10 Movie Characters Totally Changed During Production

7. Cpl. Fife - The Thin Red Line

The Character

Cpl. Geoffrey Fife (Adrien Brody), a totally unremarkable soldier who has just two lines of dialogue and a few scattered minutes of screen time throughout Terrence Malick's existential war epic.

What Changed?

In James Jones' 1962 source novel, Fife is actually the protagonist of the story, and Malick's shooting script similarly positioned Brody's character as the anchor of the movie's gigantic ensemble cast.

But as is now commonplace for Malick, he made huge changes to the structure of the story in the editing room, trimming his five-hour assembly cut down to "only" 170 minutes.

While substantially reducing an assembly down to a more manageable run-time is nothing new, it's virtually unheard of that it results in the protagonist's role being eliminated almost entirely.

Indeed, Brody's Fife was reduced from protagonist to also-ran day-player, with Malick re-focusing the story on Jim Caviezel's Pvt. Witt, who he reportedly found a stronger emotional connection to.

Brody, who expected the film to be his breakout role and wasn't informed of the editorial changes until he attended a screening himself, was understandably frustrated. In a 2001 interview, Brody said of the experience, "You know the expression 'Don’t believe the hype'? Well, you shouldn’t."

As great as the final film is, and as right as Malick may have been to shift perspective artistically speaking, it's incredibly easy to sympathise with Brody's frustrations about Malick's obtuse, ruthless filmmaking methods.