![]() ![]() He wanted to tell me to never live in Los Angeles, and stay as far away from it as I could. “He was in there, waiting for the after-party, or something. Smith, after receiving assurance from the theatre usher that he could gain re-admittance, found Malick sitting, alone, in his tuxedo. Malick sent his assistant to bring actor John Dee Smith (sitting with Adrien Brody, who was about to get the surprise of a lifetime when he saw how much he was not in the film) from the theatre to him. ![]() The prospects of walking the red carpet was for him comparable to running a gauntlet replete with clubs hammering blows - not on his body, but his psyche. He already had it written into his contract that he would provide no interviews, nor would he consent to being photographed (one invited press member on the Australian set did manage to snap a photo of a smiling Malick, which he despised ever since). However, this public spectacle was, for Malick, the most daunting of the directorial process. There were exceedingly high expectations for the film’s premier by Malick’s peers, the studio, the critics and the public - for there were some that had been waiting since the closing credits of Days of Heaven to see another film by this gifted visionary. Also, Malick could never make up his mind about anything, a fact that even he admitted. For some of the cast and crew, The Thin Red Line was an endurance test and frustrating to the point where many in the studio and alongside the director questioned his seeming lack of direction. It was indeed a long time coming, perhaps matching Stanley Kubrick in its lengthy production. Following principal shooting, the film languished an additional year-and-a-half in post-production. The Thin Red Line‘s premiere in December 1999, at long last, came after 100 days of filming in Queensland, Australia 20 more days in Guadalcanal, and filming stateside for several days off of Catalina Island (with Nick Nolte and John Travolta) and on a military base close to San Pedro, California (with Ben Chaplin and Miranda Otto). Blessed with the foresight of longevity and not immediate gains, Malick has placed himself in the front ranks of American film directors. In retrospect, The Thin Red Line is now a cult classic and Terry Malick’s vision endured. In happenstance, most look back on the making of The Thin Red Line as a peculiar highlight in their careers. ![]() That was actually found and worked incredibly well.” He remembered a guy from Venice Beach back in the seventies, and tracked him down. “The Beam idea,” explains film editor Saar Klein, “came a little bit later in the picture when we were looking for something to capture, sort of like the fear of war. Malick knows loud he engaged the services of Francesco Lupica and his Cosmic Beam to blow the roof off the mother on a Fox soundstage in order to achieve the metallic clang and boom one hears dropped into key sequences of the film, when doom and chaos becomes imminent. A highly-reticent auteur, with the mountains of knowledge behind his aesthetic should choose as his one statement this one and only piece of advice passed on to the people of Criterion. ![]() There is a note placed at the beginning of Criterion’s excellent re-release of The Thin Red Line (1999): “Director Terrence Malick advises The Thin Red Line to be played loud.” This is interesting. Reilly (Sergeant Storm), John Dee Smith (Private Train), Claude Lettesier (Ethnomusicologist) and Brad Shield (Steadicam operator) Paul Maher interviewed the following cast and crew from The Thin Red Line for this article: John C. ![]()
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