every project that Terrence Malick makes concludes with one of his actors or collaborates making a point of throwing their hands up and proclaiming confusion: confusion over the man’s methods, his technique, his approach to the conventions of filmmaking. It’s a curiously recursive theme, one that plays out in interviews with actors months or years after the films come out. Thus, it’s no surprise that Sean Penn recently went on record with the French newspaper Le Figaro (translation via The New Yorker) to speak his mind about his role in Tree Of Life:

I didn’t at all find on the screen the emotion of the script, which is the most magnificent one that I’ve ever read. A clearer and more conventional narrative would have helped the film without, in my opinion, lessening its beauty and its impact. Frankly, I’m still trying to figure out what I’m doing there and what I was supposed to add in that context! What’s more, Terry himself never managed to explain it to me clearly.

It’s hard to dismiss Penn’s opinion out of hand; he does, after all, have some experience behind the camera, so he’s earned the right to speak on the directorial direction of the filmmakers he works with. It’s also perfectly valid to claim that The Tree Of Life would’ve benefited from being more conventional. It’s valid to claim that, at least, even if I disagree; it’s a film whose uniqueness is one of its calling cards, and attempting to make it This Boy’s Life 2 would’ve eliminated a lot of what makes it special, and what will have people talking about it for some time to come.

Penn’s last sentence might be the most revealing, though, as everything I’ve heard about Terrence Malick would seem to indicate that the man doesn’t quite know precisely what he wants his films to be until he spends a great deal of time in the editing room, which leads to some confusion on the part of his actors. Most famously, Adrien Brody reportedly showed up to the premiere of The Thin Red Line expecting to have his character be front and center in the narrative, only to find his arc mostly replaced by that of James Caviezel. The Thin Red Line’s original cut was some five hours long, so obviously a lot of material got left on the cutting room floor. Brody said to the New York Press:

You spend all this time in an unfamiliar place, you experience incredible things, and then you come home, you're wounded psychologically, and you have nothing to show for it.

Some of the cast and crew on The New World had similar reactions to that film. James Horner, the film’s composer, famously excoriated Malick in an interview with Film Music Magazine, a transcript of which can be found on this Facebook page. Here’s some of the more vituperous comments that Horner had for Malick:

So Terry was making this movie that was incomprehensible. Everybody told him it was unwatchable. Everybody. Everybody. And he had Final Cut and when a director has final cut everybody can scream and shout but unless you’re willing to really go head to head in combat you basiclally have to throb your hands and say "I have no control of this man." And if we get the reputation of taking a director’s cut film from a director and recutting it ourselves and releasing no one want to make movies with us. So the studio company let him go along. He never did preview it but he played it for the studio and there were 35 people would come to the screenings and slowly over the course of three hours - because it’s a three hour movie - they would walk out. The editor who had worked on The Thin Red Line begged Terry to fix the fim. It was a love story and Terry doesn’t feel those feelings. All I can say is that Terry is on the surface a stone and he does not know how to tell love stories to save his live. When we scored the movie he completely disassembled everything. The score made no sense anymore and he started to stick in Wagner over scenes and a Mozart piano concerto over an Indian attack everybody to a man thought he was insane. By this time I was no longer on, I basically said "**** you" so I just did say a four letter word. I’m out of here. I’ve done my score. I thought what I have done was exactly what my brief was being hired, exactly what the studio wanted, exactly what the film supposed to be and the one who broke the bond was Terry. From the day he started editing to the final day when they kicked him off the dubbing stage he was just spending hour after hour doing nothing. It was like shuffling the tiles in a Rubik’s Cube. There was never a solution. All he was do was shuffle scene D over to scene X or Y would go up to A. Now that. Let’s try putting up A after D and putting D behind J. There wasn’t any gift of telling the movie. Terry doesn’t so this. And that was something we all learned about the great Terry. I never felt so letdown by a filmmaker in my life.

Ouch? If that wasn’t enough, Christopher Plummer also took issue with the way his part was pared down in the final film, telling New York Magazine:

He’s fascinated by nature, and just cuts to birds. Colin Farrell kept saying, ‘My character, he’s a fuckin’ osprey. That’s how he sees me.’ You’d be playing a passionate scene, and he’d say in that strange southern voice of his, mixed with Harvard and Oxford, ‘Ah, jes’ stop a minute, Chris. I think there’s an osprey flying over there. Do you mind if I just take a few shots?’ I wrote him an infuriated letter because I saw the film and I was hardly in it—he cut my part to shit. [...] I wrote to Terry and said, ‘You need a writer, baby, you need somebody to follow the ­story.’ I was awful to him, but I did say I admired him. He’s an individual—also mad as a hatter.”

It’s hard not to see a mild pattern coming into play here. If I had to sketch it out, it’s of a man who has final cut on his films and isn’t particularly concerned with what other people think of the final results, even his collaborators. Issues of tact might come into play at some points; certainly if an actor’s role is going to be significantly reduced in the final cut of a film, it might be wise to give them a bit of warning before they discover that in the theater. But by all accounts, Malick is a tremendously shy man who, ironically, hates being photographed; during the standing ovation at the premiere of The Tree Of Life, the Cannes camera that was capturing the event was even pointed at the ground as he came out for a minute to stand with his actors. As anyone who’s ever felt a bit of shyness might tell you, it’s likely easier to simply avoid that confrontation until it’s unavoidable.

All of this, of course, brings up odd issues of directorial primacy and authorial intent and whatnot: Malick is a prime living example of the auteur theory, and he obviously jealously guards his ability to make his films precisely as he wishes them to be, as is his right, and, apparently, as is in his contract. When such a director comes into contact with opinionated artists like Sean Penn, though, it seems likely that someone’s going to wind up with a stubbed toe in the end, and that final cut clause almost guarantees that it will never be Malick.

The moral of the story? Sean Penn's still kind of a dick.